When My Mother met Hitler, by Leslie Wilson

I don't have a photo of my mother as a teenager, but here she is
aged 20.

Gerda, my mother, was the daughter of a police officer, born in Germany, but living in Graz, Austria, where my grandfather had been posted at the Anschluss. She had a mother who suffered from depression, (though at this time my grandmother had only had one nervous breakdown, after months of persecution when my grandfather was in danger of losing not only his job, but his life.)

My grandmother disliked and feared the Nazis, which my mother understood as 'some kind of phobia connected with Hitler', and knew she had to be careful about mentioning him to her mother, for fear she should become ill again.

My grandmother after her first nervous breakdown

My grandfather had been reinstated in his job, largely because my grandmother had put on her best clothes and gone to plead for him with a high official who had fixed things in Berlin, as the documents I have seen confirm. He was doing well in his career now, but he was reticent about Hitler. Sometimes Gerda tried to ask him questions about the Führer, but he was non-commital and changed the subject.

It wasn't safe to tell your children how you felt. They might, quite innocently, say something at school, and the teachers might pass it on. My grandfather had decided to go along with a system he detested and he had to be very careful. 'I could have resisted,' he told my mother years later, 'but I thought about you and your mother.' If he had been taken to concentration camp and murdered there, there would have been no state money for them. They would have been left to the charity of relatives.

It was just before the outbreak of war, when Gerda was thirteen or fourteen, that Hitler visited Graz. She wrote: 'Everywhere I see pictures of Hitler surrounded by cheering crowds, ecstatic adoring youngsters, and I am beginning to envy those to whom he speaks.' Meanwhile, flags and banners adorned with swastikas and 'EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER,' began to appear everywhere. It was only a year since Austria had been 'taken home into the Reich', to widespread jubilation, and now the Führer was coming in person. 'Excitement,' my mother wrote, 'grows to fever pitch.'

Graz in the Forties

And then she discovered the ecstatic truth. She had been chosen to be among those who met Hitler! She lay awake in her excitement, and was worried to see the next morning, that her mother looked pale and ill. Maybe it was the fact that the man she really regarded as Antichrist was coming to the city that filled my grandmother with horror. But she only went to lie down, so my mother was free to escape from the apartment, feeling slightly guilty, and run to the place where the schoolgirls were waiting for the Führer. 'Then,' she wrote, 'the intolerable waiting starts.'

Why did they choose my mother, the daughter of a man with a shadow in his past and a mother who had a psychological illness - which was bad news in the Nazi period? She wasn't even a member of the German Girls' League. She had joined at first, but had quickly left because she found it boring and annoying: 'Too much standing around for hours so you could form a swastika when some important person flew over,' she told me. She also said her teacher told her the family would lose their ration book if she left the League, but she did anyway, and the family did kept the ration book.
Gerda was probably chosen because she was a pretty girl with blonde hair. She looked like the Aryan ideal.

My mother's ID card from 1943. A typical
bad id document photo!

My mother described the roar of cheering as Hitler's motorcade approached them: 'Throats are choked with excitement, eyes blinded by tears of emotion; in a delirium of joy and happiness hands are raised to jubilant heights in the Hitler salute. At this instant everyone present feels that this is the moment in history to be talked about to children and grandchildren for years to come.

'Then, as in the close-up of a film, everything fades and there is only a fair-skinned face, a wing of fine dark hair falling across a broad forehead, the compelling gaze of hypnotic blue eyes, the firm grip of his hand, a flash of gold as he laughs at something I have said in reply to his question, something to do with school, I think. I am aware of my madly-pumping heart and the blood roaring in my ears when he smiles kindly, pats my cheek and moves on to the next child in line.'

Photograph: German Federal archive via Wikimedia Commons,
clipped by me. 

Afterwards, she wrote: 'the memory of the brief moment when I was actually speaking to the Führer, an event so momentous that it almost seems like a dream, makes all else pale into insignificance.'

Re-reading her account of the meeting takes me right to the heart of the German and Austrian experience of the mass Nazi event, something so powerful and adrenaline-fuelled that it would sweep you away even if you weren't one of the favoured ones. I remember seeing a TV programme about Jews who survived Nazism by hiding; one of them, in Berlin, would go to Nazi events because you were safer in a crowd, and he said he'd so often wished they had let him be part of it, it had felt so marvellous.

