As the year turned from 1905 to 1906, the bells of Berlin rang out across the frozen capital.
Their iron voices rolled over rooftops, across courtyards, through narrow alleys where chimney smoke curled like ghostly ribbons into the winter sky.
Above Unter den Linden, fireworks burst in brilliant sprays of red and gold, scattering sparks over the grand boulevard and flashing against the glittering glass of shopfronts. The air smelled of gunpowder, roasted chestnuts, and the crisp bite of deep winter.
Inside the royal palace, everything glittered.
Crystal chandeliers blazed overhead.
Orchestras played Strauss and Wagner.
Champagne flowed like rivers.
Nobles laughed too loudly at jokes no one found funny.
And Kaiser Wilhelm II, flushed with pride and drink, thundered toast after toast to the "glorious future of the German Empire," his mustache trembling with each proclamation.
It had indeed been a remarkable year for Germany:
Railways expanded.
Factories multiplied.
Exports surged.
The press was still churning out articles about the Fifth Prince — the mad, brilliant, unpredictable Oskar whose inventions had begun seeping into every corner of German life.
But most astonishing of all was the number now whispered everywhere:
> Prince Oskar von Preußen was the richest individual in all of Germany.
Richer than steel barons.
Richer than shipping magnates.
Richer, even, than some smaller monarchs of Europe.
And rumor said his Oskar Industrial Group was on pace to soon rival the economic output of entire German states, perhaps even the Empire itself if things continued as they did.
Naturally, everyone assumed that the strange prince — this myth in the making — would be at the center of tonight's New Year festivities:
Standing tall among the nobility,
smiling beneath the flashes of cameras,
with his beautiful women on each arm
and his three silver-haired children passed from hand to hand like living miracles.
That is what everyone expected.
Instead—
His family was there.
Karl was there.
Even the three babies, swaddled in velvet and guarded by the Eternal Guard, were there (and stealing attention from half the aristocracy).
But Oskar?
Oskar had vanished.
Again.
Just as he always did at these suffocating, ceremonial affairs.
No one knew where exactly he'd gone.
Some thought he was hiding in his workshop.
Some whispered he'd run off to inspect a factory.
A few maids giggled that he had simply gotten lost in the palace again.
But those who knew him best — Tanya, Anna, Karl, and perhaps even the Kaiser — all understood the truth:
> When the Empire demanded pageantry…
the Fifth Prince always slipped quietly into the night,
chasing the future instead of celebrating the present.
While royals and the wealthy celebrated under chandeliers, the New Year arrived very differently in most of Berlin.
On Linienstraße, in the eastern districts, gas lamps burned weakly through a haze of coal smoke. Snow and slush had been trampled into dirty ridges along the gutter. Far from the electric lights of Unter den Linden, one of Berlin's endless Mietskasernen—the "rental barracks" of the working class—loomed like a dark brick cliff.
Inside the narrow courtyard, laundry lines sagged between windows, their frozen cloth hanging stiff in the night air. In one corner, an outdoor toilet shed crouched like an afterthought, shared by six families on that floor alone. In summer, its stench was legendary. In winter, at least, the cold kept it mostly at bay.
On the third floor, in a single cramped room, lived the Reichert family.
The father was broad-shouldered, hands scarred and rough from years on construction sites. The mother's eyes were tired, her fingers still knitting even this late, squeezing one more bit of warmth out of the thin wool for the weeks ahead. Five children of different ages huddled together. In the furthest corner, the grandmother lay beneath a stack of faded blankets, coughing now and then.
The whole room was barely larger than a stable stall.
One tiny coal stove that barely warmed the air.
Two beds forcing all the children to share.
A cracked basin.
No bathroom.
No running water beyond the tap on the stair landing.
No privacy.
No silence.
Only the steady ache of being cold and poor.
The children were too cold to sleep. Their breath fogged faintly as they sat on the floor. Two little girls played with rag dolls improvised from scraps of cloth. Three boys played cards under a guttering candle. Somewhere in the distance, fireworks thumped, and faint cheers drifted from richer streets.
The mother paused her knitting and stirred the thin soup simmering on the stove. Its greatest virtue was its warmth. The father quietly polished his boots for the next day's shift, saying nothing.
Life was simple. Hard. Exactly as it had been the year before.
Exactly as it had been for their parents before them.
Nothing had changed for decades.
Nothing, so far as they knew, ever would.
Until—
BAM. BAM. BAM.
Heavy knocks shook the door in its frame.
The father shot to his feet. The mother froze. One of the girls whimpered. The grandmother whispered a short prayer.
"Nobody answer it," the father hissed, grabbing the fire poker. "No one comes at this hour unless they want money. Or trouble."
But the latch turned anyway.
The door swung inward.
A shadow filled the doorway.
A man so tall he had to duck to clear the frame stepped inside with slow, heavy movements. His shoulders nearly brushed the jambs. Cloaked from neck to boots in dark fabric, he swallowed the candlelight for a heartbeat.
Then he laughed — a deep "Ho. Ho. Ho?" that sounded more like a growl than something from a children's tale.
The father raised the poker. "Stay back! Who are you? What d'you—"
The giant stepped fully into the room.
He had to lower his head to avoid the ceiling beam. He turned sideways so as not to hit the stove. The candle finally reached his face.
The mother gasped.
The children squealed and scrambled backward.
The father dropped the poker.
The grandmother shot upright, eyes wide.
