With the introduction of its core themes, images,
and narrative strategies into the mainstream in recent decades,
science fiction in its traditional sense
appears to have lost its competitive edge
and its innovative potential.
Frederick Jameson recently described this trend
as a rapprochement between high and low culture
and the blurring of distinctive generic characteristics
that was in his 2005 archaeologies of the future.
However, the genre's utopian, subversive,
and critical elements have survived
in the field of alternate history fictions
and have even experienced a comeback in recent years.
Alternate histories are, of course,
well-established in the Anglo-American context.
Philip Dix, Man in the High Castle, Keith Roberts,
Pavan, Richard Harris' Fatherland, Kim Stanley
Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, the list goes on.
But less so in German literature,
and this is where, in my paper, I want to redress the balance.
I want to explore three recent examples
from German literature.
Kristian Kratz, Ich wer die Här sein,
Imzon in Schein und im Schatten, from 2008.
Wolt kang jeschke z das Kuzano spiel, from 2005.
And Rop a liefs, das Margesche Jär, from 2008.
My objective is to show how a classic device
of fantastic literature is employed in the mainstream
to introduce utopian or dystopian elements
and subvert traditional reading habits.
Kristian Kratz is well-known for his novels
Fatherland and 1979, Ich wer die Här sein, Imzon in Schein
und im Schatten, Alberia in Sunshine and in Shadow.
The third novel of the Swiss writer and globetrotter
starts with a simple yet fundamental retrospective
about the change to world history.
In this novel, Lenin never left Switzerland in 1917, but stayed.
And together with Proulpotkin and Bakunin,
established a Swiss Soviet Republic.
In the year 2013, this state has been engaged in almost 100 years
of war with fascists Germany and Britain.
Russia has been contaminated by an unspecified catastrophe,
and America is engaged in a bitter civil war.
Warfare hasn't advanced much beyond World War I airships,
bombs, and gas, but is nevertheless conducted
with fanatic efficiency.
To hold its own, the Swiss Soviet Republic
has resorted to colonizing the greater parts of Africa,
spreading its unique blend of efficiency and communist
ideology, and recruiting its cannon fodder
and, increasingly, its officers for this forever war.
The unnamed narrator is one such black stranger
in a strange land, a political commissar,
charged by the Swiss Supreme Soviet,
with the capture of one Obas Wazinski, an officer gun rogue.
The commissar travels to the recently recaptured Neu Baron,
which appears stuck in a permanent winter,
and sets off on horseback to find Wazinski.
On the way, he encounters a war-torn desolate country
following minefields and desperate survivors.
And eventually, he reaches the gigantic Alpine Redui,
a vast underground shelter below the Alps
that has proven impenetrable for the German bombs,
but in reality is little more than a war in off-damp tunnels.
Here, the commissar encounters the colonel,
who holds a position of mysterious influence,
much as Mr. Kurtz and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
or Colonel Kurtz in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
Wazinski manages to talk the commissar out
of returning him to trial and execution,
and opens his eyes to the real situation,
namely that everyone is exploited
to continue a pointless war that cannot be won.
The commissar, Wazinski eventually goes mad,
blinds himself, and dies miserably,
and the commissar escapes a coordinated attack
on the Redui by German airships,
and slowly makes his way back to his native Malavi,
shedding on the way the ideological indoctrination
of his youth.
As the remnants of Swiss colonial power disappear
under the returning jungle,
the ex-commissar disappears into the African vastness.
And that's just a brief plot.
Literary critics in Germany had a difficult time
with Kurtz's novel.
It wasn't until Dietmar Dath's review
that the German Phoeten realized that Christian Kurtz
had once again cocked a snook at the literary establishment.
Dath correctly identifies the blind spot
Germany's professional critics have
when it comes to the popular,
and the Kurtz and Kurtz,
and that Kurtz in Zichru and D'Aguisonwern,
his calm megalomania,
caused them to ignore the most obvious question
that needed to be asked, namely,
why does Kurtz knee the victory of Bolshevism in Switzerland?
Dath supplies the answer himself,
communism kept the capitalists honest.
Following the collapse of communism,
the world has turned into a madhouse,
a fact that both fascinates and appalls a writer
with a global outlook.
If we had a here sign in Zondenshine
and in Chattin has disturbing qualities,
it gets uneasily close to our own seemingly endless wars
and pursuits of mad individuals hidden in deep caves
under mountains.
It uses a strange one to remind us of the power
of the failed socialist dream,
but also of the horror of its consequences.
Is there any possibility of redemption for imperialists?
