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    Zonen
    Zonen
    Zonen
    Ebook39 pages30 minutes

    Zonen

    By Tom Black

    ()

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    About this ebook

    What if in 1946, an overstretched British occupying force had called on Denmark to aid in the occupation of post-war Germany? Would the world today be radically different? Or would it be mostly the same?

    Tom Black's short story, told as a series of newspaper interviews, explores a present-day Denmark with a slightly different past. An examination of how alternate history need not only focus on great men and decisive battles, Zonen tells a simple human story. Our anonymous narrator meets characters aplenty, from family historians to TV executives and hard-right politicians.

    Funny, interesting and poignant, this short story may also teach you a thing or two about the real Denmark.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSea Lion Press
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781386216018
    Zonen

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      Book preview

      Zonen - Tom Black

      Zonen

      Tom Black

      C:\Users\Tom\Downloads\7Y3DDVk.png

      Zones of occupation in Germany, c.1947

      en

      My boarding pass falls out of my bag as I pass a motorcycle and sidecar in a glass case. I utter hasty apologies, mumbling something about a ‘rapid turnaround’. In fairness, less than eight hours ago I was at King’s Place. My guide, a man of chequered shirts and white facial hair, simply smiles and returns to the tour.

      What a lot of people forget is that this was initially part of the British Zone, Hans Jøllberg is saying as he takes me around look around the small Danskezonenmuseet in Flensburg. The museum’s curator speaks perfect English, and his accent sounds Danish. He tells me, however, that he was born here, in Germany. Or, as it was then, the Danskezone – the Danish Zone. 

      In the ashes of Nazi Germany, the former Third Reich was temporarily carved up between the ‘big three’ powers and France (apologies to French readers). In the East, of course, the Soviet Union was in charge. In the West, the occupation was divided between the three Allied powers. The United States Army and General Eisenhower occupied the bulk of the south of the country, while de Tassigny of France took over the regions bordering the Fourth Republic. British forces, under Montgomery, maintained administrative order in the north of the country.

      In the summer of 1946, however, Hans says, political developments in your own country, in London, meant that the British commitment to the occupation had to be scaled back.

      The ‘political developments’ had far more impact in northern Germany than they eventually did in their own right. The situation in Palestine had ‘blown up’ rather substantially, and the Attlee government faced demands to bolster the British troop presence in the mandate. As British soldiers struggled to come to terms with why they were now being shot at by the same people they had liberated from concentration camps one year earlier (from their perspective, at least), Eisenhower, Montgomery and de Tassigny had a difficult question to broach.

      They met here, in Flensburg, to discuss what to do.

      Jøllberg points out a large pinboard, covered in photographs of the Flensburg Conference. Danish documents – of which there are many – style it as Flensborg. While the military leaders were technically in charge, real power obviously lay with the civilian politicians in the respective countries. Truman, struggling with Congress over the role America ought to

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