Am I creating darlings that I’ll need to kill?

I enjoyed writing the end of one chapter and the beginning of another yesterday. I’m conveniently at a stage with this project now where it’s a pleasure to turn to it and I know exactly what I’m going to write. But is it all a little self-indulgent?  

Character building

I’ve worked a little more on Käthe and Hans and on Clara’s relationship with Käthe. The little scene I created there contains an important plot point: Käthe announces her pregnancy. We need to know that the baby should be born in August.  She will actually arrive in July, in a thunderstorm and will be christened wrongly. This latter fact may save her life. Her full story is told in The House on Schellberg Street. But do I need this story strand again in Clara’s Story? It remains to be seen.

In the second chapter, I have Clara feeling strange and working vigorously in the garden.  She’ll soon encounter Kurt again, a young boy with severe learning difficulties, who becomes a bit of a spiritual mentor to Clara. It may become important to both the plot and building the character. The drama of the day is that Rudolf Steiner dies. By the time we come to Rexingen, Clara must be firm in her religious beliefs and sunny and optimistic by nature.

Self-indulgence?

Oh, I am so enjoying writing the scene in the garden where Clara feels the soil in her hands and is filled with hope as she see the buds swelling and looks forward to the birth of her grandchild. I’m looking forward to the next bit where Kurt comes with his words of wisdom. But is all of this needed? Might I eventually have to cut it out? I have several scenes similar to this for The House on Schellberg Street. They seemed precious at the time.

Sometimes writers need to write what readers don’t need to read

Sometimes we just have to write to help ourselves along the way. Look how often first chapters get reduced to one paragraph. I probably need to write those scenes described above so that I get to know my characters a little better. I won’t know for sure if they’re needed until I’ve written the whole novel and started the editing.  Even if they are darlings that need killing it won’t really matter. They will still have been useful.       

Imagination – a tool that helps uncover truth

I’m finding out a lot about the lives of Clara and the people who surround her. Some of it comes from the facts I establish through the usual means – primary resources, documentary evidence from the time and archival records. Much too also comes from the testing with the imagination that all writers use. Thinking is not enough on its own. I guess as we write each answer poses new questions more rapidly than when we merely think. Here are three recent examples.

Leo in World War I

I decided I did need to include some scenes from World War I. I couldn’t really skip form 1913 to 1917 without some mention of it. Anyway something that happened then that made Leo, later called Ernst, turn from science to spirituality. Possibly the only way to find out what was to write about it.

Certainly, there are plenty of eye-witness accounts, several of which were made at the time so these are very authentic. Leo’s character has already been created in earlier chapters. We know also that he became an officer. What did this sensitive young man make of the mud, the cold and the constant fear? What did he do so well that they promoted him?

Still in the trenches, and to some extent joining in the “live and let live routine”, I have him  questioning the morality of it all. He knows the Brits are just sixty metres away and that they are sons, brothers, husbands and fiancés just like his own men. I get him to write it all in a diary that Clara later reads.

Clara and the Steiner Organisation

Clara had some doubts at first about the Steiner belief system. She was born a Jewess, became a protestant and believed, along with her children and husband, more in the natural sciences than in a deity. We know that eventually she was reconciled with the Steiner beliefs – we know that she used these to encourage herself and others when she was exiled to Rexingen. Presumably they also propped her up when she later moved to Theriesenstadt and then Treblinka. So how exactly did she become convinced?  

I’ve decided that Kurt, the young boy who actually was instrumental in persuading her to go and help at the Lauenstein was also an influence in this. I’ve made him obsessed with angels. He is a frequent companion of Clara’s and gets her thinking about angels, too. It is a way in.

It was also important to decide what Clara actually did at the Lauenstein. I imagine she was a manager rather than just a worker though she wouldn’t be afraid to get her hands dirty. I have just written a scene where she is sewing missing buttons on the boys’ shirts and darning the girl’s stockings on her afternoon off. She spends some time with Kurt talking about the angels. She generally gets on very well the children and the other staff despite her doubts. We know, from what is written of her future, that she was always a pleasant and sunny character.  

Käthe

We know that she was feisty.

·         She was the first woman to gain her driving license in Munich.

·         She astounded her husband by driving in the dark.

·          She astounded Munich taxi drivers when she lifted the bonnet on the car and started fiddling with the “sparkling plugs” as she called them.

·         She cursed herself for not shooting Hitler when she had the chance – she was shown into the same anteroom as him when she had a pistol in her bag and didn’t think to use it.

·         She fled to England soon after her daughter had come here on the Kindertransport.

·         She studied natural sciences at university – at a time when not many women went to university and even fewer to study science.

·         She married her professor.

·         She endured a Nazi-enforced divorce.

·         She worked for a London-based advertising company until a few weeks  before her death at the age of 83.

·         She had the audacity to teach English to other non-native speakers yet she spoke with a strong Yiddish accent – that she learned off German Jews living in London, rather than it being natural to her.

Some of these incidents may appear in the story – if they are in the timeline – but I’m now beginning to think she deserves a book of her own.  Does this mean I have another project sorted?

