Markus Zusak The Book Thief

This is another fictionalized account of something that could have happened during the Holocaust. The main character is Death and s/he arrives at various intervals to take someone away. But this person also lingers and tells us of some of what else is happening. “I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst the jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise. They have punctured their hearts,” says death. The story s/he tells is of:

• “A girl
• Some words
• An accordionist
• Some fanatical Germans
• A Jewish fist-fighter
• And quite a lot of thievery.”

The girl, Liesel Meminger, is the book thief. Her mother, unable to look after her, leaves her in the care of the accordionist. Liesel steals three books and reads a lot of words.  Zusak writes a lot of words. The fanatical Germans are as fanatical here as they are in any other literature, factual or fictional, and the Jew Liesel and her family protect is a fist-fighter. Many of the characters steal in order to survive.   

Zusak was not there at the time. He has had to use imagination in order to work out how it was then. He has used his writerly method-acting to create the persona of Death. We get close to Liesel, too, and learn of her encounters with communist, fascists, Nazis, and Jesse Owens. Zusak gives us a strong hint of how life was there and then by putting us amongst the people who lived that life.  

The voice is strong and unusual in this novel. The layout too is quite different. All of this brings our attention more closely to this so important story.              

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.        

Finished? Not without Molly the kitten

Yes, I think I’ve finished.  I’ve completed all edits, even the copy edit and the read out loud edit.  Very last minute I’ve put another tiny sub-plot in. A story about a kitten. Traumatised Kindertransport children often found it easier to relate to animals than to other humans, no matter how much kindness was shown. In fact, kindness by others often made them feel guilty. They felt unworthy, partly because they had been labelled as a disgrace by the Nuremberg laws and partly because they felt guilty as they were surviving whilst other friends and relations were not.

It was particularly difficult for Mischling children such as Renate, who felt neither as if they were German nor English and neither were they properly Jewish like the other Kinder.

Molly the kitten has to be bottle fed. She is the daughter of one of the two farm cats who gave birth within a few days of each other. Most of the other kittens feed from either mother without hesitation. Molly seems unable to decide which cat should feed her and is ultimately rejected by both mothers. She becomes attached to Renate who looks after her. Molly eventually goes to live in London with Renate after she has left school. She is initially as confused about her identity as Renate is. But she thrives because she is loved.

I’ve found out very recently that Renate adopted a cat while she was evacuated with the school. She took it everywhere with her, often hidden inside her jacket. It seemed like a thread that needed to be woven into the story. The word count has gone up now by a couple of thousand.     

                  

Another edit completed

Yes, I’ve just completed another edit. Just three more to go. This time it was the “Kill Off Your Darlings” edit.  I only found one, actually. It was one rather melodramatic sentence at the end of a chapter. It wasn’t needed.  The chapter had its own internal drama. Least said by the author the more the reader can decide for themselves. This is especially important in books written for young adults.  

However, I found a slight lack of logic in one of the very early chapters. Renate was supposed to be leaving Nuremberg in time to arrive at Stuttgart by two. That’s why she had got up so early. She’d thought she would be going straight after breakfast. I’ve had to make it clear that her mother was dithering with her packing and delaying their departure. She wasn’t, of course.  She was delaying telling Renate that they were Jewish.

I also found several examples of my favourite typos – “form” instead of “from”. The read out loud edit is yet to come and that actually usually deals with this sort of problem. Not all of the instances, though – which is why copy editors and proof readers really earn their keep and why self-publishers should use them.   

Defying Hitler

I went to see this the other night at the Lowry Studio. Although I’m on their list and several other lists, I only found out about this two days before from Salford Online, via Twitter. I’m glad I did. And the theatre was packed, anyway.

Defying Hitler is adapted for stage by Rupert Wickham from SebastianHaffner’s book. In the original German memoir it was called Gechsichte eines Deutschen (the story / history of a German). Haffner, then named Raimund Preztel, came to England in 1938 where he married his Jewish girlfriend. His son Oliver Pretzel found the text and published it after Haffner’s death.       

Haffner honed his writing skills by working on the Observer for many years. This memoir is now on my reading list.

The play is presented as a monologue superbly executed by Russell Bright. This is a touring production offered by Theatre Unlimited.        

Haffner’s main act of defiance was leaving the country. He felt uncomfortable under the Nazi regime but did not openly rebel against it. He remembers the hyperinflation and how the family would have to spend all of his father’s monthly salary within 24 hours before it became worthless on non-perishable food.

I learnt for the first time that Hitler started to mess around with people’s pensions. I was reminded of several other facts: the Nazi party got in with 40% of the votes, Hitler was the hero who brought life back to normal after a devastating recession, the young tycoons’ bubble burst, the “Volk” was respected and loved but you had to belong,  there was no place for the old and the infirm, the man on the street was deprived of books and an underclass was created.

I went to the production alone. It didn’t feel exactly easy to send an email round to colleagues asking them whether they wanted to join me in an evening of Defying Hitler. My husband declined to come. But I quite like going to the theatre alone. It’s just as valid as sharing the experience with others and as this is such an important contribution to my research it seemed right.    

Edits 10 & 11 Completed – pace, and point of view and some oddities

 I am now getting very close to being able to send this out into the world. I may even enter it for another competition – it is already in one. It gets harder and harder to edit objectively. Yes, it seems to have pace to me. But have I limited what I mean by pace? Am I just adhering to my own take on this? Tension mounts in all three strands of the story. I’ve noticed the chapters get shorter as this happens. Then right at the end they become longer again – but not as long as at the beginning. This seems to be a quite natural rhythm.

Point of view is always easier to deal with and I think I’m now quite good at getting this right. I hope it’s not just a matter of what an experienced published writer said to me recently. “Creative writing teachers always like to talk about point of view because it is easy to deal with.” Is it? Maybe. But hard, at first, to get right, surely? I’m actually a fan of using close third person narratives and also often use first person for young adult books. I have two different third person narratives in this and use first person for the letters. Two of the German girls and their teacher actually also have close third person chapters. However, I’m still puzzled as to why it seems right to refer to Hani’s mother as Frau Gödde a lot of the time. It just does. I guess that happens sometimes. Something works just because it does.

Bizarrely I now notice I have changed a surname and the name of a school part of the way through. Although I’ve checked for logistics, I now doubt whether one character has continuity. It just goes to show that we can edit forever and ever and how important it is to get a good objective copy edit and proof read before publication.