The Little Underground Theatre

Will that be the title of Schellberg 7?

Maybe.

This is the way my ground work on the story about the German resistance is taking me.

Imagine the place: it is the cellar of a bar in the artist’s quarter of Munich. It has the atmosphere of a speakeasy and is originally an underground jazz bar.  We have to remember that the Nazis hated jazz. It was considered degenerate. However, they did not ban it completely until on 17 January 1942 when public and private dance events were finally prohibited. 

Yet here it is underground. Every night there is a cabaret. Gradually that begins to include short satirical sketches that ridicule Hitler and his crew. By day there is no sign of the little theatre. And even when it is in full swing it can be evacuated in seconds.

Young people are gradually involved and that includes Gabriela’s niece, Anika, with a connection to Schellberg 1 and Schellberg 5.

Schwabing was and is the artists’ quarter in Munich. It did go a little quiet during the Nazi time but in this story there will still be something going on, thanks to Tante Gabriela. There are memorials now in Schwabing to the White Rose movement, which Gabriela will have an interest in and also to Georg Elser, who made a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in the Bürgerkeller beer hall in 1939.  A light installation on Georg-Elser-Platz square is switched on every night at 9:20 p.m. to this day to commemorate the latter.

Is Gabriela’s theatre one that led to the Münchner Lach- und Schießgesellschaft (a political cabaret theatre founded by Sammy Drechsel and Dieter Hildebrandt in 1956)?

The Nazis banned works by certain playwrights but Shakespeare was allowed. Could Tante  Gabriela and Anika twist a Shakespeare play and use it as resistance?   

        

Introducing Gabriela and a new way of working

Gabriela is the aunt of one of the girls who appears in book five. She is quite mysterious and seems to have some extra insights into what is going on in the war. She develops a very close relationship with her niece Anika. They have a love of the arts in common.

Gabriela is substantially different form Anika’s very practical mother. She is a dreamer and develops a love for art, music and theatre. She becomes involved with the German resistance but remains on the edge of it.

This time I’m working in a slightly different way.  I’m currently busy writing my next instalment of a YA SF book. However, I’ve started a notebook about this story. I’m finding odd moments to work on it a little:  

·         Sitting in cafes

·         On journeys

·         Holidays

I’ve spent time looking at:

• An overview of her life
• Meeting with Hans Dinkerman, a mysterious figure but who is also working in publishing as she does. He is her main contact to the Resistance.
• Her relationship with her sister
• How her love for the arts develops.

Many more items will be added to that list.

I unpick each of the threads and trace a story arc of development.  I write a short scene for each point on that arc.  

This is an interesting way of working. I hope by the time I’m ready to start on the story proper I will have a notebook filled with snippets. I’m suspect that not all of the snippets will make their way into he novel and there is even the possibility that none of them will appear. One thing is certain though: by the time I start writing I shall know this character thoroughly.   

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner

 All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

This work suffers a little from a lack of identity; it reads like a novel but not quite. It certainly has a lot of information packed into it and it feels also like a nonfiction book. It is in fact a true story. Rebecca Donner has done her research well. However, there is so much materiel in there that we don't quite get to know the main characters well enough. A dreamy present tense narrative gives it some immediacy. And we do, after all, feel some empathy for Mildred and Don to whom the book is dedicated. 

This is another long book about the German resistance.  It is based on the research that Donner did into the topic and in particular about Mildred Harnack and how she worked with the Circle, a resistance groups, to try to overthrow the Nazi regime.  Don Heath, the son of an American diplomat, has private tuition with Mildred. She sends notes to his father hidden in his books. Don always takes a different way through town. If he is stopped, he knows how to answer.

Later, when members of the Circle meet to exchange information in the woods, Don, dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform, sings the Horst Wessel song if danger is near. If all is safe he sings another song.

Mildred marries Arvid Harnack.  He later becomes a spy for the Russians. His position as advisor to the Reich’s’ Ministry of Economics gave him access to information that helped both the German resistance and the Russians. He is in fact a communist and has to destroy his PhD thesis and a book he has finished writing.

Mildred and Arvid are involved with the Berliner Abendgymnasium – a night school for worker s (BAG)   

Both Mildred and Arvid were executed.

In this text we have information about several aspects of German resistance: the Red Orchestra, the Circle and the White Rose.  Donner also gives us insights into the prison regime and details about the guillotine that was used for decapitations. The Valkyrie plot (20 July 1944) is also mentioned but less detail is given about this.