And Hitler had charm - though the gold tooth is less appealing. In those days it wasn't as off-putting as it would be now. Hitler was good with children. You can see that charm in some old videos - I have never liked to see it, I don't want to be beguiled by him even for a second, and yet if one doesn't see it, how can one understand his success?

I had to let myself feel it when I wrote, in Saving Rafael, about Jenny going to see Hitler with her school, and even though she and her family hated him and she was far more aware than my mother, she too was caught up in the mass experience, a communal high that was temporarily irresistible.

My mother did tell me about it, and about Hitler's intensely blue eyes, when I was a child - but it was a different kind of telling than she or anyone else had dreamed of on that day. Now Hitler had been exposed as exactly what my grandmother always knew he was, the quintessence of evil, though she had been accused of phobia and mania for doing so.


Shadow of War, by Gerda Erika Baker, Lion publishing, 1990

WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM? by Jane Borodale

What is writing like? Someone asked me this the other day and I’d honestly struggled to provide a decent answer. What does it actually feel like, on the whole, the act of being engaged in writing?

Button and hat-cord maker, Nurnberg, 1669

Later that week I was on a train heading eastwards with a pile of scribbles that I was trying to cohere into a short story, (at least once the crazy lady with plants in the luggage rack had got off at Romsey). The scribbles, so far, seemed to be amounting to the right kind of atmosphere, they sketched out a proper length and I could almost picture the arc of their finishedness neatly ahead of me. Now it was time to gather together the moment of crystallisation, or punctuation note, which I’d already planned quite a while ago on another piece of paper. I read through that, and thought it might work best as dialogue, straight from the voice. My biro marked out some arrows to help me remember what I’d decided. I drew a snail in the margin. But still something was missing. It became horribly clear that I needed a sub-moment; that in fact nothing was done and it would all have to be reworked if it was to work at all, to hang properly. But what was the missing thing? I read it through a few more times and the lacuna gaped at me all the way past Havant, getting larger and larger until it ate up the point of the scribbles. There was nothing in my head for that bit, nothing at all. The last of my coffee got cold, the fields outside slid by.

Suddenly a man moving along the aisle let out a loud, startling grunt and bent over to pick up something from the carpet right by my seat. ‘I need one of those!’ he shouted, delightedly, to anyone that had no iPod in their ears, and held up a white button in the air like a little trophy.

And at that moment I was struck by how writing is so often like that - always waiting for that lucky button to appear. At first it’s all about laying down the groundwork, preparing, limbering up with thousands of words, and then it’s just a wait for the right thing to come from nowhere, when you least expect it, like heading back from the buffet car in that jacket that doesn’t button up anymore.

Of course – what you come across might not be quite the right shade or size, but it might be useful. Some days there’ll be some kind of button, some there won’t, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last few years it’s that you have to be looking, looking all the time, scribbling with the pen, staying alert. It’s not the camera that will steal your soul – it’s novelists. Novelists would steal any aspect of your life if it were interesting enough or relevant enough to whatever they’re currently doing – they’re out there, waiting to pounce on any fragment the unwary might let slip, to use straightaway or to save for later. There should be signage on trains like there is for pickpockets; Novelists operate in this area. Next time the person beside you is furtively scribbling something down – beware.

Jane Borodale’s novel 'The Knot' is currently out in hardback. She is working on her third. Her website is www.janeborodale.com

Circle of Shadows and Gengenbach by Imogen Robertson

Circle of Shadows is due out in paperback tomorrow, and as the novel is set in Germany that gives me a chance to talk about what a wonderful place Baden-Württemberg is to spend time. For those of you who don’t know it, please do put it on your ‘to visit’ list at once. The scenery is magnificent and the whole region is packed with enough castles, cathedrals and museums to satisfy the most committed of culture hounds. My partner Ned and I spent some blissful busy weeks there and can’t wait to go back.

Ned helping with the research

I spend a lot of time researching my novels in various libraries, for Circle the excellent library at the German Historical Institute of London was particularly useful, but nothing beats walking the ground. I like doing the walking research as soon as possible after I’ve started working on a book. That way I can fold in all those memories into my plans and be open to inspiration before I have a plot too fixed in my head. Wow, that sounds pretentious. It’s often also a good excuse for a holiday once the last novel is put to bed! 

So I went to Germany with Ned, a notebook and a rough idea of where my novel might take place and when, but that was about it. We went to Freiburg, and Karlsruhe to look at palaces and museums and out of Baden-Württemberg a little way to see Trier and Speyer, both ancient and beautiful cities. Going to Gengenbach was a chance to walk in the Black Forest and get a feel of a smaller town. When we arrived I had no idea how important it was going to be in the finished novel. 

