We Proudly Present: A Series of Presentations About the Kansen, Otherwise Known as Shipgirls, From Their Inception to the End of German Hegemony

Again ye come, ye hovering Forms! I find ye,

As early to my clouded sight ye shone!

Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye?

Still o'er my heart is that illusion thrown?

It made a sort of sense, didn't it? Before any campaign began, one had to gather material of war. An army marched on its stomach, a ship moved with her fuel, and historical writing lived in its history.

Especially in the case of historical fiction, a strong awareness of history was required. What were the bounds of your workspace? Battering down the walls of historical fact might give you more room to work, but there was potential inside. For a skilled writer, the drama of history had everything you would ever need. Conflict, rich characters, and stakes! You lived in those stakes!

Perhaps that made it hard to surprise someone. The Germans winning the First Weltkrieg wasn't a plot twist; it was history. Still, there was room to work. Dig deep to find those overlooked nuances, to question the very narrative you were contributing to. Whether you were aiming for historical fiction or a 'simple' narrative packaging of events, you had to hit the books.

For a breakdown of how they worked, you would want Dewey Decimal 623, Military and nautical engineering. Or perhaps you were thinking 611 for explanations of their unique anatomy. 920 would have biographies of the especially distinguished, and the higher 900s would describe the role of Kansen (the preferred term) in history. You might find some navel-gazing about their nature in the lower hundreds: philosophy, theology, and the social sciences… and this all discounted books they wrote or fiction focusing on them.

Unfortunately, you couldn't really be content with just a couple of those items when your end goal was a subversive exploration of depictions of Kansen as a concept. You couldn't skip out on anything. Anything. Even the old news articles about their initial appearance. Especially those articles, actually. And diaries and editorials and any other thing you can think of.

Leo and Maria had their work cut out for them, essentially. Neither of them thought that this would be their only visit to the library, but it was a start. They had a list of sources to start with, courtesy of the librarian, and they had gathered the first few tomes.

"It's not as thick as I thought it would be." Leo commented, holding a book in his hands.

"Figures, doesn't it? It's just interviews." Maria responded.

"I was hoping for more."

"Say that on the other side of the book." Maria commented. Interviews With Seydlitz wasn't a doorstopper-level tome, but it wasn't nothing either.

He flipped through history. The earliest photograph of Seydlitz ever, one of a set sent to the Kaiser and other higher-ups. (The infamous pink was hidden, for now.) That led to the first interview, which was primitive and poorly recorded and more just a test to make sure these Kansen gals were all the same because nobody understood a damned thing–

Yes Commandant, no Commandant, I'm unsure but I will do my utmost to get you an answer, Commandant… She would have seemed the perfect example of what the Germans would have wanted, almost slavish in her love of duty, the perfect servant of empire to counterweight Lutzow. It didn't seem like Hipper knew anything about Lutzow when he formed Seydlitz, though, so it was just chance.

Seydlitz, it seemed, wasn't one to depend on luck. "If there was any failing, let me shoulder the blame for it. I lacked the strength to execute the orders I was given." That sentence, more than anything, seemed to highlight her life. Leo wouldn't go as far as to call it self-loathing, but she was dreadfully willing to put herself down for not squaring the circle. It was tragic, in a way. Seydlitz like some sort of Atlas, straining to keep the rotting empire from collapsing in on itself.

(The German Empire was doomed, from a Syndicalist perspective. History had proved it, no? Those great motives Seydlitz preached were excuses that justified the seizure of markets and the perpetuation of imperial chauvinism. Perhaps Sisyphean was the more proper term. Not in the boulder sense, but the earlier one. The vanity of binding Thanatos.)

As the pictures grew more colorful – touched-up photographs and little print portraits, the pink sometimes depicted as strawberry blonde because surely they exaggerated – Seydlitz grew less so. She was more tired, more ragged, her ramrod-straight posture seeming more like a scarecrow hanging off a post than anything natural. Hints regarding her personal life were like needles mixed into a haystack, buried in consummate professionalism.

"A lover?" Seydlitz laughed. "Ah, no, I don't have one. Osman has told me good things about her husband… but it didn't seem like someone would fit. I have my boys already. Or maybe I'm married to the job."

Married to the job. Wasn't that a miserable statement? One of the first things you truly understood about shipgirls was that they were made for something. Well, always for war, but the casus belli varied.

Married to the job? Perhaps. But she was certainly attached to a sort of ball and chain.

