Weimarstadt. Cobblestones, dirty, loud, rattling cars, people in black. Uniforms--domestic and foreign. Business suits. Bowler hats, cloth caps, the well-dressed, people in rags. Horses. Cripples. Lots of cripples. Too many cripples. Flashing neon and giant words and images looming at you from the sides of buildings, all trying to sell you something. Tons of it. "They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven." Proud stone buildings flanked by stone lions, scrappy little brick buildings from before the empire, and a very few smooth, glass-sheeted towers signalling a new Bauhaus architecture, and perhaps a new world. Shit from the sewers, geraniums from the Tiergarten, sweet, dusty, and fresh; horse sweat and old leather, gas and octane fumes, expensive perfumes, pungent body odour. Ugly, dirty old cars with shimmying wheels, huge, sleek monster saloons with curtains inside the windows, ancient men on bicycles. Even some Asians if you can believe it. There's a "Chinatown" just like the Amerikaners would have. The Chinese were brought over to clean up the mess when the war ended and they're not finished even now. Won't be for years. Were it not for her European clothing, Katyusha, with her round, mostly Japanese face, would probably be mistaken for one of them daily. They are still getting blown up almost every day from leftover, unexploded ordnance.
This is the centre of a stilled, a deadlocked revolution: sparked by the end of the war, temporarily halted in part by the threat of occupation by the war's victors, but too strong to be swept away by it. Were the governments and businessmen ruling the Entente to have their way, every Red in Gothland would be put up against a wall and shot. But there would be opposition not only in Gothland, but in the victors' nations as well.
Original Caption: How Germany is being disarmed. These planes are waiting to be scrapped.
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