Aftermath

Last Thursday I attended a special viewing of this exhibition at the John Rylands Library, Deansgate Manchester. I felt my work on Clara Lehrs is very connected with this because:

·         She experiences the Great War.

·         Letters are involved and letters are what inspired the whole Schellberg Cycle

·         Part of the exhibition is about a creative response to war, as is the Schellberg Cycle.

·         Here a voice is given to people who no longer have a voice and that is what my project does for Clara and several other people.  

In addition I was particularly pleased to go along to this as Fine Art students from the University of Salford, where I also work, have been involved in the project.

Surviving in the camp

Clara did not spend long in Theriesenstadt. Just under a month in fact. But I’ve been very concerned about getting the detail about that stay right. We always assume it to have been a more benign place than many other camps and indeed at the time that Clara was there it was more of a transit camp than anything else though it also provided cheap labour for a country at war.

We have little idea of what it was actually like for her in the camp. And in my story-line I’ve included some fictitious characters – a pregnant mother who gives birth in the camp and her little daughter. I’ve borrowed a businessman who carried on running his business from within the camp. This man really existed and he was able to influence his captors. Here, I’ve used his influence to spare the lives of Clara’s friends and her two children.  

But was Theriesenstadt all that benign actually? Probably not at the time that Clara was there. It wasn’t a death camp – a gas chamber was added much later. Neither was it the “holiday camp” fabricated for the Red Cross, nor were there yet football matches or an orchestra. Compared with Clara’s former upper middle class lift it would be pretty miserable there. Am I getting that across?

I’m currently reading Primo Levi’s If This is a Man /The Truce where we have a detailed picture of what Auschwitz was like towards the end of World War II. People had ways of surviving. Levi was enterprising and sold flints he “stole” from his work place and “sold” them for bread. Clara doesn’t survive but by being such a nice person sets everything up for her friends to survive. She is so good to everyone that she brings out the best in them.    

Levi writes about Auschwitz, which we all believe to be possibly the worst of the death camps. I think I’ve made Theriesenstadt as gruesome. Clara’s family believed for years that she was transported to Auschwitz. We have recently found out, in fact, that it was Treblinka.

It’s likely that she and all the other old people in that transport would have been shot on arrival. They would probably not have known what was happening or not until the last moment. This was actually a quicker death than being gassed which at that time took on average twenty minutes. We don’t see that particular scene in my version of Clara’s story. In the epilogue the two children are now quite grown up and help with archiving of information about the Rexingen Jews. At that point they believe that she went to Auschwitz. Only in the notes at the end, and here, do I reveal that where she actually she went.       

A slightly different creative process this time

Normally I know the end of the story before I start. I know the main hurdles it will go through and I have the structure firmly in my head, even if I haven’t written it down. Sure, the characters take off on their own a little but the skeleton of the story remains intact. This time it is a little bit different. 

Clara’s stubbornness

I am getting to the trickier part of Clara’s Story now. Hitler is rising to power. She didn’t really see that coming nor did she have that political interest. However, she is shrewd and understands people well, though she is not aware of her ability to do this. She soon realises that she does not trust this man but understands why other people do.

Clara refused to leave Germany and then couldn’t. There were several probable reasons for this:

• She considered herself to be Christian, not Jewish and German, not Jewish. She was a little naïve about the Blutschutz laws.
• She was eternally optimistic about the basic good nature of people. This came partly form her new-found religious beliefs but also from a more humanitarian standpoint she had always had and her natural sunny nature.  
• She felt a very strong loyalty to the children who came to board. Even after the Waldorf School had closed the Hilfsklasse was still allowed to carry on working in the house on Schellberg Street.    

I have already created her a little this way in TheHouse on Schellberg Street. I’m fast coming to the point where the two novels will completely cross over. I am going to have to make sure that the two personalities match.   

All about Clara

Now that I’ve changed the title of my book and this blog it seems appropriate to focus on Clara a little.  

I’ve met her before, of course. She built the house on Schellberg Street and offered sanctuary to the “Hilfsklasse” roughly translated, “Special Class” in The House on Schellberg Street. In the strand about this in that novel she appears as a feisty young-at-heart old lady and we have some anecdotal evidence that that she was an optimistic, glass-half-full type of person. I’ve painted her thus and also given her a wicked sense of humour.

The more I work on these stories, the more I am convinced that the Loewenthal-Lehrs-Edler women were truly remarkable. In Clara’s Story I’m having to provide a few reasons why Clara becomes the remarkable woman that she appears to me. She was a Jewish girl in the late 19^th century. She marries and has her first two children before the 20^th century begins. She brings up three children.  Her husband dies too early, at the age of 56. She starts a career five years later at the age of 54. Ah! Now then, there’s something I can relate to.  I too had a massive career change at the age of 55.

At the moment she still feels a little elusive to me. She needs some more work. Is this because for the first time I have an adult protagonist? Shouldn’t it be easier because we’re roughly the same age? Or is it because she is from so long ago? The House on Schellberg Street made me understand the 1940s quite well. Now I’m having to learn the years between 1871 and 1939 as well. The main story takes place between 1918 and 1942 but I’m finding I need more and more back story. I’m 22,000 words in and have just reached 1923 but realise I must add in at least a couple of World War 1 scenes.  