Gengenbach Town Hall

Gengenbach was made a free city in the 14th century, almost completely destroyed at the end of the 17th during the Nine Years’ War, then rebuilt in the 18th century so it is to that period (luckily enough for me) that you feel you are returning to when you visit. The magnificent town hall was built in 1784, the year before Circle of Shadows takes place and is now made into a huge advent calendar every year to coincide with their Christmas Market.

When Ned and I visited we fell for it completely; me with the half-timbering and Ned with the beautiful blonde in traditional dress who brought us our beers. We walked in the woods and peered at the buildings, but it was finding in Gengenbach the Museum of Fools which made it so important to the finished book. The Shrovetide carnivals of misrule are a long standing tradition in this part of Germany and involve parades were inhabitants dress up in elaborate masks and costumes, often mocking their rulers or officials. You can see some of the photographs of the festival in Gengenbach here, including the wonderful and terrifying masks. 

I was fascinated by the masks, and standing in front of the town hall imagining that torch-lit pagan procession gave me the start of the book. A young Englishman, Daniel Clode, visiting the area in 1785 and watching the parade suddenly finds himself confused and afraid. For him the people in costumes are replaced with real demons and witches. He goes missing and is found some hours later by his friends in a locked room, his wrists cut and the murdered body of a young woman alongside him. She is a favourite of the ruling Duke and Daniel has no memory of what has happened or how he came to be there. Things looks very black for him indeed… So there between the beer, the walk and the museum of fools I found my novel. And if you’re curious to find out what happens to the young Englishman next, well, I did mention the paperback is due out tomorrow, didn’t I? 

Andreas Praefcke's shot of Hopfennarr Veranstaltung:
Narrensprung beim Narrentreffen in nearby Meßkirch

'Finding the Words' by A L Berridge

I had one of those bad writing days yesterday. The kind when you spend an hour struggling to perfect a single paragraph, then ‘read it back at a run’ and have your eyes pop out with horror when you see how ghastly it is. The kind, in fact, that historical writers are never supposed to mention. 

Shutterstock, not me. Trust me, it's prettier.

I don’t know why we’re not. Authors of contemporary novels blog about writing all the time, but historical novelists tend to talk about only one thing – history. Even here on ‘The History Girls’ we usually discuss research, re-enactment, historical field trips, all the really labour-intensive stuff we do before sitting down at our computers and letting a novel ooze effortlessly out from our fingertips.

Well, I’m going to break ranks and admit that mine doesn’t always ooze. Sometimes it trickles. Sometimes it coagulates into a sticky clay mass that forms hideous faces to jeer at me. Sometimes I look around at the wonderful writers on this blog and think with shame that I shouldn’t be here at all.

All writers do that sometimes (don’t they?) but it's not something we discuss in historical forums. Research is what sets us apart, research and history – the writing is the same as in any other genre, so why should we bother talking about that?

But it’s not the same, it’s nothing like the same, and I'd argue the writing is even harder than in contemporary novels. It’s true we share the same concerns with storytelling, pacing, characterisation and narrative drive, it’s true we need the same ‘writing tools’ to start with – but the first thing you do when writing historical fiction is throw half of them away. Half your modern understanding of how things (and people) work, half your modern perspective, half your knowledge of the very time you’re writing about – and half of your precious, hard-won vocabulary. If this is a fight, the historical novelist starts it with one hand tied behind her back.

Historical words. Sometimes even reading is difficult...

The words are the thing. Those black squiggly creatures we need to nail to a white screen to make them tell the story we need to tell. Even if a historical writer has decided to ‘translate’ her work into modern English, half her vocabulary will still be useless because it refers to things for which there wasn’t even a concept, let alone a word. True, we don’t need words for computers or telephones or radios before such things existed – but what about those phenomena that have been around and observed long before we ever had words for them?

Here’s a tiny example from my current novel. A wounded soldier is being tended in a freezing cave, and when his friends peel off his woollen ‘Balaklava’ helmet, his wispy grey hair behaves just as we’d expect it to. A modern reader needs only one of the words ‘static’ or ‘electricity’ to know exactly what I’m talking about – but in 1855 my characters can’t use either of them. All right, that’s a good ‘writerly’ challenge, and I duly come up with a detailed description – but in doing so I’ve given a fleeting image an importance wholly disproportionate to what’s going on. There’s a risk that the reader will stop and think, and I want him to move on with the story. There’s an even worse danger that my ‘point-of-view’ hero will seem more interested in a physical peculiarity than in the fact his friend may be dying. So what do I do?

