World of Rosencraft

“He’s making this country into the best machine he can,” goes the upbeat, silvery refrain sounded thousands of times a day on trains, trams, and television sets across the country. And speaking of trains (and speaking of across the country!), a network of maglev tracks, vaguely late Victorian in appearance, crisscrosses the landscape, its trains running perfectly on time as they barrel from city to city.

“Craft!” whispers another, smaller voice from your corner lamppost, giving testimony to a national ethos whose name, shared with the currency, derives from the suffix of the president’s surname. Not quite president, but “director,” he reminds foreign correspondents. That was his title when the family business acquired the hard-hit national government on December 31, 1996, and as far as he’s concerned, nothing has changed.

This is Friedland, an industrial North Atlantic island nation of about 20,000,000—Anglo-American enough to be keenly familiar but German enough to have excellent railways and a trade surplus. Its technocratic director, Rosencraft, 49, is a vigorous, black-haired devil of a manager—known for his unique synthesis of machine efficiency and ubiquitous personality. He is neither liberal nor conservative, neither parochial nor universalistic. If he has a given name, it is neither here nor there. He just works.

I could tell you many more things about fictitious Friedland and its singular leader (not Guildenstern’s companion, but CRAFT!), because my roommate and I invented the whole system out on the MAC quad one unusually cold April night our sophomore year. Too old and too world-aware to waste our time on political escapism, you might be thinking. To that, I respond that the world of Rosencraft is a passing mode, not an obsession; the butt of jokes, rather than the object of role-play.

But most importantly, I submit that my exercise in political [dys/u]topia is exactly the kind of act of “applied imagination” that a student of history, politics, and culture should be engaging in—infinitely more stimulating and attention-sustaining than Facebook or Gawker, while less time-consuming than writing a political novel. Friedland brims not only with productivity, but with much of what we’ve learned over the last few years about industrialization, managerial progressivism, fascist aesthetics, and the role of institutions in development.

Let me now continue to tell you about this strange republic of craft. In the late 17th century, it was settled by German craftsmen from the Electorate of Hanover, who intermarried with the natives and shaped the countryside in the image of their Teutonic homeland. Over the course of the personal union of the principality with Great Britain under the House of Hanover, Friedland (peaceful land) filled up with British and Irish immigrants, prompting London’s formal annexation of the large island in 1837. Half a century later, Friedland was fully independent – having successfully rebelled against Britain’s mercantilist efforts to tamp down its industrial spirit and transform it into a producer of raw materials.

It is the sort of country that breeds men like Rosencraft: salty, iconoclastic, no-frills. (And I mean no frills: lace and ruffles of all kinds have been banned in Friedland for as long as anyone can remember; memorable photos show immigration inspectors in Luneburg harbor snipping the lace trim off an Irish toddler’s little dress.) He has the same regard for electoral democracy, Enlightenment ideals, and hoarded wealth as he does for lace trim, and yet manages through managerial competency to post consistent growth numbers, enviable educational statistics, and a Scandinavian-quality Gini coefficient.

Citizens were initially suspicious when Rosencorp, the manufacturing giant founded by Rosencraft’s father, Hermann, acquired Friedland’s indebted government on the eve of 1997. However, he has managed since to win at the polls by Baathist margins—accomplished in part by Baathist volumes of beatific (and somewhat steampunk) propaganda, but made possible primarily by his benign, hands-on habit of appearing weekly as a guest on Night Sky to announce revisions to the train schedules and to Get Frank (“I’ll be frank!” he avers, hand cutting measuredly through the air, kicked back, black socks exposed) about tough issues. He is part Cory Booker and part Lee Kuan Yew.

He's compensating for something, of course. You see, when Hermann and Ingrid Rosencraft weren’t busy running Rosencorp and entertaining notables, they were busy getting drunk off white wine and laughing heartily on the deck of their mountain chateau, where their son dimly remembers being left to his own devices with some plain beige building blocks. He would build and rearrange and build some more, and practice his radio voice—oh, if someone would just hear him! Deeply embittered by these memories, he raises his two teenage daughters and his one grown-up country to be tough and to be heard.

Open your government textbook and listen close enough: You can almost hear them.

Joshua B. Lipson ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Lipson.