But what was she like as a person and how did she become so brave?

I’m making her slightly awkward. She is a middle child, and they often are uneasy with themselves. She is frustrated to some extent because her brothers seem to her to have it all easier. I’m assuming her courage comes partly from her highly-strung nature.

I’m currently in the middle of the scene where she arrives to tell her mother she is expecting a baby.      

Parallels with the stage

It almost becomes a type of  improvisation. It’s a matter of getting into the heads of characters and seeing what they make of the situations we actually know about and deciding what else is likely to be happening.

The reader, of course, sees mainly Clara’s point of view but I’ve had to pop into the heads of the others too.

I’m certainly learning a lot!      

      

Putting in an extra thread - Rudi Lehrs

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.                 

    

A few physicists and anthroposophists in the 1920s

Many changes about the way we look at physics came to a head in the 1920s. Albert Einstein was consolidating his theory of relativity. Ernest Rutherford helped us to understand about the fundamental make-up of matter. Max Plank and Albert Einstein were questioning some previous assumptions how radioactivity and light behaved. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. The most important even in 20^th century science happened in the 1920s – quantum mechanics was born. Throughout the 1920s Robert Millikan confirmed that “cosmic radiation” existed. Towards the end of the 1920s Ernest Orlando Lawrence conceived the cyclotron. Possibly rocket science, both the discipline and the word, were also born at this time. Werner Heisenberg, already a scholar when quantum mechanics appeared in the early 1920s, by then was working towards his principle of uncertainty.

The Lehrs family rubbed shoulders with these physicists. Käthe was taught by Einstein and by the man she later married, Hans Edler. Rudi and Ernst would have come across some of the others as they pursued their studies in Berlin and Jena. Ernst Lehrs found himself at a conference in Stuttgart with Edwin Schrődinger. Schrődinger worked in Stuttgart for a while  and attended the same conference as Lehrs. Anthroposophism met head on with physics.

Rudolf Steiner, anyway, became well known for his clarity of vision. Physics was almost becoming mystical. Steiner seemed to concede that what the physicists were claiming was naturally true – and had been all along. We may these days find his lecture “Concerning Electricity” somewhat naïve. But for war-damaged and by-the-new-physics-confused Ernst Lehrs, and several other young men of his generation, Steiner was offering that something extra and a sense of home. By February 1923 he was forming his youth movement of which Ernst would become a part. We should remember that Steiner also had studied maths and physics and was particularly interested Goethe’s scientific papers, especially those dealing with colour.   

What most impressed Ernst Lehrs was the invitation from Steiner to think intuitively rather than discursively. The physicists anyway were turning the known and trusted science on its head and in fact suggesting something less natural and a little more esoteric. Why not, then, trust a master of spiritual matters more? At least he was one grounded in scientific discipline.   

World War II took its toll. Käthe used most of energy in getting herself and her daughter away from Germany but still kept an interest in science which she passed on to her daughter. Einstein went to America in 1933, where he found respect for relativity and never came back to Germany. Hans Edler became involved in designing the doodle-bug and the V2. British and American scientists built the first atom bomb. Ernst Lehrs, prevented from teaching in a German school because of his Jewish blood, went to Holland and then England as an anthroposophist rather than as a scientist.        

Albert Einstein

To most of us Albert Einstein was a slightly eccentric professor of physics, whose appearance matched the stereotype and maybe even have created it. He was immensely important to science and even those of us who know little about physics will associate the theory of relativity with that name. We may also know he was great mathematician, a good violinist and a Jew who was forced to live in exile.

It’s not difficult to find information about Einstein. The difficulty is in working out what he would have seemed like to Clara and her family.

The Lehrs, the Loewenthal and the Edler women were all interested in science. Käthe, Clara’s daughter actually studied at Berlin University whilst Einstein was still there and we know she attended a few of his lectures. It is possible that Clara and sons Ernst and Rudi may have attended some of his public lectures.

He first comes into my version of Clara’s story in 1917 just as he is about to leave the university and go and work in Switzerland. At this time he was quite ill but this was also the year that he applied the theory of relativity to the whole universe. By 1920 there were anti-relativity protests which some now believe actually had an anti-sematic agenda.

Einstein’s ideas on relativity captured the imagination of many. We know that Käthe was particularly excited about these new ideas and wanted to complete her doctorate studying under Einstein. She didn’t, of course, because she married another of her lecturers, Hans Edler.      

Einstein had a reputation for being quite witty. Perhaps his most well-known quote is “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe”. Beware however, and here is a note about doing historical research: even using Google Scholar you can find pages and pages of unverified quotes, some coming from sites with an .ac URL. They may have not come from him. ASL provides the sources for the quotes at least. Two which Clara and Käthe may have come across in the early part of their story are:

"With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."

--Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, December 24, 1919.

"It is not so important where one settles down. The best thing is to follow your instincts without too much reflection."

--Einstein to Max Born, March 3, 1920. AEA 8-146.

  

We build up our myth about the man with the help of whichever material we can find. My task here has been to understand which version of that myth Clara and her family believed.