Oh, fuck me, why the hell do I keep doing this?
That's what I've been asking myself since the very first moment I opened this book's cover. Well, I know why... but still, why?! Alternate history in German is a genre producing a rather scarce supply for the German market, so I chose to take what I could get. And, in fact, the basic idea behind the book is as simple as it is intriguing for an alternate history scenario: what if the German Empire won the Great War, and what if there's still a Kaiser in power in 1949? There's so much potential in that idea, so much space for the butterflies to play in. Perhaps 1918's Michael Offensive worked? Maybe the Italians didn't switch sides? Maybe Austro-Hungary remained united and started somehow solving its problems?
Of course not. In 1917, the Kaiser abdicates in favor of his son, who creates "Kastrup", which is basically the SS only for Imperial Germany. Over the coming two years, they shoot socialist workers left and right, beat down strikes, and generally make sure that any attempt of a socialist/democratic revolution in Germany drowns in its own blood. Because that works so well, Germany starts a spring offensive in 1919 (Home Fleet has lost 90% of its strength in a last grand battle with the High Seas Fleet, which it annihilated), breaking through the lines with new armored fomations. By April, France has surrendered, monarchy is restored, with Louis I sweaing fealty to the Kaiser. In July, Italy surrenders. Austro-Hungary is merged with the Reich in November.
In 1921 the Kaiserreich lands 800,000 men in Egypt, beginning the conquest of the whole of British Africa, which is finalized in 1924. In 1926 the Nordic League is founded, soon encompassing basically the whole of northern and central Europe under Germany's leadership. The year 1941 sees the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in German-Lybia.
That's what I've been asking myself since the very first moment I opened this book's cover. Well, I know why... but still, why?! Alternate history in German is a genre producing a rather scarce supply for the German market, so I chose to take what I could get. And, in fact, the basic idea behind the book is as simple as it is intriguing for an alternate history scenario: what if the German Empire won the Great War, and what if there's still a Kaiser in power in 1949? There's so much potential in that idea, so much space for the butterflies to play in. Perhaps 1918's Michael Offensive worked? Maybe the Italians didn't switch sides? Maybe Austro-Hungary remained united and started somehow solving its problems?
Of course not. In 1917, the Kaiser abdicates in favor of his son, who creates "Kastrup", which is basically the SS only for Imperial Germany. Over the coming two years, they shoot socialist workers left and right, beat down strikes, and generally make sure that any attempt of a socialist/democratic revolution in Germany drowns in its own blood. Because that works so well, Germany starts a spring offensive in 1919 (Home Fleet has lost 90% of its strength in a last grand battle with the High Seas Fleet, which it annihilated), breaking through the lines with new armored fomations. By April, France has surrendered, monarchy is restored, with Louis I sweaing fealty to the Kaiser. In July, Italy surrenders. Austro-Hungary is merged with the Reich in November.
In 1921 the Kaiserreich lands 800,000 men in Egypt, beginning the conquest of the whole of British Africa, which is finalized in 1924. In 1926 the Nordic League is founded, soon encompassing basically the whole of northern and central Europe under Germany's leadership. The year 1941 sees the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in German-Lybia.
And all the while I thought: If I had posted such a timeline on AH.com, they'd have ripped me to shreds, and with good reason.
1949. Well, the story starts with a German bomber squadron sent out from Iceland to destroy the American nuclear facilities in California (because only Germany can be trusted with nuclear weapons) while a German moon mission is underway. Each of their Horten B1s can carry 50 tons of bombs, and the are to drop 450 tons of cluster bombs on the Silverlake installations. Naturally, they succeed, but witness that almost at the same time someone firebombs the nearby town of Rosamond, killing most of the 10,000 inhabitants. One of the German bombers gets shot down, the crew captured.
Chestbeating macho-monarchists that they are, the Kastrup and the Reich come up with an ingenious plan: bomb the crap out of the base the prisoners are held, land paratroopers there to break them free, then return to Germany. Naturally, they succeed. Again.
Meanwhile, the fleet of the Nodric League (Germany & its clients) is in international waters to pick up the returning moon capsule (whose retro-thrusters haven't fired). But the Soviet fleet appears on the scene. prompting the Germans to launch a first strike lest the Reds get too close to their retrieval mission. Naturally, they succeed. Again. Spectacularly, without even losing a ship of their own.
