We only know a
little about this character:
He was five years
younger than Käthe Lehrs i.e. there was a much bigger gap between them than between
Käthe and Ernst.
- He only had one lung. (Though for how much of his life we’re not sure, nor why.)
- He was a mathematician.
- He was in London with Ernst when niece Renate Edler arrived there on the Kindertranport.
- He ended up at the University of Ottawa.
Despite the
problems with his lung he survived almost as long as his brother and sister.
At one point they
could not find him: he had moved house in Canada and the notification had gone
astray.
That actually may
seem like quite a collection but in fact we have much less of an impression of
him than of the rest of the family. He seems to have been a bit of a loner but
he has to come into Clara’s story. She was above all else a mother and a mother
is concerned about her children.
I am only
including a few scenes of Clara’s life before her “third stage” – her life after
her husband’s death which spans the time of her involvement with the Steiner schools,
the special class in Schellberg house and her persecution by the Nazis. Yet
these scenes are crucial. They really build her.
For these scenes I
am using the historical writer’s third tool – the imagination. (The other two
are primary resources and repeated experience.) I’m inserting three scenes of
Rudi’s earlier life. He will appear again later – mainly as he moves away from Germany.
There is a
symbiotic relationship between the research we do and our writing in any case.
We research the story in order to be able to tell it but as we write new questions
appear. The research must stay out of the writing time and be seen as separate
activity. Sure, it counts as a writerly
activity, it’s extremely interesting and it seems to me to be a good use of my
time. But it can’t count as writing time.
I keep a list of
what else I need to look into. Lung diseases joined that list yesterday.
