The Locations of TBA - Germany, 2024

Well, the feature about Berlin, Nazi Germany was supposed to be the last of the series, but I decided to add a little special here about Germany in the "The Burning Ages" universe of 2024. As already mentioned in the Portsmouth feature, what is described here is not something I wish to become reality, as it is a future where the democratic process has failed, a future dominated by ethnic strife and chaos. As such, the outlook will be suitably dystopic. In fact, it's my worst case scenario short of a nuclear war. Everything written in the following post is therefore purely descriptive.

The Locations of The Burning Ages

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Götterdämmerung 2024: Germany

To paraphrase the line I used in the post about Portsmouth, the Federal Republic in the year 2024 isn't a happy place. Truth be told, it would actually even be a stretch to still call it a "federal republic", since in reality its federalism has been strongly curbed, and as for the republican aspect, the less said the better.

Germany had been the wealthiest country of the European Union, but wealth is never limitless. Tasked with footing much of the bill for the European bailouts, first of smaller countries like Ireland and Greece, later that of large economies like Spain, the long overtasked well of German finances finally ran dry at some point. At the middle of the decade, the political class had to face a truth that should have been obvious for the past thirty years: you can't spend money you don't have. It wasn't really any single party's fault. Neither the 2009-2013 coalition of the centrist Christian Democrats and the classical liberal Free Democrats nor the leftwing coalition of Social Democrats, Left and Greens that replaced it had a grasp on the situation (and, in all truth, neither had the coalitions preceding both). And, in all fairness, by the end of 2013, after the new government ministers had taken their oaths, matters already took on a life of their own.

A common sight in every larger urban concentration
throughout Germany after 2013. Ironically, the pre-crash name
for these districts was Brennpunkte, literally meaning
"Burning Points".

In many cases, the developments that led to this decay had been in motion for decades by this point. The blame for it could be justly and squarely placed on the shoulders of all the political and social elites. Demographic change, fiscal irresponsibility, ignoring the will and the (justified) fears of the electorate, the increasingly felt effects of mass migration and the failure of the multicultural society: those were everybody's fault.
Well, it doesn't take a genius to guess what you get if the currents transfers out of the social security networks dry up in an environment where social peace is dependent on them. Once you get whole city districts of people who in their majority are unemployed, non-integrated and outright hostile to their host society, and you take away their sole source of income...?

Again, it would be unfair to lay the blame to any single social group's feet: at one point, there simply was no longer enough money to pay for everything and everybody. If you had to let the infrastructure crumble to pay for the Euro bailout and had to withhold teachers' salaries to pay those of the police and vice versa, nd if your credit rating began dropping through the floor, most people would agree that you're done for. But then, had the current breed of politicians not been gifted with such a very special appreciation of reality, the worst of it could have been prevented.

Modern societies are very delicate constructs. We naively believe them to be stable, static even, but to anybody able to observe current and past events it was obvious that such a statement could not have been further from the truth. Look at any instance where the veneer of normalcy is scrubbed off just not for months, but just for a week. Look at the events in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Look at any instance where a power outage has continued for longer than 24 hours. Look at comparably tiny incidents like the beating of Rodney King, and what such a small spark was able to set off. Modern societies are everything but stable. The glue holding them together is money, is the normalcy of the appliances and luxuries money can buy. Take that glue away, and you will soon stare into the face of something ugly and feral if you do not hurry to find ways to tame it or frighten it into submission.

Ethnic militias attacking and "processing" a district in the
Ruhr Area city of Bochum (~ 2016).

Police forces had been reduced since the days of the German Reunification, so even if their had been the political will to clamp down on some of the more rebellious quarters, there simply wouldn't have been the additional manpower and equipment available to do so. In many cities the situation quickly began to resemble that of the French banlieues, the suburban no-go zones most ethnic French try to evade as best as the can. The difference in Germany, however, was that unlike the French they had neither the personnel nor the experience in dealing with such situations.

A small but necessary digression. Violence between social and ethnic groups is a true danger in every multicultural, multi-ethnic society. Some societies - Ancient Rome, the United States - are able to a large degree to subdue these inherent conflicts with "the other" by giving all groups a common sense of purpose and national belonging. We may like to hope that there is something like an ideal multicultural society, where all ethnic and cultural groups coexist in peace and harmony. And there is nothing wrong with striving to achieve such a goal. But the truth of the matter is - and will always be, bar massive and crippling social engineering on the scale of 1984 - that humans associate in groups, and that these groups posit themselves in an "we" and "the other" matrix, be it via social (class), by the color of their skin (race) or by heritage and religion (ethno-religious) markers. Where groups with a strong identity marker and such with none or very weak ones coincide, violent conflicts are preprogrammed in the absence of a strong superior authority. This isn't badmouthing the multicultural ideal: it's a plain and basic empiric fact.

I hope you've stayed with me during this little sermon, because it leads us right into the abyss that opened up in the middle of the decade. With the constraints gone that money and normalcy provided, and with the police forces overwhelmed, interethnic violence erupted like a volcano. Immigrant groups vs. immigrant groups, immigrants groups vs. local militias, local militias vs. political enemies: unlike its public image, Germany is a nation with a high degree of private gun ownership. When it seemed society was breaking down, those guns appeared in the hands of men on the street. It's often the case that those who have never fired a shot in anger and who have never in their life strayed from the norm explode the worst. In the dark months of that second decade of the century it was no different.