Logically, the Russians don't take too kindly to such things and amass their forces along the border, despite German warning that should they commence hostilities, they would nuke the troops concentrations.
Alas, the Germans want no war, and the Kaiser hopes a demonstration of their new weapons system will deter the Russians: their new land cruiser. Guys, I know this all sounds as if I'm making this up as I write, but I'm not. The LK-1 land cruiser is a nuclear-powered vehicle, 45 meters long, seveteen wide and thirteen high. It's armed with a dual 38cm turret, a single 12.8cm turret, 8 dual 8cm AA guns, "additional secret systems for air defense" and 12 machine guns against infantry. And yeah, it weighs 2,200 tons and can drive under water...
The Germans also are the only ones with a nuclear deterrent,... but the German deterrent fails because the son of a worker shot in the 1918 riots becomes part of the failsafe program and creates a backdoor in the German nuclear authorization program that deactivates all warheads on his command.
The UK, the USA and the USSR all declare war against the Kaiserreich. 6 million men of the Red Army with 30,000 tanks cross the eastern border (and into Finnland). The British use 1,800 "Lancaster" bombers to annihilate the German nuclear center in the Lybian desert (they succeed, but lose *all* their bombers). It seems all is lost.
The novel ends with the leader of Kastrup driving to a secret base where he is only allowed entrance after a genetic sample is taken and tested to prove his identity...
You know, there's 'wank' and then there's 'wank'. There's your average Trekkie wanking the power of the Enterprise. There's Karen Traviss wanking to the idea of sweet, sweet Mandalorian man-juice. And then there's Kaiserfront. In the league of wanking, Kaiserfront is the leader of the “Oh my god, my hands are burning and my wiener is a glowing lump of charcoal”-category.
Almost everybody of the German protagonists - and I mean everybody - is a member of the nobility. I swear, the whole cast is made up of "von XYZ"s. Then there's the whole issue of Nordic mythology and Nordic ethnic solidarity whoch really wasn't a thing in the Kaiserreich at all. All those military operations have names like "Wiking"; the airbase on Iceland is called Midgard, and so on.
Ah, but there's more! Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, Kaiserfront 01 keeps on giving, and it gives us...Aliens! Because, as we learn through flashbacks, in 1925, after the Germans had conquered the whole African colonial Empire, the British were dug in with 20,000 men (!) in a fort in the Sudanese desert. So Kastrup takes the fort in a combined glider & tank assault with a force of less than 2,000 men, and beneath the fort, in a hall "measuring at least 4x10 kilometers" the British have been studying Alien spaceships!
Regardless of the absolutely ridiculous plot it's the astonishing lack of imagination and seriousness that pisses me off.
Why are the international leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the USSR in this alternate 1949 reality Winston S. Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Josif Stalin?
Why is all equipment a virtual copy of the historical WW2 designs and concepts, which came only into being because of WW2?
Why is there a Guderian leading panzers, why is there a von Braun in charge of a space program?
Then there's the actual quantity of written words you get for your money. When “Wolf Hunt” is finally ready (sorry, that much self-promotion's got to be, got the manuscruipt back from my editor today), it'll be ~390 pages in a 6x9 inch format and 10.5 script coming in at around 178,000 words – for $16.99. Kaiserfront, on the other hand, is script size 12, book format 7.5x4.8 inches at roughly a hundred and eighty-five pages of written text. I bought Kaiserfront via Amazon.de at its standard price of €12.90, which, depending on the exchange course, is between 18.50 and 19 greenbacks. For 53,000 words. To put that into perspective for the forums, at 53,000 words you're barely out of the prologue of LightningCount's “Dilgar War” epic.
The sad thing is: Kaiserfront wants to be great. It wants you to take it serious. It's like a twelve year old who programmed his first web page and now thinks he's the second coming of Bill Gates' – when in fact he's just lousy teenager with a website full of junk.There's even a fake Folder for the Media (use Google Translate), which was included in the book as its own little booklet, its content more or less repeated in this book trailer (watch it; even if you don't know German, this tells you all you need to ever know about Kaiserfront).
