Finishing book five

I have now completed the first draft of the fifth book in the cycle. This brings us closer to the German girls who wrote the letters that sparked off the whole project.  The girls are now very heavily fictionalised. 

I have used just four characters:

• The feisty Anika who becomes an actor
• Erika, one of the twins who has to run her father’s factory after he dies suddenly.  Her twin also features in the novel but is a minor character.
• Gerda, who becomes a farmer
• Hanna Braun, the girls’ former teacher.

The novel spans nine years and the girls grow up a lot in that time. Of course they are touched by the war. Each girl finds a strategy for coping. They enjoy some camaraderie each in their own area. The round robin letter is also a point of connection. They develop a strong sense of duty. They have to learn some painful truths about what has happened to some people they know: Renate, Elfriede Kaiser, Sister Kuna and Father Maxfeld. Hanna Braun carries the burden of knowing and of realising all of that and of being aware of what the Nazi regime is doing to education. .

The novel is running at 101,000 words at the moment. Will it get shorter as I edit? 

The girls are thirteen at the beginning and twenty-two by the end.  They live in a completely different world from their twenty-first century counterparts. Is this novel suitable for young adults?  Young adults could certainly understand it and digest it. They might not read it for pleasure. It could certainly also be suitable for adults. 

One review for The House on Schellberg Street mentioned that readers more often hope for escapism and entertainment in their reading. This is a fair comment. The type of text I’m producing here then will always remain on the back foot. However, I hope the books in the cycle will do two things: show there is some hope as they all end on an optimistic note and offer some explanation as to how it all might have happened. 

Ah well, on to the redrafting.           

That sense of duty

I noticed when I was studying the letters from the Wilhelm Lőhe School that two words occurred quite often: camaraderie and duty.  Now, I’ve made one of the girls also notice the word “duty”.

All of these girls will have attended the meetings and training sessions of the BDM, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. They would have thereby been indoctrinated.  This organisation at first glance seems much like our scouting and guiding movement. Young people are taught many useful life-skills, wear a smart uniform and get involved in a lot of outdoor activities. 

However it becomes a little more sinister, especially for the girls. They are to grow up to become useful women. Women were expected to be content with the bringing up children, working in the kitchen and going to church.  The latter may seem odd as the girls’ school was closed because it was a church school and did not teach Nazi values. Perhaps church was just a way of keeping the women occupied. 

Big families were encouraged, so that more Aryans may be born.  

The Lebensborn initiative was sinister. Women were encouraged to have good Aryan babies.  Single mothers were more than tolerated- as long as the father was a respected Nazi officer. Fantastic maternity homes and homes for young mothers were built. These became breeding centres. 

The BDM magazine again looks just like a scouting magazine – until you start looking at the book reviews. As the years went by, they changed from recommending outdoor activities to providing more and more articles about home-making. 

BDM girls were encouraged to think for themselves and not just think as their parents had thought. However, that thinking was encouraged to be anti-Semitic and over patriotic. Young girls aged 14-17 were encouraged to alert the authorities about anyone in their family who was thinking “wrongly”.  

The girls I am studying don’t seem that different from the young British women who lived through World War II. Our women worked in munitions factories, became land girls and took on many of the jobs that the men who had gone to war had left behind, including ones in middle management. The German girls had to do their RAD (compulsory work experience) and then war work. They had lived through hyperinflation and the depression which was worse in Germany than here because of the constraints put on the nation after the Great War. They were very young at the time of the hyperinflation but it would still have affected them and they lived with parents damaged by it.

Of course they wanted their country to be great. Why wouldn’t anyone want their own country to shine? 

In my latest novel, Erika, one of twins who have to run their father’s factory after he dies suddenly, and Frau Schmitz the secretary there, come up with their own version of what doing duty means. It is about being aware of the needs of others. And if that leads to Germany becoming great again, so be it.              

