Revisiting the Holocaust – which works best, visiting a museum or engaging the imagination through fiction?

Revisiting the Holocaust – which works best, visiting a  museum or engaging the imagination through fiction?

As I’ve intended for some time, I visited the Holocaust Exhibition at the ImperialWar Museum yesterday. It was a little surreal, anyway, as in the morning I worked with the Ministry of Stories, at their Children’s Republic of Shoreditch. All that is fun and zany. The IWM is more serious.

I suppose my intention in visiting the IWM was to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I hadn’t, and in fact I found I knew more about each aspect of the topic than the exhibits showed me. I have after all used much of the IWM’s online archived material and as well as many other online resources. I’ve read a great deal and have a 40 page bibliography of books yet to read. Although the novel is finished I still wish to contextualize it.  

Nevertheless, the visit was fruitful. I found another half dozen books I’d like to read sometime. I was also able to visit the “A Family in War Time Exhibition” which was pertinent to the “Renate in England” strand of the project. Again, there was little I didn’t already know. However, it was useful to sit in an Anderson shelter and experience what it might fell like during an air-raid and also to have a close look at a Morrison shelter. I didn’t have time to visit the Blitz Experience. That is something I will do another day.

In another way the visit was extremely relevant: I realised that although the exhibition is informative for those who know little about the Holocaust it doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter as some of the other materials and accounts I’ve studied. It doesn’t have the emotional impact of the creatively written texts I’ve read to support my research: - those by John Boyne, Emma Craigie, Charlotte Delbo, Marcus Zusak and Jake Wallis Simons. A really important aspect of this project for me, the creative writing academic researcher, is the opportunity it offers to examine that relationship between fact and fiction and how fiction and writing fiction can investigate what actually happens in a different way from how a bare laying down of facts informs us. Perhaps I need to assess how much my beta and beta+ readers understand of what I have written.

And a final advantage of the visit is that the receipt for my coffee included an invitation to hold my next important event at the IWM London. Now that would be grand: launching Potatoes in Spring at IWM London and perhaps at IWM North as well.        

Three Ways of Dealing with Necessary Foreign Words

I’ve used quite a few German words in Potatoes in Spring. I haven’t translated them because I consider that they don’t translate exactly.

Interestingly, I’ve read two other books recently that are also set during World War II. Robert Mucahmore in The Escape has chosen to use footnotes. His stories are always extremely exciting and fast-paced.  Possibly showing the meaning of the words would have slowed the pace down too much.

Emma Craigie in Chocolate Cake with Hitler has chosen to translate her words literally into English, including all titles and place names. She says on page 202 that she does this “to give a sense of their meaning to Helga”.

I’ve chosen a different method in my novel. I’m influenced here by Caroline Lawrence and the way she introduces Latin words’ meanings by contextualising them the first time the reader meets them, providing a glossary in case the reader has forgotten the meaning when they meet the words subsequently and expanding even further on a web site.

I spent considerable time deciding which to do. As a fluent speaker of German, I find retaining the original German intensifies the atmosphere. As this a story of emotions, that seems appropriate.

Readers may find the German words a little more exotic. That in turn may give them a sharper sense of the conflict that Renate feels. Also, my protagonist is slightly older than Craigie’s so it’s possible the readers will be and may also have a little German. One of Muchamore’s main characters does speak German well, so understands much of what the German officials say to him.

I’m certain I’ve made the right decision this time. It will be interesting to see what the editors think.                          

Emma Craigie “Chocolate Cake with Hitler”

This is a moving account of the last days in Hitler’s bunker for Helga Goebbels. Those of us who know our 20th century history will perhaps find the first person narrative somewhat ironic. Nevertheless, it works and gives us some closeness to this main character.  

Emma Craigie offers us a very convincing character in Helga. Craigie successfully shows us a child’s point of view. And she does show us, rather than telling us. She achieves this partly through very good use of the senses. We can see, hear, smell and taste the life in the bunker. We watch the big “Uncle Leader” gradually disintegrate.   

Craigie seems to face many of the issues that I face in my project.

She too has had to span a long period of time. She attains this by interspersing the days in the bunker with memories form the past. She spans 1936 to 1945. I go from 1938 to 1947, though I also have flashbacks to 1936 and 1925.

She has also had to make up some characters and make up some of the details of the lives of some of the real people.     

She too has had find out exactly which facts might be verifiable.

She too had some really useful help form some people brave enough to tell their stories.   

I’m intrigued to see that she has also included a glossary.

And is there after all some justice? Does my story have a slightly more upbeat ending? Despite the concern about Clara Lehrs? Maybe, maybe not. Both stories rely somewhat on the reader knowing some of the background.