Just finished reading (re-reading, technically, but enough time had passed to make it practically new) the AH novel The Dog King by Christoph Ransmayr (Morbus Kitahara is the original German title), and was left bemused/puzzled enough that I still can't really tell where it falls in terms of quality: story, characters, and otherwise.
http://www.uchronia.net/label/ransdogkin.html
The POD is apparently twofold. After a different German surrender (the "Peace of Oranienburg"), the Allies implement the Morgenthau Plan for stripping Germany of all industry in the wake of WWII and reducing it to a medieval level of civilization, while also forcing the surviving population (or at least the citizens of "Moor", OTL's Mauthausen) to undergo regular rituals of penance and remembrance for the Holocaust, even to the point of dressing them in camp uniforms and other Untermenschen apparel, making them act out forced labor, and erecting huge memorials to the dead and to the "Bringer of Peace", Judge Lyndon Porter Stellamour (apparently responsible for the Plan?). At the same time, the war in the Pacific drags on until the late 1960s, when the atomic bomb is finally dropped on Japan (no idea why so long, other than maybe the Allies were so focused on Germany and numerous other operations and brushfire wars mentioned in passing that they somehow couldn't pursue the Pacific War with the same vigor against a Japanese Empire weakened as in OTL?). The story focuses on three characters: a concentration camp survivor who becomes the occupation's main official in "Moor", a young blacksmith who become his de facto bodyguard, and a woman who smuggles and trades illegal goods between "Moor" and the more prosperous "lowlands".
Maybe there were issues in translation (or maybe the prose was a type I can't fully wrap my head around), but I found much of the story to be jumbled and going in many directions at once. The conjured imagery was vivid and well-done, yet had the same semi-aimless feel. I won't spoil the ending, but "unresolved" is probably the politest way to put it. I'll be holding onto the work, if only for its imagery, and the speculation about a Morgenthau Plan-Germany, but it'll likely be a while before I fully understand it.
If anybody else has come across it, and has a better grasp of it, I'm all ears!
http://www.uchronia.net/label/ransdogkin.html
The POD is apparently twofold. After a different German surrender (the "Peace of Oranienburg"), the Allies implement the Morgenthau Plan for stripping Germany of all industry in the wake of WWII and reducing it to a medieval level of civilization, while also forcing the surviving population (or at least the citizens of "Moor", OTL's Mauthausen) to undergo regular rituals of penance and remembrance for the Holocaust, even to the point of dressing them in camp uniforms and other Untermenschen apparel, making them act out forced labor, and erecting huge memorials to the dead and to the "Bringer of Peace", Judge Lyndon Porter Stellamour (apparently responsible for the Plan?). At the same time, the war in the Pacific drags on until the late 1960s, when the atomic bomb is finally dropped on Japan (no idea why so long, other than maybe the Allies were so focused on Germany and numerous other operations and brushfire wars mentioned in passing that they somehow couldn't pursue the Pacific War with the same vigor against a Japanese Empire weakened as in OTL?). The story focuses on three characters: a concentration camp survivor who becomes the occupation's main official in "Moor", a young blacksmith who become his de facto bodyguard, and a woman who smuggles and trades illegal goods between "Moor" and the more prosperous "lowlands".
Maybe there were issues in translation (or maybe the prose was a type I can't fully wrap my head around), but I found much of the story to be jumbled and going in many directions at once. The conjured imagery was vivid and well-done, yet had the same semi-aimless feel. I won't spoil the ending, but "unresolved" is probably the politest way to put it. I'll be holding onto the work, if only for its imagery, and the speculation about a Morgenthau Plan-Germany, but it'll likely be a while before I fully understand it.
If anybody else has come across it, and has a better grasp of it, I'm all ears!