They had taken it away from her, back then when they had come into her house. Her brothers, only thirteen and fifteen years old, had tried to fight them, but that had only enraged their attackers. [Alida] could still see them lying on the kitchen floor in pools of their own blood, their heads and faces disfigured so much she had needed to identify them by their clothes after it had all been over. She still remembered how numb she had felt back then as she had staggered through the apartment half-naked, not even noticing the pain between her thighs. Her sister Samara, a lively little girl of nine years, had been too young for them, so they had just shot her in the face at point blank range. She still held the teddy bear she had loved so much since she had been a baby. Gunshots had echoed through the streets outside, and the smell of fire had lingered in the air. [Wolf Hunt]

Within months thousands, maybe even tens of thousands had been killed. Other nations didn't intervene or even react as they were faced with similar problems themselves. With desertion being high - or many soldiers being at least secret members of the virulently growing militias - military equipment found its way into the hot spots. Neither this nor the exact number of casualties have been questioned: the new government spread a veil of silence over it.

An ominously well-equipped and disciplined militia unit
guarding an exit to a city district being "processed" by their
comrades. Note the presence of an AFV and the liberal use
of barbed wire, indicating access to official military stocks.

“Yes, terrible things happened back then, but it was total chaos nation-wide,” he shook his head. His high cheek bones and hooked nose gave him the image of an eagle, something intensified by his piercing eyes. “A lot of old scores were settled, and sometimes innocents got trapped in the fray. But if it's an apology you want you won't get one, not from me or from anyone else who knows what happened. Your side had it coming for a long time, and your fathers and brothers did all they could to fan our fury.” His lips curled into a snarl. “Your people broke every rule ever made, and we let you do it because otherwise, hey, now that would have been racist.” He rolled his eyes. “But undermining our society, preaching hate and terror and transporting your culture here to transplant ours all the while living off the fruits of our labor, yeah, that was okay.” Anger glittered in his eyes now. “You spat on our laws and terrorized the very people that financed your stay. There was no week that went by without one of you murdering one of us for some banality. What we did? Your people sowed a thousand seeds for that.” [Wolf Hunt]

Major Alexander Kaufmann, the man speaking here, is one of the more ambiguous figures featured in Wolf Hunt. In his case, what he is saying above is not something he recites but rather something he took part in. It's not mentioned in Wolf Hunt, and I'm not sure if I'll feature it in Clash of Eagles, but I strive to not have my characters be one-dimensional: before the crash, Alexander Kaufmann was one of those quiet men who never broke the rules.

It was then that the one force constitutionally not allowed to operate to uphold law and order chose to do just that: the Bundeswehr, the federal armed forces. But they did so on their ownconditions. And they weren't picky in the means they chose to get rid of the competitions in the higher levels of power.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-13) is escorted into the
Spandau Military Prison to be placed under arrest "indefinitely".

Someone had once called the Bundeswehr, the federal German armed forces, the most politically lethargic force in the world. For long decades this had been true, and more so, an intentional and important lesson drawn from the past to avoid a return to the ‘state within the state mentality’ harbored by the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht before the outbreak of World War II. Patiently, it had sat through crippling cuts while ever greater responsibilities had been heaped on its back. Its leadership had not concerned itself with the decaying situation back at home, with whole cities becoming ungovernable and essentially lawless, for that was not its constitutional duty. And even if it had expressed its concerns, who would it have talked to? After all, even the Chief of Staff had only a direct connection to a permanent under-secretary in the Ministry of Defense, not even the minister himself! But even the most apathetic institution was subject to personnel changes, and ever since the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the tone and the tasks of the Bundeswehr had changed, if ever so gradually. The alienation between the forces and consecutive governments, especially after the first decade after 9/11 had passed, had changed the character of the forces, and when high command, the Führungsstab der Streitkräfte, decided to throw its weight into the ring towards the end of the last decade nobody but the politicians had been surprised. [Wolf Hunt]

As several thousand more individuals representing the elite of political parties and the media establishment join the former as well as the current cabinet under arrest, it becomes clear that the military had been planning its move for months. The following weeks and months saw the pacification of the nation, often with the side-effect that many militias found themselves tacitly absorbed into the military apparatus, no questions asked. The regime rising from the ashes of the old order is not loved, but it is respected since it has restored a sense of order and even of belonging by propogating a common if vague German identity. And, knowing what it can do, it keeps with the old wisdom of Niccolo Machiavelli:

Germany, 2024: Soldiers in uniform are a common sight
in the country for the first time since WW II.

Men are less worried about harming somebody who makes himself loved than someone who makes himself feared, for love is held by a chain of obligation which, since men are bad, is broken at every opportunity for personal gain. Fear, on the other hand, is maintained by a dread of punishment which will never desert you. [The Prince]

Much about the military regime is limited: its social power, its financial abilities, its means to conduct an independent foreign policy (the leaders of the coup wisely agreed to continue and foment German cooperation within the NATO framework), but also its willingness to re-establish civil and human rights. It's shortcomings may be different from those of the system it replaced, but nonetheless, they do exist. And after seventy years in which the German society had been thoroughly demilitarized suddenly seeing military forces everywhere is a reason for concern enough. However, while it seems that by 2024 Germany is in the grip of a military dictatorship, its leaders are distinctly aware of the fact that they have at best won a temporary victory. And whatever they are, they are not the second coming of the Nazis. They have alienated and radicalized most of the remaining immigrants in society. They are still operating in a society with deathbed demographics. It's another storm just waiting to happen.

The copyrights to all used photographs remain with their respective owners. No infringement is intended.