Proposed cover of "Our Finest Hour"
Our Finest Hour, also sometimes known by the draft title Führerreich, is the planned seventh novel of the famous alternate history World Crisis series by Winston Churchill. Scheduled to be released in early 1937, little information has filtered out about this novel, but in a press conference in December 1935, the author vaguely described the plot of his future novel, describing it as "the work that will make alternate history a true category of literature". The story takes place in an alternative world where Germany has lost the Weltkrieg.
Plot[]
The main story in the novel is rumored to be about a young British soldier returning home from a victorious Gallipoli campaign, and his ensuing life in the service until the Second World War. However, early readers claim this meager plot is only an excuse for the historical background in the novel. It is there explained that after the American entry on the side of the Entente, Germany has been totally overrun by early 1919 by the forces of France and Britain. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is torn into pieces and the Hohenzollern dynasty is deposed in Germany, being changed into a weak democratic republic. As a debt of war, France occupies the western bank of the Rhine; spending their energy by struggling against the German patriots, the Entente lets the Soviets win the Russian Civil War, establishing a communist Russia that takes control of formerly German Eastern Europe.
In a context of political violence and Red Scare, Germany soon falls into chaos, partly occupied by French forces and constantly having to deal with communist or monarchist riots. The western democracies themselves, with their Parliaments full of patriotic and chauvinistic war veterans, soon fall into an authoritarian system. In this chaos, a man arises as the leader of an anecdotical party, the Valkist German People's Party: Adam Dressler is a war veteran from Sudetenland who caught syphilis in the trenches. After a bloody coup tentative in Berlin, he is condemned to only 9 months of jail by a corrupted court. In jail, he writes a manifesto detailing the future that his crazy mind has imagined: a giant German Empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific one, with the German culture and language becoming dominant across the globe. After his release from jail, he begins an electoral campaign that seduces the humiliated and exhausted German: Dressler eventually coups the government with the support of large swathes of the army and after the French have talks of invading Germany, Dressler calls an emergency election in which the Valkist Party wins in a landslide, causing the French to back down officially.
As leader of the republic, Dressler soon establishes a xenophobic and militarist dictatorship, along with the immoderate personality cult that gives him the title of Leader, or "Führer". Western democracies, weakened by internal disputes, let him annex German-speaking parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ally with the vanquished powers of the Weltkrieg. The German armies easily overrun France, and is rejected by the British forces during a landing attempt in Scotland. Motivated by his own anticommunism, Dressler then decides to invade communist Russia. The book ends with the beginning of a three-sided war between Dressler's New Reich, the British Empire, and Soviet Russia.
Reactions[]
Many historians have criticized the point of divergence of the work's history as a "childish fantasy": an American intervention in the Weltkrieg was impossible due to the then-pacifist trend of the US population, an evidence being the reelection of President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 on an isolationist program, as well as the probabilities for a final French victory over Germany being incredibly low, as Ludendorff's doctrines permitted to secure victory over the Entente by mid-1919. The probabilities of an ultra-nationalist victory in Germany are also quite unimaginable, as far-right organizations in Germany like the völkisch movement always have quite fringe and only appealed to a small minority of elitist chauvinists - much different than the typical "National Populist" regimes of Integralist Portugal or Legionary Romania. Many also deem the Bolshevik victory in Russia unplausible, as White Russian forces basically controlled most of Russia except the rich West throughout the entire duration of the Russian Civil War and were severly strengthened after the death of Vladimir Lenin in September 1918, as this would lead to the splinter of the Bolshevik leadership.
The worst reactions, however, have come from German nationalist parties. Bavarian DVLP politician Anton Drexler felt insulted by the book and intends to file a lawsuit against Churchill and the publisher soon, as Adam Dressler, his namesake, is presented as a power-hungry madman corrupted by syphilis. Winston Churchill however refuses to reply to the critics until the release of his book, only sying that his "vision of an alternate world is theoretically possible and that something like this could have happened in another universe".