ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES ARE well established in Anglo-American literature— for example, Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), Richard Harris's Fatherland (1992), or Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)—but less so in German literature, where the division between high and popular culture has been maintained far longer (cf. chapter 4) and where the need for an alternative history has tended to concentrate on and emanate from the traumatic experience of the Third Reich. It wasn't until Carl Amery’s Das Königsprojekt (1974)—a time travel story that sees the Catholic Church attempt to change history in its favor—that German writers discovered the potential of alternative history fiction for cultural criticism. In this chapter I explore three examples of extraordinary quality and complexity that haven't (yet) been translated into English.

Christian Kracht is well-known for his novels Faserland (Land of Fibers, 1995) and 1979 (2001). Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I Will Be Here in Sunshine and Shadows, 2008), the third novel by this globe-trotting Swiss writer, starts with a simple yet fundamental retrospective change to world history: Lenin never left Switzerland in 1917 but stayed on and, together with Kropotkin and Bakunin, established a Swiss Soviet Republic. In the year 2013, this state has been engaged in almost one hundred years of war with fascist Germany and Britain. Warfare has not advanced much beyond World War I airships, bombs, and gas, but it is nevertheless conducted with fanatic efficiency. To hold its own, the Swiss Soviet Republic has resorted to colonizing the greater part of Africa, spreading its unique blend of efficiency and communist ideology, and recruiting there its cannon fodder (and, increasingly, its officers) for the eternal war. The unnamed narrator is a black African stranger in a strange land, a political commissar charged by the Swiss supreme soviet with the capture of Oberst Brazhinsky, an officer gone rogue.

The commissar encounters a war-torn, desolate country full of minefields and desperate survivors, including a mysterious dwarf named Uriel (an allusion to the archangel of the apocrypha) who rescues him from certain death.