A Nazi Era Anthology of Counterfactuals: "Was Wäre Wenn?" by Peter Purzelbaum

I just turned up a source that was unknown to me: an anthology of “what if” essays, entitled Was Wäre Wenn…? (What Would Have Happened If…?) published in Berlin in 1942 by a German writer named Peter Purzelbaum.

It seems that “PP” is a pseudonym for a former German officer named Karl Alexander Prusz von Zglinitski (1884-1957).

I’m wondering what his stance on the Nazi regime was. He seems to have published lots of semi-humorous, anecdote-rich, “lite” essays in the Weimar and Nazi eras. Some of them appeared in Nazi publications like “Der SA-Führer.”
Does anyone know anything about him or his politics? It would help me make sense of how and why he published this volume of counterfactual essays.

Comments

HSC said…
Hi Dr. Rosenfeld, would you mind sharing the table of contents and/or the forward? Your questions could likely be answered from those alone.
January 25, 2021 at 10:13 PM
Gavriel Rosenfeld said…
There's not much to be found, in all honesty. Much of the volume's focus is on German and European military history, which seems to have been his angle.
January 26, 2021 at 2:24 PM
HSC said…
How much of his work deals with World War I counterfactuals? There seems to be quite a bit of dissonance in the Nazi era historiography of the Kaiserreich.
January 26, 2021 at 8:04 PM
HSC said…
I finally received a copy, and I must say it's fairly disappointing. I expected nationalistic alternate histories replete with German Pannonia's, World War I counterfactuals and the like, but none of that is in there.
March 5, 2021 at 10:45 AM
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