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Krigeshilfsdienst

 

Some of the jobs that the girls in the Schellberg cycle had:

·         Air traffic control

·         Working at the Post Office

·         Working in the pharmacy

·         Working at a Kindergarten

·         Working on farms

·         Looking after families so that the farmer’s wife could take on the farm work

·         Playing the organ and writing letters for the vicar  

·         Looking after the family business

·         Working as a housekeeper for a man with an important job  (Hani)   

Which of those jobs would you like the most? Write your letter of application. Say why you would be good at the job.

 

Camaraderie and duty

The girls continued to feel a strong sense of duty but also enjoyed being with the other girls.  In some roles they worked with other young women but in other roles, such as Hani’s, they were more on their own.  Pretend to be the person who wrote the letter above. Tell the other members of the group why you have a sense of duty and how much you enjoy or miss mixing with other girls.    

 

After the war is over

The war ends. The men come home. They take back their work. Write a small sketch in which you argue that you should be allowed to keep your job.

Then write a letter to one of your friends about what you think of this.

Hani’s experience

Some points to ponder:  

·         Hani went straight from school to being a house-keeper.

·         She had to learn to cook.  The Gődde’s maid taught her how to cook.

·         She also had to clean and do laundry. Remember they didn’t have dishwashers or washing machines then.  And she was used to having a maid to do all of that work at home.  

·         She would also work in the garden.

Hani keeps a journal. She wants to remember everything so that she can share it with her friends later.  Write an entry for her journal. She probably won’t mention the special class in case someone finds her journal.    

A German childhood 1925 – 1938

Hyperinfaltion

Most of the girls in the first book of the Schellberg Cycle were born as the hyperinflation in Germany ended. Some of the older girls in the story would have experienced this. Just imagine what it must been like having to turn your father's wages into goods the moment he came home from work. Families would buy some fresh food, certainly, but there would also have been lots of pickles, canned and bottled foods along with salted meat and fish.

Happy days in Nuremberg?

Renate spent much of her early childhood in Nuremberg. Certainly she had more vivid memories of that than of Jena where she was born. Nuremberg was then and still is a bit of a fairy tale place. It has a magnificent castle and is the home of the world's largest international toy fair.     

However, when Renate and her friends were younger it was also the home of the infamous Nuremberg Rallies. Thousands of people would march into the grounds that then echoed with Hitler's charismatic rhetoric and the "Sieg Hiel"s which don’t sound all that different from the Daleks' "Exterminate!"

Hitler's policy 1933

He wanted to take charge of education. He sought to mould young people into perfect Germans.

"My program for educating youth is hard … weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order, a new youth will grow up, before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless and cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes…That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication…That is how I will create the New Order.”

The first Waldorf school

In England, we know them as Steiner schools. They still exist and there are now many worldwide.

Steiner specified four conditions for the Stuttgart school:

1. that the school be open to all children;
2. that it be coeducational;
3. that it be a unified twelve-year school;
4. that the teachers, those individuals actually in contact with the children, have primary control over the pedagogy of the school, with a minimum of interference from the state or from economic sources.

This is so very different from what was going on in other schools in Germany. It eventually had to be closed down but opened again after World War II.  

Renate only experienced the Stuttgart school through her grandmother. However, she went to a Steiner school in England.

Germany does not have many private schools but it does tolerate the Waldorf schools. Many of the teachers who now work in these schools are very skilled artists.     

The BDM

The Bund Deutscher Mädel. An organisation for girls.

Renate actually left Germany before she had to join the BDM. It became compulsory for girls aged 14+. The uniform was very smart and must have been a joy for the girls who lived through the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s which hit Germany even more than other European countries.

It was a little like our scouting movement to start with but the emphasis soon shifted to making the girl into homemakers. There was some subtle indoctrination. The girls in the book have been taught to value camaraderie and duty.

This post and the next few relate to the Discovery Packs I am creating for the Schellberg Cycle Workshop