With all the shoutouts to historic personalities, to supposed Nazi Germany Wunderwaffen, to things you'll only find on speculative pages like Luft46.com it comes across as incredibly lousy and lazy, an impression only deepened by the unbelievably bad prose. Even the Landserhefte - dubious dime novels about WW2 - tend to have a better prose than Kaiserfront. I've got to know, I actually bought one to compare them... As for the author, Heinrich von Stahl (yeah...right...). Let's just say its almost 100% certain that it's just another pseudonym for the guy who wrote an really thinly-veiled Nazi series a couple of years ago under the nome de crap Torn Chaines. Compared to that guy, Tom Kratman - SPACE MARINE! - writes subtle prose. Having read "Watch on the Rhine", I mean that.
How anyone can in all honesty write stuff like that - and even more, how he can find a publisher for it - is beyond me. I feel like part of my belief in justice as well as part of my brain have died reading this. It's just that astonishingly bad.
Chestbeating macho-monarchists that they are, the Kastrup and the Reich come up with an ingenious plan: bomb the crap out of the base the prisoners are held, land paratroopers there to break them free, then return to Germany. Naturally, they succeed. Again.
Meanwhile, the fleet of the Nodric League (Germany & its clients) is in international waters to pick up the returning moon capsule (whose retro-thrusters haven't fired). But the Soviet fleet appears on the scene. prompting the Germans to launch a first strike lest the Reds get too close to their retrieval mission. Naturally, they succeed. Again. Spectacularly, without even losing a ship of their own.
Logically, the Russians don't take too kindly to such things and amass their forces along the border, despite German warning that should they commence hostilities, they would nuke the troops concentrations.
Alas, the Germans want no war, and the Kaiser hopes a demonstration of their new weapons system will deter the Russians: their new land cruiser. Guys, I know this all sounds as if I'm making this up as I write, but I'm not. The LK-1 land cruiser is a nuclear-powered vehicle, 45 meters long, seveteen wide and thirteen high. It's armed with a dual 38cm turret, a single 12.8cm turret, 8 dual 8cm AA guns, "additional secret systems for air defense" and 12 machine guns against infantry. And yeah, it weighs 2,200 tons and can drive under water...
The Germans also are the only ones with a nuclear deterrent,... but the German deterrent fails because the son of a worker shot in the 1918 riots becomes part of the failsafe program and creates a backdoor in the German nuclear authorization program that deactivates all warheads on his command.
The UK, the USA and the USSR all declare war against the Kaiserreich. 6 million men of the Red Army with 30,000 tanks cross the eastern border (and into Finnland). The British use 1,800 "Lancaster" bombers to annihilate the German nuclear center in the Lybian desert (they succeed, but lose *all* their bombers). It seems all is lost.
The novel ends with the leader of Kastrup driving to a secret base where he is only allowed entrance after a genetic sample is taken and tested to prove his identity...
* * *
You know, there's 'wank' and then there's 'wank'. There's your average Trekkie wanking the power of the Enterprise. There's Karen Traviss wanking to the idea of sweet, sweet Mandalorian man-juice. And then there's Kaiserfront. In the league of wanking, Kaiserfront is the leader of the “Oh my god, my hands are burning and my wiener is a glowing lump of charcoal”-category.
Almost everybody of the German protagonists - and I mean everybody - is a member of the nobility. I swear, the whole cast is made up of "von XYZ"s. Then there's the whole issue of Nordic mythology and Nordic ethnic solidarity whoch really wasn't a thing in the Kaiserreich at all. All those military operations have names like "Wiking"; the airbase on Iceland is called Midgard, and so on.
Ah, but there's more! Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, Kaiserfront 01 keeps on giving, and it gives us...Aliens! Because, as we learn through flashbacks, in 1925, after the Germans had conquered the whole African colonial Empire, the British were dug in with 20,000 men (!) in a fort in the Sudanese desert. So Kastrup takes the fort in a combined glider & tank assault with a force of less than 2,000 men, and beneath the fort, in a hall "measuring at least 4x10 kilometers" the British have been studying Alien spaceships!
Regardless of the absolutely ridiculous plot it's the astonishing lack of imagination and seriousness that pisses me off.
Why are the international leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the USSR in this alternate 1949 reality Winston S. Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Josif Stalin?