"Y–Your Highness…?" the father stammered.
The massive figure smiled—warm, almost shy.
Prince Oskar of Prussia stood in their miserable little room, a huge burlap sack slung over his shoulder like a suspiciously muscular, all-black Santa Claus.
He gave them a small wave.
"Good evening, my people," he said. "Happy New Year."
The Reicherts stared at him as if he might vanish if they blinked.
Oskar eased the sack down with a heavy thump. It was almost as wide as he was, stuffed so full it bulged like a small hill. The floorboards groaned under it.
"I'm doing a bit of… ah… princely field study," he said, as if he were out on a scientific expedition and not invading a tenement at midnight. "I wanted to see how my people live. And maybe deliver a few presents. Think of me as a very large, extremely handsome, overly muscular Santa Claus."
The youngest boy let out a delighted little squeak.
The mother tried to curtsy and nearly lost her balance. The father tried to bow and stumbled into a stool. The grandmother's eyes filled with tears.
Oskar opened the sack and pulled out a wrapped loaf of fresh bread, then a paper bundle of sausages, then a sealed bottle of milk, a bar of chocolate, a tiny carved toy soldier, and two pudgy teddy bears with painted top hats.
In a moment he'd laid them out on the rickety table.
"Here," Oskar said, handing the bread and sausages to the father. "A New Year's gift from the Fifth Prince. Eat well. Grow strong. And—" he sniffed the cold air, wrinkling his nose slightly— "we will also need to talk about better heating. And plumbing. And perhaps bathtubs that aren't a once-a-month luxury."
The father flushed, torn between shame and gratitude.
The mother bit her lip, then burst into quiet tears as she accepted the bread, hands trembling.
The children stared at the food as if treasure had fallen from heaven.
Oskar crouched, his massive frame folding down surprisingly gently, and reached out to ruffle the youngest girl's hair.
"Be good, little one," he said softly. "Germany is changing. I promise you'll grow up in a better one than your parents did."
He straightened up—almost brushing the ceiling—and moved back toward the door.
Before leaving, he turned again, more serious now.
"In the sack, there's a card," he said. "Karl Bergmann's name is on it. He's my right hand. Go to him when the holidays pass and ask about Volksbau—the People's Building Company. We're going to build better homes for families like yours. I want you to be among the first to sign up. For now… I should visit your neighbors. I hear several of them also work in construction."
He gave them a final nod, then ducked back through the doorway and disappeared into the stairwell.
The door closed with a quiet click.
For a few seconds, no one moved.
Then the smallest child shrieked, "MAMA! IT WAS HIM! THE REAL PRINCE!"
The mother began laughing through her tears. The father wiped his eyes with a rough hand and went to the sack, pulling out a small, stiff card. On it was printed:
> Karl Bergmann
Oskar Industrial Group
Volksbau – People's Homes for the Future
On the back, in Oskar's neat handwriting, was a line:
> "Guaranteed work. Better housing. Come and see."
The father's jaw dropped.
The grandmother whispered hoarsely, "He was like an angel…"
Outside, distant bells rang the last minutes of the old year.
Inside, for the Reicherts, something long buried flickered painfully back to life:
Hope.
Down in the courtyard, Oskar trudged toward the next tenement stairwell, sack slung over his shoulder, breath steaming in the cold night air.
He could not shake the image of the Reichert room.
The chill that bit through the thin walls.
The damp in the corners.
The overcrowding.
The outdoor toilet shared by too many.
The old grandmother coughing beneath threadbare blankets.
Children too cold to sleep in the middle of a European capital.
No, he thought. This won't do.
Not in my Germany.
He'd always known, in theory, how the working class lived.
Karl had told him.
Reports had crossed his desk.
He'd seen photographs in pamphlets and newspapers.
But standing in it—smelling it, feeling his own lungs burn from the damp chill, seeing children shiver a few streets away from the royal palace—that was different.
The modern part of his mind — the man who had once lived in China, seen cramped but functional apartments with electricity, running water, toilets, a refrigerator, maybe even a washing machine — rebelled against what he'd just seen.
Germany was rich in coal and iron.
It had some of the best engineers in the world.
Its workers were disciplined, skilled, hungry for better lives.
And yet its poorest families still lived like this.
Like livestock penned in brick boxes.
Unacceptable.
He wasn't trying to make the world "equal." He had no illusions about that. There would always be rich and poor. But Germany, at least, would become a place where even a poor family could live like human beings — with light, warmth, water, privacy, and a chance to climb higher.
By the time he had finished the rounds of that building and the next one—delivering food, asking quiet questions about wages and rent, listening more than he spoke—his mind had already hammered the night's impressions into something sharper.
A plan for 1906.
A three-point plan:
1. Volksbau — building real homes for ordinary Germans.
Not palaces. Not villas.
Solid, clean, warm apartments with toilets, baths, and decent air.
2. Power for homes — electricity, heating, and water properly piped and distributed.
Not just for factories and boulevards, but for stairwells and kitchens and bedrooms.
3. A symbol — something to rally people, to make them dream bigger.
A figure in a cape, perhaps, in a new kind of publication for children and adults alike —
a story about a hero who protects the weak, teaches first aid, builds homes, fights fires and disasters instead of villains.
The world's first true comic book not about fantasy, but about what people could become.
He smiled to himself in the dark.
Highways would come. Cars would come. Tanks would come. War would come.
But first?
He would give his people homes.
And a story worth believing in.