Does neutrality keep your conscience clear?
Kurtz seems to say that even our best intentions
and the proverbial Swiss perfectionism
cannot ward off the corroding effects of totalitarianism.
If Joseph Konrad's Heart for Darkness
was a criticism of the ideology of imperialism,
Christian Kurtz's book can be read as a criticism
of the imperialist nature of ideology
and an imaginative engagement with the psychology
of the colonized mind.
Kurtz does not deny his commissar dignity and culture,
but in the end, these European attributes are discarded.
The dream of a world without racism is as ephemeral
as the snow in Africa.
In spite of the brooding atmosphere,
the book has a utopian age.
Kurtz uses the means of estrangement
inherent in alternate histories to attain the freedom
that allows him to comment on questions
of post-colonial mentality,
the danger of ideological control inherent
in utopian euphoria,
and the deep seated mindset of superiority,
the root cause of inequality in war
that is still prevalent in our society.
By referencing Konrad and Coppola,
he clearly links his work with two instances
of cultural critique,
be it of the original hubris of Western colonialism
or of American imperialism.
His fiction, however, targets the much more complex question
of what happens when the colonizers are also the colonized,
a reflection on our modern world of migration.
And the question to what extent identity can be maintained
and or created in such a world.
Through the protagonist's journey from ice to heat,
from seclusion to open spaces,
from endless war to peace,
Kurtz constructs a utopian space
where the guestess of people who claim to know
what is good for the rest is questioned
while it retains the sense of solidarity and empathy
that neoconservatives and neoliberals lack.
I would argue that we cannot fully understand this book
until we place it in the context of the wider tradition
of alternate histories.
Kurtz hides a reference to Philip Dick's classic,
The Man in the High Castle in his text.
Science fiction readers will appreciate
this brief acknowledgement.
Other readers will miss it or dismiss it.
Small wonder than that,
in spite of all the publicity that the book has garnered,
Kurtz has so far only picked up one prize for this novel,
the fantastic prize, Deshtard Wetzler, in 2009.
Wolfgang Jeschke's novel, Das Kuzannuschbier,
The Kuzannusch Game, from 2005,
is a sophisticated exploration of the outer limits
of fantastic literature,
mixing alternate history, time travel,
and parallel world narratives,
and combining the very latest scientific theories
on the nature of time and space
with medieval religious philosophy.
Leichkacht, he is well aware
of the alternate history tradition.
He acknowledges Jack Finney's time and again.
Arkady and Boris Dragatsky's Hard to Be a God,
and Karl-Amerista's König's project specifically.
In 2052, climate change has become harsh reality.
Southern Europe is covered by sand
blown across the Mediterranean,
and the migrating masses from North Africa
are forcibly kept away from fortress Europe.
Neo-Nazis hunt those who slip through the net.
Due to global warming, the sea levels are rising.
While huge dams have been built
along the coastlines of Europe,
large areas of the poor countries of Asia are flooded,
leading to even more migration.
The European Union has disintegrated.
Following the explosion of a French nuclear reactor in 2028,
large parts of central Europe
have been radioactively contaminated
and are now virtually uninhabitable.
As a result of the radiation,
species extinction has been accelerated
by the rapid spread of genetically mutated plants.
In this bleak future,
the young Italian botanist, Domenica Ligrina,
finds a job at the Instituto Pontificale
della Venizrinacita della Criazione di Dio,
a scientific department of the Vatican,
which has been moved to relative safety in Salzburg.
Scientists at this mysterious institute
have developed a process that allows them to send agents
into the past to collect genetically intact plants,
which will be used to repair the damage in the present.
After her initial training in Venice,
she travels through the contaminated Germany.
And there she is then sent to the year 1451,
where she collects plants, seeds,
but is arrested in Cologne.
She's accused of heresy, dealing with the devil,
and eventually tried as a witch.
In her desperation, Domenica writes a series of letters
from her prison cell to the German Cardinal,
Nicholas of Cusa,
of whom she knows that he traveled via Cologne in 18,
in 1451.
This constitutes an illegal intervention in history,
and a series of breaks in the timeline occur,
which in turn opens a series of parallel worlds.
In the first timeline, Cusaños rides on,
and Domenica is burned in public.
In the second timeline,
Cusaños returns to Cologne to talk to her.
She's released and can return to her in on time.
In a third variant, the letters have disappeared,
but Cusaños hears a rough summary,
and decides to ask the Archbishop of Cologne
for a postponement.
In each case, Cusaños learns something about the future,
as in her letters, Domenica has revealed details
of his cosmological and scientific work,
that at this point in time exists only in his head.
