With Pale blond hair going to white, watery blue eyes and the intent bearing of a man trying to hear what's being said. T.H. Schumpeter hardly seems the figure of history that he is. He lives in a modest urban home in Hanover with his wife of twenty-six years, Neva. His oldest son, Marcus serves with the German Space Navy as a captain; his second son, Helmut, is an architecht in Essen; and his daughter Ilka is married to a civil servant in Berlin. He still travels on behalf of Germany but he rarely has much more than a couple of bodyguards and a secretary for an entourage. He shuns all publicity and is deeply suspicious of any newsmedia types, particularly if they do not declare themselves upon introduction. Schumpeter is an Elite Administrator.
NPC Motivation Results: Heart Jack: Schumpeter is wise and is a donor of good counsel; Club 3: Violence does not bother him, nor does the threat of its use.
One of the political miracles of the late 23rd century, the reunification of Germany was largely the product of the dream of one man, Theodor Hans Schumpeter, the present Premier. It was he who brought together the commercial and then the political powers of the five German states, creating a new European superpower. Yet the man himself is reserved, retiring, almost reclusive in his desire for privacy, not at all the image of a nation-builder.
Born in Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 2239, T.H. Schumpeter grew up in a prosperous household, the eldest of seven children. Like his father and grandfather before him, young T.H. aspired to the civil service, and he dutifully completed Gymnasia and attended university in Nurnberg with this goal in mind. In 2263 he attained it, and his real education began.
He had vaguely wondered why Bavaria alone possessed starships and interstellar colonies while Hanover claimed supremacy of the German states. Likewise he had pondered why Bavaria was such a staunch French ally even if that meant opposing measures clearly in the German interest. He gradually became aware of a subtle but pervasive policy, French inspired, to keep Germany a mass of seperate, mutually supicious states. His unpublished memoirs state that his true political awakening occurred at the Brussels trade show of 2272, but it is just as likely that awareness took a long time to come to him.
As a trade delegate, Schumpeter had ample opportunity to visit the other German states and become aquainted with some of the most influnential businessmenin central Europe. He began to insinuate into his talks with these men and women -- Ilsa Schaust, O.V. Gruber, and Friedrich Eisenback among them -- the ideas of unity. Trade agreements, currency protocols, controls removed or inter-German freight, little things like that, and always he let his listeners find the idea that they wanted to sponsor while he stood aside and listened in turn, and dutifully reported these ideas back to his ministers in Bavaria.
By 2280, Schumpeter had become one of the hubs of a network of like-minded Germans working towards commercial standardization. But, by this date, the hand of the French began to be felt; agreements fell through, data was lost, important people were disgraced or ruined. There was little to actually connect the French to so many events, but Schumpeter saw a pattern and began to make himself even more anonymous and secure. Meetings and conferences still went on, but he was not officially in attendance, or no records were kept, or he was listed as being somewhere else.
All this remarkable effort might have been for naught had the French not embroiled themselves in the Central Asian War of 2282. Bavaria was obligated to serve their ally, France, as she backed her ally, Russia, against Manchuria, and their were many Bavarian casualties for a cause best described as obscure. In fact, there was no Bavarian interest in Central Asia at all, and between this and the Japanese intervention that actually reversed the tide and allowed the French to claim victory, France lost much political capital with Munich. Bavaria declined to leave troops in the multinational peacekeeping force after 2287 and concentrated its efforts on improving relations with its fellow German neighbors.
Schumpeter had not been idle; with French interests focused on the east, German trade talks and currency revaluations were neglected. The foundations of commercial unity were laid well, and for the first time in centuries there was serious, unforced and uninhibited discussion of political unity. French victory did nothing to stop this process; the French military was soon seizing control of the government and the Germans received only half-hearted attention from them. It was a perfect atmosphere for formenting rebelling, and Schumpeter and his charmed circle made the most of it.
The effort bore sudden fruit when Hanover, on 3 May 2291, called for all German states to unify and write a new German constitution. Within three weeks Saxony, Brandenberg, and Westphalia answered the call and began proceeding to elect constitutional delegates -- leaving Bavaria the only holdout. Later, Schumpeter would claim that he felt deep mortification at the recalcitrance of his childhood homeland, but at the time his homeland was still not a household word. No one who knew of his efforts could blame him for Bavarian resistance, but even after his contributuion was recognized Schumpeter was never held accountable for this. After all, he was talking to trade representatives of all the other German states but not his own. One wonders how history might have been changed had Schumpeter aligned the thinking of Bavarian business.
