Roads not Taken, at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
- cepmurphywrites
- Aug 12
- 5 min read
By Gary Oswald.
From December 2022 to January 2026, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin has been running an exhibition called ‘Roads not Taken, Oder: es hatte auch anders kommen konnen’ which covers fourteen turning points in German history, as chosen by Dan Diner and Fritz Backhaus, and how they could have turned out differently. This is fascinating for enthusiasts of AH, because it has been traditionally scorned by mainstream academia as a parlour game of little use as a tool of analysis. AH has become the realm of fiction writers rather than academics, a version of science fiction far more than a version of historical education.
This exhibition, and its companion book, directly challenges that. In the FAQ on the website the curators talk about their aims for the exhibition by saying the following:
“This is not a science fiction exhibition: the courses of history are not told in a fictional form, as if in a novel or film. Rather, it is an exhibition that repeatedly returns to important points in history and looks into the ways the outcome of an event was influenced. This procedure is almost exactly how historians go about their work: they attempt to place themselves in the historical situation and then ask why it happened that way and what alternatives were available in the respective situation. The exhibition points out alternative paths, but only as far as these options can be verified through historical evidence as really having been available. In this point the DHM, as a museum of history, wants to draw a line between what could have happened and what counts as fiction or counter-factual historical narrative. With respect to the unrealised alternatives, we did not want to stray entirely from the path of the possible.”
This is the goal then: to show how important turning points were by pointing out the existence of alternative plans and world views that have got to be lived out. So, one of the turning points they picked is the 1972 Vote of no Confidence on Willy Brandt, a politician generally seen as vindicated by history, and the exhibition is mostly made up of quotes by Brandt’s critics and enemies. The point is less who would have replaced Brandt but why people wanted him replaced and the genuine unpopularity of many of his moves that are easy to forget now.
This is perhaps most blatant with the turning point about Hitler surviving his first year in power. The Exhibition explicitly says that viewing it as an inevitability is a disservice to your understanding of how it happened because it ignores that many powerful people had every opportunity to prevent Hitler’s rise but didn’t act because ultimately, they accepted it. This is why the exhibition views the presentation of the options which could have stopped Hitler but weren’t taken as an important thing in the understanding of the real historical record.
And preventing Hitler’s rise is a preoccupation of the exhibition. Inevitably WWII looms large over any look at German history and as such there are multiple looks at how that happened, in terms of the instability of the interwar republic, the economic travails of the 1930s, the elite being willing to work with him, and the French accepting the remilitarisation of the Rhineland.
Unsurprisingly there is no similar preoccupation with Hitler’s Germany winning WWII, the more common pop culture AH scenario. That is simply never discussed at all. There are only two turning discussed points within the war itself.
One is Operation Valkyrie, the 1944 attempt of the German army to kill Hitler and end the war which, in the style of the entire exhibition, is covered mainly by graphs showing facts from OTL history. These graphs cover when deaths in WWII happened, of German soldiers and civilians, allied soldiers and civilians and those exterminated in the death camps, thus illustrating how many would have been saved from an earlier end of the war and who would have benefited the most (German soldiers). It also has several quotes from dissidents talking about the importance that Germany lost completely and so could be rebuilt, and the worries that a successful assassination would see a lot of the Nazi structure in place.
The other is the capture of the bridge at Remagen in 1945, which allowed the Western Allies to cross the Rhine. The exhibition talks about this as something that possibly bought forward the end of the war by several months. And the main thing that the exhibition is interested in as a result of that is the possibility of the first atom bombs being dropped on Germany rather than Japan. There is a computer where you can choose various targets on a map of Germany, and it shows the blast radius and the number of people likely to have been killed or to suffer from radiation poisoning.
This is in keeping with the general sombre focus of the exhibition. The opening thing you see when you walk in is a direct comparison of the successful protests in East Germany in 1989 and the ones in China in the same year which were crushed by the military, thus showing the bullet dodged in Germany. (I happened to be directly behind a bunch of Chinese tourists when I visited it, and this led to some animated conversations) Another exhibition is about the prospect of a war starting in Berlin between NATO and the Warsaw Pact leading to a nuclear holocaust.
But perhaps the most interesting turning points picked are much less dramatic. The idea of the SPD committing to pacifism in 1914 and calling for a general strike would probably not stop WWI, but it changes a lot of how that war is conducted and how it ends. Germany accepting the 1952 offer by the USSR to reunify as long as neutrality is agreed, so they can’t join NATO or the ECC, is also an underexplored idea and the letters and propaganda posters produced by people on all sides displayed was fascinating.
The very last thing you see in the exhibition before you leave is a list of the 1848 Revolutionaries and their long journey across Germany, with a look at what they hoped for achieve. If the idea of alternate history is to look at world views that never happened, at polities that never emerged, than in German history, which has seen a fascist state, a communist state, a monarchy and a democracy, the big one is the constitutional monarchy that the 1848 revolutionaries wanted and didn’t get.
It is not a long exhibition, I was in and out within an hour, and from the point of view of a fiction writer it is frustrating that none of the scenarios were ever fleshed out, but that is not the point. The point is, as the curators are very clear, to talk about real history by talking about the choices that created modern Germany and the alternate paths that other choices would have resulted. And that idea, of talking about history through talking about the opposition to things that happened and the other options not taken, is one I personally find compelling. If nothing else, it’s good at providing concepts for stories as inspiration.
I recommend the exhibition, though the companion book isn’t worth it, and hope that similar exhibitions are made by museums in other countries. I’d love to see something similar for the UK.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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