After Africa, work swallowed them again.
There was no gentle return to normal life—only schedules snapping tight, meetings multiplying, letters arriving in stacks, and the dull certainty that whatever Oskar had built in Cameroon would now have to survive without him.
For Oskar, "work" meant Königsberg.
Months at the headquarters of the First Corps—mud and drills, maps and firing ranges, lectures that began before sunrise and ended long after the light had died. He trained the men and trained himself beside them, not as a distant royal inspector but as a soldier-shaped problem the entire corps had to learn how to use.
Because the reorganization of the future Eighth Army was no longer a plan on paper.
It was underway.
And while he hardened the army, he drove the second machine that would reshape Germany from the inside: the police reforms Karl oversaw—under Oskar's direction, under his pressure, under his uncompromising insistence that "order" in a modern state required more than a baton and a moustache.
It began quietly.
Then one day people noticed a new sound on cobblestones:
engines.
Police vans and cars appeared in city after city—dark, practical, fast—rolling through neighborhoods that had never seen law arrive that quickly. Ash-black uniforms became common. Revolvers became standard, not luxury. Special units carried heavier weapons locked in cases, kept out of sight until needed.
And every station—every brick building with a desk and a few tired men—began changing into something else.
An armory.
Not grand. Not ceremonial.
Just stocked.
Because ammunition that did not exist when you needed it was the same as a weapon that did not fire.
Oskar insisted on one thing in particular, and it annoyed everyone at first:
head protection.
He did not want policemen walking around like soldiers in full helmets—Germany wasn't at war, and that sight would sour the streets. But he also knew how riots happened. Stones. Bottles. Clubs. The cheap violence that killed just as efficiently as bullets.
So the compromise became a new invention:
reinforced hats—civilian in silhouette, protective in truth.
Not enough to stop a rifle.
Enough to stop a rock from splitting a skull.
Germany was… tightening.
Not cruel.
Just prepared.
It was also rewarding.
Oskar had never forgotten the men who made his reforms possible.
So in the Ruhr Valley—in Hans Albrecht's hometown—a statue rose.
Not a king.
Not a general.
A worker.
Hans Albrecht—once a coal miner, once a man who should have been forgotten by history—stood cast in bronze with a pickaxe resting on his shoulder and safety gear strapped across his body like armor of the modern age. One hand held a helmet—not worn, but offered, as if passing it to whoever stood before him.
A simple message carved into metal:
A common man can rise.
And if he rises properly, he reaches back down.
Hans had won the lottery in 1904 and could have vanished into comfort.
Instead he built Albrecht Safety Works—helmets, goggles, kneepads, boots, gloves—tools that made workers harder to kill by accident, and therefore harder to treat as disposable.
Oskar made sure everyone understood what the statue meant.
Not wealth.
Usefulness.
And Hans was not meant to be the last.
Across parks and squares in Germany, Oskar began pushing a new kind of civic religion: modest statues honoring craftsmen, inventors, rescue workers, builders—ordinary people who had done something grand for society.
Not heroes of blood.
Heroes of daily life.
Meanwhile, Imperial Weapons Works kept accelerating.
Krupp's shadow lay over it like a mountain—metallurgy, discipline, contracts, machine halls that could turn ideas into steel fast enough to frighten ministers.
The Eighth Army was not yet fully equipped; the numbers were too vast, the supply chains too fresh.
But the estimates now carried confidence:
By the end of the year—or the next at the latest—the Eighth Army would be armed to the teeth.
And when it was finished, its firepower would not merely match the rest of the German Army.
It would embarrass it.
It would be unparalleled.
Perhaps even in the world.
All of it—the army, the police, the factories—felt like big history.
But the strangest part was how quietly Oskar had begun touching the smallest corners of daily life.
It happened without parades, without speeches.
A child's shoes that didn't fall apart in rain.
A bar of soap that didn't leave your hands stinking of lye.
A bottle that sealed properly.
A lottery ticket tucked into a pocket like a tiny prayer.
A sack of flour that arrived on time because rail schedules finally meant something.
A bar of chocolate—its cocoa grown in German Cameroon, harvested by free workers, refined and pressed in German factories—ending its journey in the palm of a German child walking home from school. Cheap enough that a tired mother didn't need to think twice.
Just a small sweetness, granted without strain.
Wherever people reached across a counter, there was a growing chance Oskar had been there first—if not in person, then in blueprint and policy. In steel and transport. In the quiet decisions that made goods move faster, cheaper, cleaner.
And once you noticed it, you couldn't unsee it.
Germany was still Germany—streets, churches, smoke, old men arguing about politics—
—but beneath it, another Germany was forming.
One that ran on schedules. Standards. Systems.
Oskar was ready to push further.
He began planning something he called Oskar's Warenhof—Oskar's Goods Court.
Not a single shop.
Not a warehouse.
A whole complex: a modern market under one roof, clean and warm, built like a court of commerce around a central hall. People would one day find a foreign word for it—something American or French and modern.
A shopping mall.
But Oskar was cautious—almost paranoid.
He did not want to crush craftsmen. He did not want a future where every loaf tasted the same, every coat was stitched badly, and every city became identical because "efficiency" had eaten everything human.
So he made one rule and treated it like scripture:
Within the central hall, Oskar's own market would sell only what did not require trust.
Only standardized goods—things that should be identical no matter who sold them. Flour. Soap. Nails. Lantern oil. Simple clothing. Basic tools. Household necessities—priced clearly, sold fairly, produced in volume.
No masterwork bread.
No hand-fitted boots.
No tailored suits.
No medicine mixed by a respected apothecary.
Anything that depended on skill, taste, reputation—
that remained the domain of specialists.
And he didn't tuck those specialists away like decoration.
He built the Warenhof around them.
Around the general goods hall—separate from it, deliberately so—individual shops would line the court like a ring of small kingdoms: bakers, butchers, tailors, cobblers, barbers, confectioners, apothecaries. Tradesmen whose work lived or died by the quality of their hands, not the volume of their sales.
A person could buy necessities quickly and cheaply…
…then step ten paces and buy something made with care.
But the Warenhof was never meant to be only a place to buy.
It was meant to be a place to exist.
Especially in winter, when streets turned to black slush and the wind made errands feel like punishment.
There would be clean public toilets—still rare enough to feel like magic. Benches and warm halls where people could sit without being chased away. Cafeterias where one could spend an hour over coffee or soup and not be treated like an intruder. Little corners where children could run while parents rested. Drinking fountains with clean, free water, because thirst should not be taxed.
Small comforts.
Small dignities.
Daily life made lighter—without being hollowed out.
For now, the experiment would exist only in Berlin and Potsdam.
One city of industry.
One city of court and tradition.
A controlled test—small enough to fail without bleeding the nation, large enough to prove the concept if it worked.
If it failed, it would fail quietly.
If it succeeded…
Germany's markets—and daily life itself—might never look the same again.
And while Oskar built machines of steel and systems of bread and law, the Kaiser quietly built something else.
Something that did not involve factories or rifles.
Something that would shake the Empire far beyond parade grounds and boardrooms.
Wilhelm worked in the shadows with Priest Arnold—the hidden architect behind the New Dawn movement—and together they prepared an answer to a question Germany had been pretending it could delay forever.
Oskar learned of it the usual way.
A summons.
One afternoon at First Corps headquarters in Königsberg, a courier arrived with sealed orders, stamped in black wax and imperial authority.
Return to Potsdam at once.
No reason given.
Only one additional line—written in a hand too careful to be casual:
Dress as for a ceremony.