"Who am I? I'm SMS Seydlitz. That's what I've always been."

Meanwhile, Maria was working through her own book:

Lady Vasa, it was called. A German stageplay written in 1922, a little after the conclusion of the first Weltkrieg… and after a request to salvage the historical Vasa was denied. It was a symptom of the fascination with Kansen at the time, a story essentially tacking a wisdom cube onto an old ship and running with it. A few sketches and jokes had been made to that effect previously, but Lady Vasa was seriously executed on stage instead of being circulated in cheap papers.

Of course, the star of the show was the titular Lady Vasa – played by a previously unknown actress – but her supporting cast was studded with real historical figures. Gustavus Adolphus, that great King of Sweden, commissioned the ship both as a symbol of power and the means of projecting it. He would die at Lützen four years after the doom of his warship, but that was only foreshadowed in the play, not depicted.

The focus was Vasa. Vasa who looked like her wardrobe had been misplaced in an indigo dye works, golden blond and deep blue making her a miniature flag.

It was a tragedy, but there was no shock in it. No surprise. It was Julius Caesar, it was Oedipus Rex. You knew what fate the titular character faced, the stageplay was just wringing emotions out of you first. (Or perhaps making a point of some kind.)

VASA, holding a letter from the King: "And to Älvsnabben I bid you go,

Our Swedish colors over the Baltic flow,

Blue as our sea, yellow as gold,

Shall Polish red and white enfold…"

VASA throws the letter to the side.

VASA: "And what of me, O King of Goths and Wends?"

Perhaps Vasa was lacking in some of the courtesies a lady of the time should have had, especially considering the scenes where she spoke with men of renown, but shipgirls had a reputation for breaking the mold even then.

Even after the sinking, Vasa remained on stage. On a grander scale, a replica of the sailing ship's rear stood as the backdrop for the stage, vivid paint and gaudy sculpture swallowing up modestly dressed shipwrights and ministers, a perfect match for the vibrant Vasa. Vasa the character stayed too, a specter who limped in a tattered dress of wisdom-cube blue, haunting the men who built her to sink.

Who was responsible? The King thundered about "imprudence and negligence" in his soliloquy, but had he not approved the design? He signed off on each and every feature, but perhaps he simply trusted the shipwright too much. Henrik Hybertsson was indisposed (with that most permanent of conditions) and yet he shouldered most of the blame.

Why did the ship sink?

"Only God knows," did not seem a particularly comforting conclusion for the mourning Vasa. Perhaps her keening would have only been more horrible if she knew it might have been as simple as gun ports left open.

Fortunately, the book also included some modern reactions and a few discussion questions about the text. Was it a statement about the value of life, perhaps? The ship was misbegotten and top heavy, certainly, but did that detract from the Lady Vasa? Simply comparing costs, the expenses of building her were certainly more than rearing a child. Or perhaps it was some sort of commentary on politics or the government. Was it just an impassioned cry to investigate the real Vasa? From a certain angle, you could read the play as a story of governmental incompetence and imperial ambition killing innocent people. It was a small tragedy, but it was a tragedy regardless.

Perhaps there was another piece of information that might help a reader reach a conclusion. At the end of the book, there was a simple note: the author fled the country for the Commune, securing his freedom but sinking his play.

With some early notes taken, it was onto the next source: old science fiction. The Syndicalist relation with sci-fi was quite warm, historically, so it meant that there were a number of old periodicals you could peruse if you were cautious.

Alongside The Longshoremen of Mars and The Mill Grinds Slow, you would find something like the White Ships of Venus, a story that assumed the powers of Kansen would extend to vessels that flew through space. Sketches of tall, willowy women who seemed to take after the tower-like rockets they controlled…

Perhaps the most notable of those stories, at least for their studies, was simply entitled "The Navigator". It didn't even receive a promotion on the cover of the issue – it was taken up by some spacesuit-wearing hero fighting giant locusts on an alien planet – but it earned a reputation to overshadow the other stories in the issue.

They weaved between humming pipes and clicking machinery, a complex web of regulators and valves keeping the ship operating smoothly with almost no human intervention. Mandjet had no need to check with her eyes, not when she sensed the ship as her body, so the machinery was completely untouched. Some of the dials and gauges were covered in a layer of dust – there was no need to check, after all.

Two ladders later, they reached the astrogator's room, broad windows giving showing the barest hints of a rocky Martian horizon beneath the star-studded heaven. There were star charts and slide rules, a pair of sextants, reams of paper for calculation… and not a single man to work with it all.

