Gawdammit, lets get this shit moving already.
Germany:
The Great War took its toll. Early victories in 1914 and 1915 gave the young Empire hope, and its people drank in the pride they had felt when their brave young men took the field at Sedan in 1870. But this was not the same. Even though the Russians blundered across the Eastern Front from one slaughter to another, Germany faced the combined forces of France, Britain, and the dozens of colonies both had spent the last two centuries building. New weapons of war, built in the factories of the industrial revolution and the laboratories of modern secular science, changed the shape of the battlefield forever. Machine guns ended the cavalry charge that had been a staple of warfare from Gaugamela to Waterloo. Flying machines built from canvas and beam and wire, an invention scarcely past a decade old, dropped bombs and burst reconnaissance balloons. And then each other. Pilots shot at each other with pistols, and then with machine guns timed with their propellers. Massive steel vehicles driven by diesel motors pushed through lines of men, and could not be stopped by rifle shot alone. To advance was death. To appear was death. Everybody hid in trenches.
Russia left the war earlier, frightened by a Bolshevik revolution at home. Though the revolution was brought to a close, the battered Empire stayed out of the war. German u-boats sunk any ship that threatened to supply their foes. This raised the ire of the supposedly neutral, but few did anything about it. As much as the Allies wanted them to join the fight, the United States kept silent. Even as their plans failed on the western front, Germany had a stroke of luck when Abyssinia, the small African kingdom that had broken Italy a generation earlier, joined its side and brought down Allied colonies abroad. No matter what happened, neither side gained enough of an advantage to end the war.
By 1919, Germany was prepared to crack. The British headed blockade in the North Sea was choking their lands dry, and prices sky-rocketed. The people blamed their generals, and they blamed the war, and they blamed their Kaiser. New troops that should have been heading to the front stayed in Germany and put down plots and the traitors who plotted them.
As the bloody decade came to a close and the twenties dawned, the war turned into a pointless stalemate. Neither side budged, but neither side could afford to advance. Calls for peace came and went, but both sides were convinces that the other would capitulate if they just waited a month longer. A month always turned into months, however, and months into years. It wouldn't be until 1925 when they would see their peace, and by then too much damage had been done. The Habsburg monarchy disintegrated, leaving the Austria-Hungarian Empire a smattering of new independent states. Britain retreated from the world, and even from her Empire, and France fared as badly.
For Germany, those who had hoped the end of the war would bring them normality had their hopes dashed. War debts loomed, an army full of disillusioned men came home with nightmares, and bread remained expensive. For many Germans, it was the Kaiser's fault.
Republicanism swept across the country, headed off only in the North where the military might of old Prussia still held sway. The Kaiser resigned, afraid that the bloody terrors of the French Revolution one hundred years before had finally arrived in his country. Legendary General Paul von Hindenburg was elected Chancellor, but this was not enough.
Unable to bring the south to heal, he allowed the new Bavarian-led republic its independence. It was a time to rebuild, not to fight a civil war, and so rebuild they did. For the next fifty years, the divided land of Germany licked its wounds and waited for a new generation of youth to guide them.
The death of Hindenburg in 1939, and his successor in the next decade, brought the republican spirit back to the country. Wishing for unity, they two nations folded back into a single republic. It would stay this way until 1976.
The 1970's were a decade that changed the world. Communism was rising in the east, Spain filled the boots of the old European powers and set about rebuilding its old Empire. The Ottoman Empire was showing signs of crumbling, and Africa was beginning to congeal into a force of its own. In Germany, the stressed republic was beginning to loose favor. Spanish hegemony in Europe was seen as an insult to German pride that the ineffectual government was doing nothing about. A string of depressions and recessions made people uncertain of their jobs or futures, and it seemed like there was a new scandal in Munich every week. When the Minister of the Treasury was caught embezzling funds into foreign banks for the personal use of him and his friends, the people grew angry, and when it was revealed that the same Minister was married into a prominent Jewish family, that made it somehow worse.
Protests turned into riots when green guards mishandled them. An underground pro-monarchy movement added fuel to the fire when they dug up an unknown construction worker named Frederick who happened to be second in line for the place of Hohenzollern family head. The first in line, a sonless old rich pile of dust living in an old castle that nobody thought twice about, was easily passed over. Frederick was tall, loud, and sported a forked blonde beard that looked good under a pickelhaube. With his face in their minds, the riots turned into a revolution. The Munich government surrendered, and Frederick was put in its place. He moved the capital to Berlin and took the title "King of Prussia".
A swift occupation of the broke nation of Austria brought it into this Greater German polity, and nationalism swelled in the streets. German military might was increased. For the Germans, Frederick had brought the nation back to where it was before the damnable war. As the seventies came to an end, it looks as if even borders will not contain their swelling pride.
((43 minutes. See, this is easy as hell to do yo. You can change whatever you need to change, but at least you got a goddamned base.))
