Book Club Guide for 'Girl in a Smart Uniform'

 

1.      One of my aims with the Schellberg Cycle has been to explore how Germans could have ended up behaving as they did in the 1930s and in at the time of World War II. I have a lot of German friends, my age, and they're decent people. And so are their parents. Does this novel shed any light on that period for you?

2.      Why do you think Bear is so different form his brother?

3.      Why did Gisela and other German girls like her feel so proud of her BDM uniform?

4.      What have you learnt about the BDM by reading this novel? Have you found out more since? Do you think if you had been living in Nazi German you would have like to join? Why or why not? Does it compare with our guiding and scouting movement?

5.      What must it have been like for Gisela's father, having to leave the family home?

6.      The Nazi society labelled both Gisela and her younger brother as impure, defective. Is this something we need to worry about today?

7.      Apart from the main character, do you have a favourite character in the novel?

8.      I first wrote this as a close third person narrative. I then switched to first person.  Do you think it worked?

9.      What do you make of Trudi? How does she change? What makes her change?

10.  Eberhard (Bear) has about fifty pages to himself. Doe this change of point of view work?     

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Nazi Germany and the Daleks

Some may find it surprising that Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator was released in 1940. In the film that Chaplin also directed, he plays the parts of a Jewish barber suffering from memory loss and Adenoid Hynkel, the great dictator, who is very friendly with Benzino  Naplaoni. Hynkel and the barber manage to swap roles.    

The film became Chaplin's greatest financial success.

Hynkel's speech at the end could fill us all with hope, even today. However, even though he sends a positive message, his tone is similar to Hitler's at the Nuremberg rallies.

This was also Chaplin's first film with dialogue. 

My character becomes dissatisfied with just making fun of Hitler. She realises they must show his evil side as well. So, she exaggerates the near hysteria that is both Chaplin's speech and in Hitler's ones at the rallies. She begins to sound like a Dalek. The early Daleks' sink plungers were used almost like a Nazi salute. They use that same hysterical voice as Hitler  and Chaplin in their 'Exterminate. Exterminate.' Gabriela uses this in her scene.

Terry Nation, the first writer of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, based the Daleks on the Nazis. Nation died twenty-five years ago and grew up in the shadow of World War II.

The Daleks share many qualities with the Nazis, including their claim to be the master race and therefore all who get in their way must be exterminated.

I was a small child in the early 1950s and Doctor Who was first broadcast in my first year at secondary school. The Daleks filled me with the same horror as the swastika and the Nazi flag.

I can’t remember how I know about the latter. And we should remember that the swastika was originally a symbol for prosperity and good luck.

Even as a small child I recognised this as absolute evil. That black hooked cross against startling white and vivid red backgrounds. It was almost as if I could remember the horror of all that that represented even though I hadn't lived though those times. Was I accessing other people's memories? Had someone told me something about it and though I’d forgotten that actual conversation the emotional memory remained?

Such is our reaction to the Daleks, and indeed sirens which resemble the air raid and even that all clear ones.  Were they designed to instil fear or is that a learnt response now?

The Nazis, Hitler and the Daleks have become the 20th century equivalent of the bogey man. Are we, though taking enough heed of any 21^st century recurring patterns?         

      

 

Our Wartime Street by Fiz Osborne and Katie Kear

 

This is picture book and as do all good picture books this has more of the story in the pictures: a train platform full of evacuees, London covered in smoke and broken buildings, details of wartime clothing. Each picture invites a talking point.

The author is pragmatic and non-judgemental in her story-telling. She tells simply of how the war came about.

There is a particularly interesting double spread about the RAF throughout the world.

The Battle of Britain is observed by a cat.

There is information about four different types of air raid shelter

We are also given information about civilian life: evacuation, war-time food, clothing and schooling.

Women's war-time work is also discussed.

The end of the war is presented briefly.

The Holocaust is only mentioned in the context of liberation.    

This is an engaging book with a light touch  but it nevertheless invites some interesting discussion. 

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Caricatures of Hitler

 

I'm going steadily ahead with Schellberg 7. Protagonist Gabriela knows she must resist and rebel.

In the background there has been the burning of books – and she works in the publishing industry yet has been protected from the consequences of this. The White Rose movement will appear quite soon.

Gabriela has to find her own way of resisting.

She's abandoned her swing-loving friends- the Schlurfs - and now she is being reacquainted with them. She has a flatmate who draws cartoons – specifically satirical cartoons of Hitler.

In my research I have found plenty of cartoons satirising Hitler but many of them were made long after he was dead.  I have to get into the mind-set of a woman who would dare to do that at the time that he was still alive and very much revered. That has given me the wonderful character Heidi Viebeck.

Naturally there are many pro-Hitler cartoons drawn at the time and plenty of anti-Semitic ones too.

These cartoons that Heidi draws will lead later to Gabriela's niece taking part in satirical plays about Hitler.

All of this is really interesting research as is creating an underground venue for where the plays can take place.  

 

             

More about the Schlurfs

 

These really did represent a reaction against the value of the Nazi party and the rise of the Hitter Youth and the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen. The word 'Schlurf' actually later became part of the name of a Hollywood film, Heil Schlurf, released in 1991. It wasn't a great success but did shed a little light on this time and caused a minor reappearance of Swing music in Germany.

Swing became popular in Germany in the 1920s.  It represented the roaring twenties though Germany also had to cope with hyperinflation at that time. It seemed odd that jazz was used as background music in the BBC film of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; the Nazis didn’t like jazz. Or perhaps that was precisely why it was used.

However, jazz and swing were never completely banned. The Nazis realised that it was good for moral and even produced their own version of jazz with Charlie and His Orchestra. However this was mainly a satirical band that adapted the lyrics from popular jazz pieces in a way that made fun of them.  

Many of the swing fans welcomed Jewish youths into their clubs and this did not sit well with the authorities.   

Several managed to import jazz and swing records from the USA but those caught doing that were rewarded with beatings and hard labour. On 18 August 1941 over 300 members of the Schwingjugend were arrested and subjected to police brutality. By 2 January 1942 Heineich Himmler ordered Reinhardt Heydrich to clamp down on the swing movement and submit participants to several years in a concentration camp. By 1941 20,000 young people were taking part in swing events.  

The Nazis saw jazz and swing as 'Negermusik' – it was indeed mainly supplied by Black musicians. The Nazis saw Black people as part of an inferior race.