"And where might we find your captain, Mandjet?"

"My captain?" She asked, dark red eyes alight with humor. "I have no captain, Monsieur. I chart my own course and plan my own expeditions. I've outgrown one."

Wasn't that a thought? Even now, Kansen hadn't truly outgrown the military. They could make something almost like a clean break, but they couldn't maintain control of their ship and go out on their own. Admittedly, they wouldn't be able to get very far without the logistics to back them up, and wisdom cubes hadn't been used on simple trade vessels…

The titular navigator – named Wandjet for the sun barque the Egyptian god Ra rode across the sky – charted her course across the sky on her lonesome. Perhaps she had to get some help from the stevedores when she landed on some foreign planet, but she was free. No captain commanded her, no passenger came on without an invitation… not even the bonds of gravity could keep her down.

There were some hints that she was part of some sort of club of equally free and cultured Kansen, but even discounting that one gained the impression that she was in some sense apart. When she met with a patrol ship – because what sort of space tale wouldn't have pirates and those who hunted them – she had a rapid-fire conversation with one L'Audacieux, throwing around random slang that the author seemed to have just made up. One gained the impression that the author thought that Kansen might, with time, evolve into their own sort of culture.

Imagining a bright future for the Kansen was all well and good, but some people were looking for stories centering on them at the moment. Whether that moment was mere months after the reveal or the modern day, it didn't particularly matter, but that desire was especially strong when works on the Kansen were limited. Ask your buddy in the Navy or read the tabloids and hope that both weren't giving you the runaround.

Governments tried to control information about Kansen, but that only led to a vacuum that needed to be filled. Some of these were honest accounts from men who had served along Kansen describing figures like the virtuoso Frederich der Grosse or the sweet Bayern. The cat was out of the bag, so the government permitted it, but some of the finer details were scrubbed out by the mighty censorship apparatus of the Kaiserreich.

The government would keep a very careful eye on anyone who wrote one of those tell-all books after an officer snuck to the French Commune through Switzerland and wrote an infamous number called The She-Devil Hindenburg. The government hadn't managed to hide the horns, but they had managed to hide the attitude, to some extent. The Kaiserreich proved itself willing to squeeze the press to defend the character of their ships… a tendency that led to rumors, even as they turned sterling Seydlitz into a show horse.

Unfortunately for the poor, overworked censors of the German Empire, they weren't just hunting down books that impugned the character of figures like Bremse, Brummer, and Graudenz. Well, perhaps they impugned them in one sense, but some people might have found them flattering, in a different sort of way.

Graudenz smiled like a lion, restless and hungry – "Ah, kochanie, what don't we have a little longer?"

Graudenz couldn't actually speak Polish, even if ships like Elbing and Posen could, but that wasn't the detail that made the book so troublesome. Despite efforts to control distribution, the book – and others like it – spread like wildfire. Perhaps the imperial government was right and there was a Communard effort to corrupt the image of German Kansen and pollute the minds of her people… or perhaps the average German man was curious about Kansen and also a little horny.

(There was an infamous incident where one such article came to the attention of a certain Regensburg. Shesaid something like: "One more word about my sister and I'll whip them raw!" The creative reader may be able to imagine what followed that comment, but this is left as an exercise for them.)

It wasn't as if Kansen couldn't do it or anything. The government made a tremendous occasion of Oldenburg's marriage to a dashing young nobleman, and if you were up to date on rumors, it was said that Kaiserin – also known as Augusta, to avoid any strange implications regarding her sister Kaiser – had found a man of her own… just not one so notable as Oldenburg's beau. For someone named for a member of the imperial family, she certainly married down…

Kaiser would endlessly complain about her sister's choice in spouse. Albert would ignore the complaints entirely, Luitpold would wish her sister well… and Fredrich would make some not-so-subtle hints about nieces and nephews to spoil.

The Empire would prefer it if Kansen played their roles as proper German women and kept all sex properly matrimonial and aimed towards babymaking, but not all of them fit into such tidy boxes. Of course, even normal German women didn't always fit into those tidy boxes, but the Empire had a special interest in controlling the Kansen.

What they couldn't always control was the image of Kansen, considering a famous incident involving hair dyed pink and the prostitutes of Bremen's Helenenstrasse…

If you weren't one for lurid descriptions – or if you just liked images better – then you could always turn to Glamour at Sea: A History of Kansen Modelling.