The research is fascinating though it’s important not to let it interfere with the writing. It must be a supplementary activity. I still find actually writing uncovers some detail about Clara’s psyche and motivations.

I am so glad to have permission to work on this fascinating subject.   

              

Debating titles

Martin and I went to see The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams on Friday at the Octagon in Bolton. It was a very good production, incidentally. And The Glass Menagerie is a very good title for it. A central character owns and is obsessed with a collection of glass animals. The working title for the play was The Gentleman Caller. I also like this title. The “gentlemen caller” is central to the story.

I have difficulty with titles and very often the final one doesn’t settle until I’ve completed several edits. Now I’m agonizing over the titles of my two Holocaust stories. Potatoes in Spring is so called because the girls who sent letters to each other 1938 to 1944 were more fascinated by the fact that the potato crop came early one year than by the fact that they were at war and were living under the Nazi regime.

The House on Schellberg Street is currently the title for Clara Lehrs’ biography because she and her son built the house on Schellberg Street and later hid some severely disabled children there.                

However, I’m thinking of renaming Potatoes in Spring and calling it The House on Schellberg Street. Renate thought she was going to Schellberg Street permanently when she was whisked away on the Kindertransport. One third of the story takes place at the house and is an interesting bridge between the other two strands linking ordinary Germans with the girl who had to go to England because she was Jewish.Antony Rowland, one of my beta readers, recently told me he preferred this title – he had been under the impression that The House on Schellberg Street was indeed the new name for Potatoes in Spring. As I was writing at one point I decided that I did want to rename Potatoes. However, I came back to it because another beta reader said she liked the title and because The House on Schellberg Street seemed such a good title for Clara’s biography.

I’ve now started Clara’s biography. I’m 14,000 words in and we’ve not got to Schellberg Street yet. Her biography lasts from 1918 – 1942 – though there are a few earlier scenes – and she only lives in Schellberg Street from 1928 – 1942. She actually had to sell the house in 1939. She carried on living there for a while as a lodger. If I do call the earlier story The House on Schellberg Street, I can call Clara’s story simply Clara’s Story. The first novel may ask the questions anyway “Who was this extraordinary woman?” and “What happened to Clara?”              

I really am wondering and I’d like everybody’s help with this. Let me know what you think.   

What anthroposophism means to my family and what it meant to Clara and Ernst Lehrs

It feels very much as if it belongs to the New Age. It’s a little creepy when you read works by and about Rudolf Steiner and he uses word such as the “astral body” and the “etheric body” and he talks of his own reincarnation that actually should have happened somewhere in the United States in 2002. I find myself asking where is that ten or eleven-year old and what is s/he doing now? Do I really believe this happens?

And yet. If one takes out the strange language, a lot of what Steiner says in his various lectures, particularly those about education, makes an awful lot of sense. 

The first Waldorfschule, as Steiner schools are known in Germany, was built at Stuttgart. Ernst Lehrs taught there. He and Clara Lehrs built a house nearby which offered accommodation to students during the week. Later that house, the very house after which this blog is named,   would accommodate and protect a class of disabled children with severe learning difficulties. In 1973 I visited the school. The family of my mother-in-law’s best friend attended. I was taken there by the two daughters of the well-known architect, Gűnter Behnisch. Being an award-winning architect does not preclude you from sending your children to a Steiner School. Not many private schools are tolerated in Germany. The Steiner education system is.   

Nothing seemed particularly strange at the school. It was in a leafy suburb of Stuttgart.  As far as I could tell, it taught the normal range of subjects in quite small classes. I’ve been in British education system since 1974 – until 2006 at secondary level and now in higher education. What I and others consider good practice – as opposed to some crazy tick-box hurdles – always seems to line up with what happen in the Steiner schools. The latter don’t seem to have any tick-box craziness.          

My mother-in-law, Renate Edler, attended the Michael Hall Steiner School in London and during World War II was evacuated with them to Minehead. I tell her story in my novel Potatoes in Spring in my blog of the same name. My husband’s parents considered Steiner education for him and we also considered it for our children. In the end, because we all wanted out children to remain in the main stream, because we didn’t know how we would pay the fees and because of the practicalities of getting the children to school, we decided against it.

Ernst Lehrs had fought in World War I.  He became an officer. He came home disillusioned with society. He continued his studies in the natural sciences and obtained his doctorate in 1923.  But he found some of the experiments he had to do tedious and meaningless, despite the excitement in physics at the time because of the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Steiner offered him a spiritual perspective and a common sense approach to science.

Clara Lehrs was born into a Jewish family. She and husband Ernst became protestant at the beginning of the 20^th century. She also became an anthroposophist later and her faith in this sustained her through many of the horrors of the Holocaust. She was resistant at first. She couldn’t quite believe what Steiner offered and it was most likely her intimate relationship with her son that persuaded her to help him and the organisation generally. By the time she was living amongst the Rexingen Jews towards the end of her life she was wholly convinced and used her own faith to help others.