Why is all equipment a virtual copy of the historical WW2 designs and concepts, which came only into being because of WW2?
Why is there a Guderian leading panzers, why is there a von Braun in charge of a space program?
Then there's the actual quantity of written words you get for your money. When “Wolf Hunt” is finally ready (sorry, that much self-promotion's got to be, got the manuscruipt back from my editor today), it'll be ~390 pages in a 6x9 inch format and 10.5 script coming in at around 178,000 words – for $16.99. Kaiserfront, on the other hand, is script size 12, book format 7.5x4.8 inches at roughly a hundred and eighty-five pages of written text. I bought Kaiserfront via Amazon.de at its standard price of €12.90, which, depending on the exchange course, is between 18.50 and 19 greenbacks. For 53,000 words. To put that into perspective for the forums, at 53,000 words you're barely out of the prologue of LightningCount's “Dilgar War” epic.
The sad thing is: Kaiserfront wants to be great. It wants you to take it serious. It's like a twelve year old who programmed his first web page and now thinks he's the second coming of Bill Gates' – when in fact he's just lousy teenager with a website full of junk.There's even a fake Folder for the Media (use Google Translate), which was included in the book as its own little booklet, its content more or less repeated in this book trailer (watch it; even if you don't know German, this tells you all you need to ever know about Kaiserfront).
With all the shoutouts to historic personalities, to supposed Nazi Germany Wunderwaffen, to things you'll only find on speculative pages like Luft46.com it comes across as incredibly lousy and lazy, an impression only deepened by the unbelievably bad prose. Even the Landserhefte - dubious dime novels about WW2 - tend to have a better prose than Kaiserfront. I've got to know, I actually bought one to compare them... As for the author, Heinrich von Stahl (yeah...right...). Let's just say its almost 100% certain that it's just another pseudonym for the guy who wrote an really thinly-veiled Nazi series a couple of years ago under the nome de crap Torn Chaines. Compared to that guy, Tom Kratman - SPACE MARINE! - writes subtle prose. Having read "Watch on the Rhine", I mean that.
How anyone can in all honesty write stuff like that - and even more, how he can find a publisher for it - is beyond me. I feel like part of my belief in justice as well as part of my brain have died reading this. It's just that astonishingly bad.
Verdict: 1/5 How anyone can read and like this is beyond me. It's lazy and totally overpriced shit.
OMFG
ReplyDeleteSomething like that comes out, when people without imagination and knowlage of history writing storys only using templates.
The Nazi-Regime was so far away from the the shape of the Kaiserreich, like our Democracy is away from the Nazi-Regime. Whether ideology or technology these two periods had nearly nothing in common. So - WTF - does Mr. Kratman/von Stahl/Dumbass really think the Kaiserreich was just a prequel of Nazi-Germany?
It seems even my alternative timeline in "TimeShift" episode one is based on better research than this bullshit. And my intention was a SF-trash-story.
And by the way: why do they always forget the Ottoman Empire in ther alt-WWI-timelines?
ReplyDeleteGood question. An Ottoman Empire under the influence of a "Young Turks" reform movements would be a nice factor.
ReplyDeleteWell, if you can master the German language and have some spare time, you could download this book in PDF format, completely legal, from .kaiserfront.de
ReplyDeleteAlthough, to be quiet frank, the review above sums it up nicely, but this seams to be general problem with alternate history novels, weak writing style and lousy research is the norm ,what always puzzles me is, that no author in that genre, seams to realise that history itself is a very complex thing, you alter A than B will not work.
To be fair, I think it was never intended as being more than very shallow novel and certainly not a historians mindfuck, but since “Fatherland” no other alternate history novel did make it big in the mainstream, I think there is a huge potential out there, but either great authors don’t have a soft spot for history or they are clever enough not to get themselves burned.
Regards
Wolf.
Sorry to break your one sided review. But the Russians attack the Nordic League not because of the attack on their fleet but because they and their American and British allies have decided to destroy the Nordic League with Operation Thunderstrike. Read page 99-101. And if you would have read the rest of the series you would know that it was a) about to destroy the meritocracy of the Nordic League and impose the bankers / New World Order rule over all the world.
ReplyDelete