As a result of these messages from the future,
an alternate course of history is created,
which the omniscient narrator describes
as the Cusanian acceleration.
This history, or alternate history,
accelerated history of the last 500 years
is meticulously described then,
beginning with a letter from Cusaños to Pope Nicholas V,
in which he proposes the creation of a scientific academy
at the Holy See, which would deal specifically
with unusual natural phenomena
and the revival of the humanistic heritage.
In the science-friendly atmosphere,
a new type of engine is invented as early as 1478.
This revolutionizes trade and transport,
and the West then secures its access to the oil wells
and the Middle East,
and because of the intense use of fossil fuel,
sea levels begin to rise already in 1825.
The first airship crosses the Atlantic mid-18th century,
1908, a radiation sickness is discovered
near nuclear power plants,
Winston Churchill celebrated in 1918 as a unifier of Europe,
and in 23, Hitler and Ludendorff are killed
when their coup attempt fails.
In the first half of the 20th century,
further development of the embankments
against the rising sea levels is agreed upon,
and in 1945, President Charles de Gaulle declares
that Europe must become an impregnable fortress.
So it is at this point that the reader begins to realize
that Dominica's reality, which one has until then assumed
to be a straightforward extrapolation of our own reality
into the future, is in fact one of the parallel worlds
that have arisen because of her intervention.
In fact, there are more and more clues in the text
that the various timelines have intertwined
that history itself has become porous.
Despite all this, Dominica has allowed a second trip
into the past, this time with the objective
to prevent the death of her father,
who was killed in 2039 in a terrorist attack.
Back in 2039, she meets herself as a young girl,
thus causing a time paradox which completely throws her
out of the reality of her own time.
As the attempt to save her father
has several possible outcomes,
the timelines turn into an inextricable knot.
The scientists in Amsterdam take this quite calmly,
according to their theories, time has an organic nature.
Like a self-optimizing computer program,
it will brush out timelines
that cannot stabilize themselves.
Jeschke references, of course,
Stephen Hawking's theory of time,
Q. Everett's superstring theory,
and quantum cosmology in this.
He adds to this mix his own fantastic variant,
namely the solitons.
These waves run from the beginning to the end of time,
then change their direction and move back towards the past.
Time travelers can surf these waves
without having to understand the process.
Strictly speaking, we are in the role of dogs
that have learned to take the subway.
This surfing in time is represented
quite poetically in the novel,
and one would hope for a translation
into English at some time.
Like H.G. Waltz and the Time Machine,
the author romanticizes the end of time
and the process of time travel itself,
bringing categories such as wonder
and grandeur into the mix.
So were scientists rarely allowed
for these contemplative moments, of course,
but in science fiction,
they have been fundamental since its beginning.
For the reader, this contradiction, on the one hand,
the seemingly plausible scientific explanation
of unprecedented events, on the other hand,
Jeschke's irrepressible storytelling skill
forms part of the aesthetic experience,
one that Kurt Laswitz,
the father of German science fiction,
described in 1895 in his essay,
Hubert Zukunftströmme,
as the necessary and adequate stance of the face
of the rapid development of modern science.
With Das Kuzanospiel,
Jeschke has introduced new aspects
into the venerable tradition of alternate history fictions.
There's the confrontation of two imaginary worlds.
On the one hand, the transition from middle ages
to the Renaissance,
where Kuzanos, way ahead of his time,
developed his theory of the coexistence
of the real and the possible,
so-called Dr. Ignorantia.
On the other hand, we have the world
at the middle of the 21st century
where human invention and the creation
can be repaired by traveling back
to this supposedly dark time.
In a further step, Jeschke integrates
this juxtaposition of the real
and the possible into the plot.
For example, the description of the consequences
of the nuclear accident,
which has turned the survivor into genetic cripples.
I want to briefly talk about one more novel
along this line,
namely a detective novel, Das Margeschia,
by Rob Allev.
He provides a satirical view of what might have happened
had the West German student movement
been successful in 1967, 1968.
Those of you not familiar
with the German student movement 1968,
it is a major myth.
It is something that exercises Germans
a lot still to this day.
So in this alternate history,
the revolution has happened,
but the irony is that nothing much has happened.
Nothing much has changed.
People continue to phone in to radio stations
to request a dedication to their grandparents.
Only now they ask for the songs of the revolution.
Everybody has a job,
but only because the under qualified are employed
to act as human infobooths,
reeling off a useless information to pass us by.
