The Problem(s) with Hitler

 

My character Gabriela in Schellberg 7 is about to start satirising Hitler.  What has she got to go on?

He was born in Austria, not Germany.

It is likely that there was Jewish blood in his ancestors.

His father was cruel in his strictness.

He didn’t do well at school.

He lost four of his siblings in childhood.

He scratched a living in Vienna before the Great War.  

He wrote a book that many of us would like to ban but we’re not going to get into banning books like the Nazis did.

He had a criminal record and had spent some time in jail before coming to power.

He was a failed artist: he failed to get into the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts – twice.   

His mother died of breast cancer when she was just forty-seven and he was eighteen.

He was a despatch runner during the Great War.  

He was wounded and gassed in the Great War.

He was awarded the Iron Cross for his participation in the Great War.

He was a very good speaker.

He was a vegetarian – good for him – it was particularly hard to be one in those days.

He admired the Italian fascists.

He actually supported the working class – as long as its members were Aryan.

He gave people hope as they struggled with the Depression – bad throughout Europe but particularly keen in Germany – the Germans were already suffering because of the harsh requirement of the Versailles Treaty.

He offered hope through road-building, employment and encouraging the Hitler Youth and associated organisations.

He believed that the Germans, and indeed the British, were the master race.  

He was xenophobic.

He used the 1936 Olympics for propaganda

He saw Hindenburg as a doddery old man – no good for the German people and easy to overcome.

Politics and making German great again gave a purpose to his life.

He liked to escape to his retreat at Berchtesgaden and play with his dogs when he should have been thinking about military tactics.    

   

Attitudes to Homosexuality between World War and World War II

 

I’m at a very dramatic stage of Schellberg 7,  though I haven’t yet got a proper title for it but I’m labelling it ‘Gabriela’, because it’s Gabriela’s’ story. In later chapters it also becomes Anika’s story.

Gabriela is at last told the truth about her birth and is let into the secret that her father has been keeping from her for some time.

There are parallels between her story and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: there is death, and unrequited homosexual love and there is the same contrast between pragmatism and romance. Her own story though also includes two unwanted pregnancies.  

She is about to find out about homosexuals being ‘rehabilitated’. Attitudes to homosexuality will also become even more important as the story progresses through the 1930s and 1940s.

Gabriela is by now comfortable with lesbian love.  Two of her best friends are a lesbian couple and they have been instrumental in introducing her to the Bohemian life she enjoys in Schwabing, the artist part of Munich. This is also a sort of foreshadowing to the Nazi era where lesbianism was better tolerated than homosexuals.

Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, established in 1871, forbade sexual relationships between men. However, although lesbianism was forbidden it wasn’t illegal. No criminal code made is so.  Were the German as puzzled as our own Queen Victoria about how women could have sex? It may also partly be explained by the fact that lesbians seemed less of a threat as women on the whole didn’t hold  high-ranking positions in  society

Life became difficult for men as the Nazi regime took hold: they were expected to admire the strength and physique of other men and away from home and at war what might happen? Both women and men on both sides of the war became closer. There would often be an emotional link that could spill over into sexuality.   

In the 1920 and 1930s both gay men and women had been tolerated despite Paragraph 175. The clamp down on homosexual men was in part a reaction to some of the ‘decadence’ of that period.  This is a decadence in which our protagonist will take part shortly. This will ultimately lead to her niece, Anika, taking part in a satirical cabaret in an underground theatre.           

Find a copy of Death in Venice here.   

Note, this is an affiliate link and a small portion of what you pay, at no extra cost to you,  may go to Bridge House Publishing.   

German Weddings

 

Another interesting topic I’ve had to research.  My main character in Schellberg 7 has to attend her sister’s wedding. Gabriela is estranged from her mother and sister but all the same she is there,

There will be quite an explosive scene soon. But at least so far the wedding ceremony has gone smoothly.

The reception is held at the bride’s home and it is called a wedding breakfast. They are served a buffet of cold cuts, breads, salads, Sekt and cake. But there isn’t a wedding cake as we know it. The couple saw a log, light a candle and have a first dance together.

Something that is just becoming popular is the throwing of the bridal bouquet. Edith looks at Gabriela as if she ought to try to catch it. Gabriela wants nothing of this and you’ll understand why when you read the novel.

I’ve set this wedding just after the hyperinflation has been brought under control. It’s also around the time that Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and George VI marry.  The bride is wearing a similar dress to the one the young Elizabeth wore.  There is another similar bride elsewhere in the cycle.

Rings are used differently in Germany. The engagement ring is the wedding ring but it is worn on the left hand and it is moved over to the right hand during the wedding ceremony.

Gabriela’s dress is quite daring. She hasn’t been invited to be a bridesmaid but her sister has asked her to wear blue. It is definitely a very fashionable dress. Will she upstage the bride?