The House on Schellberg Street, Edition 2
- Submitting institution
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University of Salford, The
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 45045
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Chapeltown Books
- ISBN
- 9781910542231
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This novel is a response to letters written between 1938-1947 by young German women. The letters were transposed and translated. This process then suggested the three interweaving stories. It enabled me to uncover an original bystander/perpetrator point of view of the Holocaust. I became aware of two issues that were discussed and defined regularly: duty and camaraderie.
All three stories are based on facts but were missing details. Can fiction uncover truth? Can we find out what we don’t know by applying what we do know? I used fictional devices – close third person narrative, inner monologue, character-voiced dialogue, use of senses – to identify what may have happened. I discuss this in my paper, 'Professional Liars and Truthmongers' in New Writing Volume 14, Issue 2 (December 2016). I identify here also three tools for the writer of historical fiction: primary resources like the letters, embodied experience (such as staying in a confined space and travelling long distances in an uncomfortable train), and the imagination which is aided by using the writers’ tools described above. I used all three in producing this novel.
I further investigated the sense of duty and camaraderie by studying Das Deutsche Mädel, the magazine that supported the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the compulsory group for girls aged fourteen to seventeen in Nazi Germany. This primary resource helped me to further build the bystander/ perpetrator voice for the characters in the novel. This is discussed further in ‘Children, Cooking, Church, Campfires and Beautiful German Lasses: How the magazine Das Deutsche Mädel built young German women 1933-1944’ (Pied Piper, 2014).
I continue to write fiction about this era and further examine the viewpoint of young women in Nazi Germany by using the three areas of creative process to uncover history at a blog devoted to the project.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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