School children are brought into theaters
to learn about Marxist dialectics
in a punch and Judy show,
learn about the mere weird,
and visit museums to study the history of the revolution.
And of course, like school children in the real world,
they are bought by the attempts
of their equally bought teachers
to convey to them the significance
of the historic events that lead to the revolution.
The peace and quiet of this fictional post-revolutionary
Berlin is shattered when the internet dealer,
Prometheus, Palman, is brutally murdered.
Palman once a key member of the movement
and a close associate of the great student leader,
Richard Dubinsky,
very close to Woody Duchke,
the German student leader,
has turned his revolutionary pass into a gold mine.
He sources and sells historically important memorabilia
to keen collectors.
For example, Theodore Adorno's hole puncher for 2,000 euros,
or Rieke Meinhof's toothpick, authenticity guaranteed.
In this alternate world, things had shifted
and everything had changed in 1968.
The event that turned the tide
was the battle for Teigler's fleece
when the students won a major confrontation
with the police and public opinion turned in their favor.
In reality, the Schlachtam-Teigler-Wieck
was the final convulsion of the German student movement.
The other crucial difference to real events
is that Dubinsky was shot dead by an assassin.
As a consequence, he is revered as a patriotic hero and martyr.
Woody Duchke was not.
He was just heard.
And as a consequence, he is revered
as a patriotic hero and martyr.
And every year, there's an official victory celebration
where the fleece, nothing more than a seat warm
and a police car belonging to a police sergeant,
gets paraded around the streets of Berlin
as the birth certificate of our new community.
Only when three other former members of the commune are killed
does the investigating detective realize
that the murderer is looking for a photograph
to prevent a long-held secret becoming public.
Namely, contrary to official history,
Dubinsky had not been in Berlin on the decisive day,
but an avid fan had traveled to Hamburg
to watch the Beatles play.
In the end, it doesn't really matter what happened 40 years ago.
Different events may have altered the course of the history,
but as Alif points out right at the beginning,
rivers will never flow upstream.
The old order may have been overthrown,
but the world is the same.
All the alternate histories discussed in this paper
deal with Schnee von Gester, literally yesterday's snow.
This is one of the traces that can be found
in the third novel I was talking about.
The Schnee von Gester is the LaVine von Morgan,
is a slogan profoundly uplifting
for readers of a revolutionary leaning,
and of course, absolutely banal for everyone else.
But this Schnee von Gester, and yesterday's snow
in its colloquial meaning just old news,
is something that is no longer relevant.
I would argue that all these texts
are designed to show their readers
the effects of ways of thinking that are no longer relevant.
Karthse, Hverde, Hirsch sein im Sonn,
Scheinde, Reimschatten, targets the utopian dream of socialism
that forever desires to do good,
but always ends in totalitarianism.
Wolfgang Geschke, Staszkuzannespiel,
challenges our belief in technological progress
that we hope will save us from ecological disasters,
even though these disasters were caused by technology
in the first place.
Robalese, Lampoons, the smug members of the 68 generation,
whose lives have become as square as the generation
they rebelled against,
and who have held onto their myth too long.
And yet, in each of these alternate histories,
yesterday's snow has the potential to become an avalanche
to cause fundamental change or upset.
In some of the texts, there's hope for concrete utopia
and splocks elusive, not yet.
Karthse, Black Commissar,
breaks his colonial and ideological shackles
and returns to a life that is both self-determined
and in line with his traditions.
Geschke's doomed heroine, on the other hand,
may find refuge at the end of time,
but no amount of tinkering with the timelines
can fundamentally alter the course of history,
something that Kim Stanley Robinson recently discussed
in an interview at length.
To stretch the metaphor somewhat,
it is more a question of deciding
whether to wait for the avalanche to come down on its own
or to set it off in a controlled explosion.
Alif Sattar is ambiguous about a positive outcome.
It is entirely plausible that even
the most successful revolution will run out of steam.
At the same time, the text itself serves as a reminder
that a different life is possible, perhaps desirable.
My parting short, all these alternate histories,
poke irreverent fun at received wisdom and predictability.
They're examples of subversive cultural criticism.
In the utopian, dystopian, or satirical guise,
they radically challenge the status quo,
something that science fiction used to excel at.
However, none of the texts discussed in this paper
were sold under the label of science fiction
or fantastic literature.
Does that mark a decline of fantastic literature?
I would argue that it does not really matter
whether alternate histories have successfully made
the transition from fringe to mainstream
or whether mainstream literature has absorbed
a central device of science fiction.
The important thing is that the form is alive and well,
demonstrating its innovative potential
and continuing relevance.
Thank you.