As it was, Bavaria held out for the entire summer, long enough for the military junta in Paris to notice and become alarmed. At the same time, Schumpeter openly began to network among the Bavarian corporations, arguing that a unified Germany was at least as strong as France and more in line with Bavarian interests. It was for this, in the summer of '91, that made Schumpeter's reputation, as he rose from nowhere to become the voice and conscience of reunified Germany. There were many who did as much as he, but they were all better known, politicians and business leaders with decades of accomplishments behind them, and their ideas were his ideas. When Schumpeter spoke, with the chorus of four other states behind him, people realized how pivotal he had been in the reunification effort. By summer's end, even before Bavaria voted to join the convention, the people had lionized him, and a grassroots movement to have him elected President of the new German republic was in full swing.
September 1, 2291, Bavaria voted to join itself to the new Germany. Within a week France found a pretense to abrogate a major trade treaty, and Schumpeter realized that worse was in store. He had never sought public office before, but he found himself at the forefront of a nation about to give birth to itself, and he felt he could not leave it unguided at this critical moment. When the Provisional German Government was formed 12 September, Schumpeter allowed himself to be elected President by acclimation. In swift succession he called together the Constitutional Convention, drafted letters to the heads of the ESA pledging German fidelity to Bavarian obligations, and issued proclamations stating that no German government would be forced to dissolve before all had decided how they would govern themselves. In this fashion he mollified critics at home and abroad, and his next masterstroke preserved peace and bought him time: He did nothing.
Public sentiment was already with him; he needed to do nothing to keep their hopes high but send out regular reports from the Convention. Europeans worried that a new Hitler or a new Bismark was rising to plunge the world back into war; Schumpeter said and did nothing in public that looked like posturing or politiking. France was watching Germany and himself closely to see what he would do; he did nothing and gave no visible clue. In fact, he was meeting already with all the German military staffs and bringing them under one unified policy: Protect the homeland from dangers without.
The Convention was a contentious one; their draft was not finished until January of 2292, by which time the French military government was fully comitted to sabotaging the effort. Stirring up the ESA was easy, particularly as the French mobilized their armed forces on the border while claiming they were getting ready to defend themselves against attack. Schumpeter realized that the French were prepared to forcibly deunite Germany even if this meant a long and bloody struggle, probably on German soil, and so, after agonizing over it for three nights, he made the fateful decision.
On 10 March, 2292, President Schumpeter went on worldwide TV to annouce the new German Constitution had been signed and that Germany was now a formal entity, the newest nation on Earth. Two hours later the French hovertanks crossed the Rhine and invaded. Waiting for them four kilometers on the other side were the German tanks -- and international observers -- and the TV cameras. The French brought only their own newspeople and a canned story about a provocation. They were outclassed from the start.
There has been much debate about the intended goal of the German counter-invasion of France that followed, and some critics have suggested that this was the intention all along. In his account of the War of German Reunification, My Country ( 2295), Schumpeter maintains that he was indeed ready to go all the way to Paris if that's what it took to keep the French on their side of the border. In the end that was never neccesary; under the force of the German counterattack the French were pushed back over the border everywhere and a spearpoint aimed directly at Paris got within 46km of the city before the French sued for peace. Instantly Schumpeter accepted, and to the amazement of the world, halted the drive and ordered all troops back across the Rhine. Over 20,000 soldiers from both sides had died, but Schumpeter asked neither for compensation or territory. "The only place I ever wanted was Germany," he said at the Chalons-sur-Marne Peace Conference, and that was that.
Since the war, the French junta has collapsed, Nicholas Ruffin has been elected Emperor of the French, and the Germans have become a power equal to their neighbor to the west -- but a rival, not an enemy, still co-members of the ESA and now, with the Kafer threat, allies in the struggle. Never before has the face of Europe been so dramatically changed with so little bloodshed or destruction. Yet the man who made it all possible, T.H. Schumpeter, has all but disappeared from public life; having accepted the symbolic office of Premier, he has ample opportunity to be visible and advance his position of Germany in the interstellar community, but this he does, as he has before, quietly, without any fanfare, behind the scenes.
With the loss of the Hochbaden and its four million colonists, Germany now possesses five colonies and one outpost. While it maintains its status as a major space-faring nation, the economic, scientific, and emotional loss of such an important frontier colony will be felt for some time. Prestige remains high though as Germany's space fleet, still Earth's third largest with some 70 major warships, continues fighting well against the Kafer menace.