The text includes snippets of actual documents and much detail of archival material is also included at the end of the book. This is a very useful text for the scholars of this time.      

      

Complex situations

 

As I read more of Helena P. Schrader’s 548 page novel An Obsolete Honor I realise how complex the situation was for many who lived in Nazi Germany. One sees at once that the resistance offered by the White Rose movement was naïve. The students rebelled openly and distributed pamphlets that said that the Nazi regime was wrong. They were rounded up pretty quickly and beheaded.

Most of the characters in this novel take a more pragmatic approach. They attempt to work from within the system and appear compliant. The main character is at once a skilled military man who obeys orders and one is disgusted by the treatment some of his colleague mete out to Jews, gypsies and Russian civilians.

His father-in-law is also against the government but is intolerant of anyone else who is and makes it too obvious. A lack of subtlety will undermine any attempt at getting rid of Hitler.  

The protagonist’s sister marries a dedicated Nazi who controls factories in the east and is involved with the Warsaw ghetto. His father had been unemployed for eighteen years after his business as a locksmith failed. The Nazi regime brought him employment and hope for the future.

A young woman who forges a birth certificate for a Jewish child in a desperate situation goes on to forge other documents.  Her boyfriend is an SS officer.  

Many people see parallels in the UK today and I have to admit to seeing these very early on when I first started this project in 2011. The proroguing of parliament reminded us of the 1933 Enabling Act. The treatment of some Windrush immigrants is highly disturbing. This is particularly so for me; many of my friends in my teenage years were first generation Windrush – and incidentally I’m not comfortable with labelling them as such. The new law on protests feels oppressive. At least, though, we’re not saluting each other in the name of Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. There aren’t pictures of our questionable leaders in classrooms.

Social media is both our enemy and our friend in this. It polarises us more but it does allow space for debate and is more effective than the Stammtisch was in 1940s’ Germany, when you couldn’t be sure who you were talking to. At least today we can find our tribe. Perhaps also because we have studied the Nazi era and recognise some of the pitfalls attempted fascism doesn’t have quite as much hold.

We need to remain vigilant, however. The present Tory government is stabbing the working class in the back at the same time as seducing the workers by making them laugh and promising more jobs than there are people in a by-election town. The opposition is cannily praising the British spirit in order to gain back working-class votes just as Hitler and co included the word “Socialist” in the name of the party to maintain the support of the workers.

We can understand why Germany felt aggrieved. After the Treaty of Versailles it was not allowed anything but a skeleton army. It had huge debts which led to hyperinflation and a worse experience than other nations of the 1930s depression. The Jew became a scape goat.  Something else was going on as well, though. Something much more sinister. There was some concern about purifying the German race. It could not be polluted by non-Aryan blood or by the weaker elements in society.

Survival of the fittest? I shudder a little that a week today we are being asked to return to normal though a pandemic is still raging in the world. Is this an attempt to get rid of the frail and vulnerable?

Well, again, here is an example of how reading, and reading fiction at that, helps us to form our view of the word. I’m about one hundred pages form the end of the novel.  When I reach the end, will I have hope for the future or will I have to conclude that human nature is thus and we just have to live with it?

More stories, more materials

 

My research for this project has gradually broadened out to include a more general look at the 1940s, both during Word War II and after it, and in both the UK and on the continental mainland, especially in Germany.

Sadly, my father-in-law died suddenly in April and we have been involved in sorting out his house. Many more papers and photos to do with Renate have emerged.

One particularly interesting phot one is of her with her class mates in her final year at the Steiner school. The phot has a list of names so I may research those people a little more.

There are several phots of her when she was still at school and in her late teens early twenties when she first met my father –in-law.

The papers include her description of leaving Germany in January 1939 and about her birth. Naturally the latter comes from the story her mother had told her.

I feel another story coming on: I would like to explore what it was like for a young German Jewish woman, naturalised British, making a life for herself in the late 1940s in London. This one though I would completely fictionalise, even choosing different names for the main characters.

And so it goes on. So it seems I’m alternating writing SF for YA and historical fiction of this era. So be it.

Another two stories planned are:

Helga’s story: the story of another young Jewish woman living in Germany during World War II.

Gabriela’s story: the account of a German resistance worker who happens to be the aunt of one of the girls who joined the class letter.

Never ending? That’s the way we like it!      

Image by Brigitte makes custom works from your photos, thanks a lot from Pixabay