The problem’s everywhere. Even common internal sensations can be tricky when we're not allowed to know about simple chemicals like adrenaline. I try telling myself that's good, that it's better to ‘show, not tell’, but there’s a limit to the amount of ‘showing’ we can do before the action grinds to a horrible halt. My first draft of the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’ dealt with three characters facing imminent death for the first time, and there was so much sweating, heart-thumping and stomach churning in the first five minutes they looked ready for the ambulance before ever facing the guns.

Everywhere. Artistic concepts like ‘surreal’, retail terms like ‘wholesale’, technical phrases like ‘crossed wires’ – all out. Psychiatric concepts – no-one can be ‘obsessed’ or ‘fixated’ or even ‘have a thing’ about something, even if I know they damn well do. Computers alone have given us so many useful phrases it’s hard to work out how we once managed without them. I’m old enough to remember when we talked about putting on different ‘hats’ rather than working in different ‘modes’, but I still struggled for nearly ten minutes with the idea of a man trying to ‘process’ his feelings before I came up with the sentence ‘She was hitting him with so many emotions at once he could no longer fathom his own.’

Not great, perhaps, but ultimately I think it’s better. ‘Fathom’ is a lovely word, plumbing the depths, digging down through the layers – it’s much more evocative than ‘process’. Modern language may be full of useful words it’s hard to replace, but there’s a soulless quality to them I’m never sorry to lose. Many are little more than a glib shorthand to save us the effort of thinking what we really mean. Writing historical fiction forces us to look at everything with fresh eyes, as if we are seeing it for the first time. 

All well and good – until we have to communicate it. When there’s an ‘old’ word like ‘fathom’ to do it, then we’re home and dry, but when there isn’t we often have to resort to imagery. That's what I did in the end with my old man's electric hair - I let it crackle and 'float about the lined forehead like torn cobwebs’. Unchanging nature is still the best way to make the unfamiliar familiar – which is why historical fiction is often so bung full of ‘natural world’ imagery as to make Thomas Hardy look positively industrial. 

The problem comes when the natural world is silent. Human invention and behaviour are both complex, and unfortunately not everything can be explained in terms of sun, moon, stars, earth, water, fire, plants, animals and bloody birds. When that happens we have to hunt for other things that will be meaningful to the modern reader but still within the grasp of a protagonist who lived centuries ago. 

It can be done. Writers like fellow History Girl M.C. Scott deal with the Roman world, but in ‘The Eagle of the Twelfth’ we find men with ‘cheekbones jutting sharp as bridges’, blades ‘held forward like clubs’, and slaughter with the ‘dance-like elegance of a mummery made for our entertainment’. It can be done and done brilliantly.

When we’re ‘in the zone’, it can even seem easy. I haven’t had to worry much about the unfamiliar in the Crimea (mud and trenches are well enough known through WWI) but even in my 17th century Chevalier novels I didn't have to look far to find the simile for my hero being goaded by a crowd of men ‘like a bear at a fair’. 

When we do this we’re almost defeating the purpose of imagery, using the unfamiliar to describe the even less familiar, but when we’re behind our characters’ eyes it just somehow happens. In ‘In the Name of the King’ I had the character of Jacques confronted for the first time by a firework rocket, but I was ‘in his skin’ at the time and knew exactly what it looked like. The image that sprang into my mind was this:

Chateau at Lucheux - Wikipedia Commons

That’s the chateau at Lucheux which Jacques would have seen in the distance every day of his boyhood. The modern reader won’t necessarily know that, but he’ll know what a cone is, he knows what a firework is, and even if he’s never seen 17th century French architecture I’m hoping that ‘a pointed cap like the cones on the roof of the chateau at Lucheux’  will give him enough to join the dots.

I hope. That’s what it’s like when it works, when we’re really ‘in period’ and don’t have to ‘translate’ modern ideas into their 17th or 19th century equivalents. When it works, we’re seeing things as our characters do and conveying them as our characters would, and for me there is nothing more satisfying and exhilarating.

When it works. I’m not complaining at what we have to do – I think both our perception and our writing are better for it. I'm only saying that I sometimes find it hard, and really hope I'm not the only one.

