Hat-tip to Paul di Filippo on this one.

Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2010).

Which Google Translate tells us is about this:

“By 1917, Lenin lived in exile in Switzerland, he was brought to Russia by the German Reich, in order to advance the revolution. But what if all this were not happening? If Lenin had remained in Switzerland and from there would have tried to build socialism? Christian Kracht has with “I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow,” wrote a dystopia, a science fiction novel, the basis in the past is rooted: the world is divided into individual blocks, the American double continent torn itself, Russia is uninhabitable, the socialist Switzerland fights for centuries against Fascist Germany. Middle of a thriller: A Commissioner shall inform Party in New Bern, a murder and pursued the suspect into the mountains, legendary in an Alpine fortress. Kracht know where to steal it, may the literary charged war reporting is reminiscent of Ernst Junger, the image of the mountain fortress comes from Dürrenmatt’s “The Winter War in Tibet,” the eternal war emerged in Orvell, “1984” on the dystopian thriller plot comes Richard Harris’ “Fatherland,” which also refers to Kracht’s early work “Fiber country.” At the end, tells stories and whispered and interpreted in the fog, giant stone vessels stand on northern Italian meadows, civilization disintegrates into a frightening peace, Switzerland is in the sense of the word to the black continent. Kracht has also namely Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is read, what he will do so, but you can not understand. “I’ll be here …” to read as a political commitment that does not work, the rescue is only a slow going insane. The horror, the horror.”

Typically fractured translated language, but you get the point: Lenin never leaves for Russia, Switzerland is a socialist republic fighting Nazi German for world domination. From the pen of a German.