And I think it’s going to get harder for the next generation. It’s only when we start to write historical fiction that we realize how fast our language has changed in the last sixty years. William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ (1954) hardly uses a word that couldn’t have been spoken in my Crimean world of exactly a hundred years before – but how many books written in 2012 could have been easily understood by a passenger on the Titanic? 

And the gap is growing. My own childhood was filled with books written long before I was born: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (1865); Beatrix Potter (1902); ‘The Just So Stories’ (1902); ‘The Railway Children’ (1906); ‘The Secret Garden’ (1910). Like most children I knew, I was familiar with Victorian and Edwardian English long before I picked up ‘Jane Eyre’ at the age of nine. Is this still true of children now? How long before even ‘Great Expectations’ has to be taught with footnotes, as Shakespeare is today?

Inkwell dug up near British HQ in the Crimea

The past is slipping away from us. I’m now old enough to see it, to watch as experiences from my youth crystallize and freeze into history. I’m not ancient, but I remember those first writing lessons with pen and ink when we dipped the scratchy nib into an ink-well in the desk that was usually half-full of pencil shavings. A few weeks ago I was writing a scene when a Crimean officer was writing a report, and had to consciously remind myself to describe those things I remember so well: the clink-clink-clink of pen against ink well, the shaking to remove the drops, the careful application of blotting paper afterwards. Time’s whirligig has brought in its revenges rather quicker than it used, and my childhood is now history.

So be it then. That is sometimes our job, to write about the strange as if it is familiar, and the familiar as if it is strange. We must be the translators, the guides who hold the door open to the past and allow the reader to re-enter a lost world - and the only tools we have to do it are our words.

That’s why writing historical fiction is hard. Definitely not because I’m rubbish. Not at all.

Or then again, maybe I’ve just had a bad day.

***

A.L. Berridge's website

Manuscripts and The Master and Margarita: by Theresa Breslin

It was one of those never-to-be forgotten experiences.

As a writer who is also a librarian I’m always interested, when in different countries, to visit their libraries. Recently, on the Russian leg of the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference with Melvin Burgess and Tibor Fischer, I’d asked if it was possible to see around the Russian State Library in Moscow. I expected a quick tour of various departments. Instead what Melvin and I were treated to was a privileged glimpse of the archives and special collections.

 

Dwarfed by the massive statue of Dostoyevsky we made our way with our British Council escort to meet the librarian and archivist, our charming hosts for the afternoon. We were led through a maze of corridors, across an open courtyard to a separate building where they’d laid some exhibits out for us.

 First up was a stunning bound illuminated manuscript, with colours from natural dyes still vibrant after hundreds of years.

Some manuscript leaves from a writer of later date were next. There were pages of pre-typewriter elegant ink script, with scoring out of text and corrections inserted. Empathy flowed from us. But who could this be? Which famous Russian writer? 

Leaning closer we could distinguish the words ‘Brothers Karamazov’ Dostoyevsky’s own writing! 

The archivist then picked a green covered exercise book and laid it before us. 

We literally gasped when we realised it was a handwritten version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, ‘The Master and Margarita.’ 

It was an exceptional day. We left, dizzy with delight.

Our trip took us further east - four hours flight plus four hours time difference - to land in the pale yellow and lilac light of a Siberian winter morning. Beautiful clear air and a mesmerising twinkle from the ground’s frosty sheen. Mild snowfall, but it wasn’t that cold, honestly, (and I’m not just saying that because I’m a Scot) A myriad of things done and seen and shared, and then, on our last night, something happens, one of number of things which I’m starting to call a Siberian Serendipity moment.

We’re invited to a ‘Night at the Museum’ – a very innovative idea here - when the public have free late night access to the Krasnoyarsk Cultural and Historical Museum Complex. Wandering through some amazing exhibits in one of the galleries we come across a painting. Ahh! The artist has chosen to illustrate scenes from a book. I’ll leave you to guess which one….       

 

More info:

http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/     http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor  

Twitter: @theresabreslin1 

Spy for the Queen of Scots is nominated for the Carnegie Medal and an Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales   illustrated by Kate Leiper is nominated for the Greenaway Medal.

An interactive session on Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales with illustrator Kate Leiper is scheduled for Tuesday 27^th November, Rothes Hall, Fife.  

In conjunction with the Citizens Theatre and South Lanarkshire schools the Divided City musical will be produced at Hamilton Town House Theatre in February 2013.