L. Annette Binder's Blog, page 2
October 28, 2020
waiting for the character
There is a perfect
dead center stillness
around which we circle
until we can't.
I've been thinking about these lines for months. They're about a character, but I don't know who yet. Guess I'll have to wait and see.
So much of working on a novel or a short story -- for me, at least -- is about living with the characters, sometimes for weeks and months, before I write anything down. One way to get closer to the characters during this period is to find out what makes them angry. Strange as it sounds, I look for the trivial things that anger them because those little things are often very revealing about the bigger issues at play in their lives and in the story.
That's why writing is solitary but not lonely, I suppose. Your head is full with other people's voices.
October 25, 2020
My father's notebook
I have only a few things from my father’s childhood. Long after he'd passed away, I found his notebook from his time in primary school, when he was nine years old. Students at the time learned the Sütterlin variant of German cursive. The repetition of the words they had to write — Göbbels, Göbbels, Göbbels, Göring, Göring, Göring — chilled me as I looked at the pages. Nazism percolated through every aspect of society, down to the words used in cursive practice. I thought of all the boyish energy suppressed for order in the classroom, for acquiescence and obedience to a murderous regime. I thought, too, of how the Nazis tapped into young boys' desire to be heroic and harnessed this impulse to serve the regime's hateful goals.
Another source of inspiration was Alexsandr Scriabin’s Nocturne for the Left Hand, op. 9, No. 2. I'm not a musical person (as my piano teacher can confirm) and this piece is a little heavier than I normally like, but something about the composition moved me. I thought of Max’s comrade Fischer when I first heard it. Fischer has lost his right arm while fighting on the Eastern front. An accomplished pianist, all he can think of when he returns home is his piano. “I’m starting to play again,” he tells Etta. “I’ve got music already.” The composer Scriabin wrote this remarkable piece after he’d damaged his right hand from overuse. The doctors told him he’d never perform again, but he proved them wrong. And he took misfortune and turned it into something beautiful. Listen to it here.
I collected many more items during the eight years I wrote and revised The Vanishing Sky . A 1939 railway map of Germany, the yellowed 1946 Jahresbuch from the city of Würzburg that details the aerial bombardment and destruction of the city in remarkable detail, the diaries of my great-grandfather from the years between the wars (as painstakingly transcribed by my Aunt Ute). At some level writing a story is borrowing other people’s eyes for a little while so the writer — and hopefully the reader, too — can see the world differently. All these things helped me see the world through my characters’ eyes, and I was a little sad when I finished writing and had to set them all aside.
Another source of inspiration was Alexsandr Scriabin’s Nocturne for the Left Hand, op. 9, No. 2. I'm not a musical person (as my piano teacher can confirm) and this piece is a little heavier than I normally like, but something about the composition moved me. I thought of Max’s comrade Fischer when I first heard it. Fischer has lost his right arm while fighting on the Eastern front. An accomplished pianist, all he can think of when he returns home is his piano. “I’m starting to play again,” he tells Etta. “I’ve got music already.” The composer Scriabin wrote this remarkable piece after he’d damaged his right hand from overuse. The doctors told him he’d never perform again, but he proved them wrong. And he took misfortune and turned it into something beautiful. Listen to it here.
I collected many more items during the eight years I wrote and revised The Vanishing Sky . A 1939 railway map of Germany, the yellowed 1946 Jahresbuch from the city of Würzburg that details the aerial bombardment and destruction of the city in remarkable detail, the diaries of my great-grandfather from the years between the wars (as painstakingly transcribed by my Aunt Ute). At some level writing a story is borrowing other people’s eyes for a little while so the writer — and hopefully the reader, too — can see the world differently. All these things helped me see the world through my characters’ eyes, and I was a little sad when I finished writing and had to set them all aside.
My father's notebook
I have only a few things from my father’s childhood. Long after he'd passed away, I found his notebook from his time in primary school, when he was nine years old. Students at the time learned the Sütterlin variant of German cursive. The repetition of the words they had to write — Göbbels, Göggels, Göbbels, Göring, Göring, Göring — chilled me as I looked at the pages. Nazism percolated through every aspect of society, down to the words used in cursive practice. I thought of all the boyish energy suppressed for order in the classroom, for acquiescence and obedience to a murderous regime. I thought, too, of how the Nazis tapped into young boys' desire to be heroic and harnessed this impulse to serve the regime's hateful goals.
Another source of inspiration was Alexsandr Scriabin’s Nocturne for the Left Hand, op. 9, No. 2. I'm not a musical person (as my piano teacher can confirm) and this piece is a little heavier than I normally like, but something about the composition moved me. I thought of Max’s comrade Fischer when I first heard it. Fischer has lost his right arm while fighting on the Eastern front. An accomplished pianist, all he can think of when he returns home is his piano. “I’m starting to play again,” he tells Etta. “I’ve got music already.” The composer Scriabin wrote this remarkable piece after he’d damaged his right hand from overuse. The doctors told him he’d never perform again, but he proved them wrong. And he took misfortune and turned it into something beautiful. Listen to it here.
I collected many more items during the eight years I wrote and revised The Vanishing Sky . A 1939 railway map of Germany, the yellowed 1946 Jahresbuch from the city of Würzburg that details the aerial bombardment and destruction of the city in remarkable detail, the diaries of my great-grandfather from the years between the wars (as painstakingly transcribed by my Aunt Ute). At some level writing a story is borrowing other people’s eyes for a little while so the writer — and hopefully the reader, too — can see the world differently. All these things helped me see the world through my characters’ eyes, and I was a little sad when I finished writing and had to set them all aside.
Another source of inspiration was Alexsandr Scriabin’s Nocturne for the Left Hand, op. 9, No. 2. I'm not a musical person (as my piano teacher can confirm) and this piece is a little heavier than I normally like, but something about the composition moved me. I thought of Max’s comrade Fischer when I first heard it. Fischer has lost his right arm while fighting on the Eastern front. An accomplished pianist, all he can think of when he returns home is his piano. “I’m starting to play again,” he tells Etta. “I’ve got music already.” The composer Scriabin wrote this remarkable piece after he’d damaged his right hand from overuse. The doctors told him he’d never perform again, but he proved them wrong. And he took misfortune and turned it into something beautiful. Listen to it here.
I collected many more items during the eight years I wrote and revised The Vanishing Sky . A 1939 railway map of Germany, the yellowed 1946 Jahresbuch from the city of Würzburg that details the aerial bombardment and destruction of the city in remarkable detail, the diaries of my great-grandfather from the years between the wars (as painstakingly transcribed by my Aunt Ute). At some level writing a story is borrowing other people’s eyes for a little while so the writer — and hopefully the reader, too — can see the world differently. All these things helped me see the world through my characters’ eyes, and I was a little sad when I finished writing and had to set them all aside.
July 24, 2020
Objects that Inspire -- #2
In the Car with Abdulla — Through the World! — I found this book in Las Vegas when my husband and I drove out there to look for supplies for his metalworking. While my husband was looking at steel, I came across a vendor selling curiosities from WWII.
This book tugged at me, though I didn’t know why at the time. Sponsored by the Abdulla Cigarette Company, the book is filled with picture cards of two women in a convertible traveling the world. The book’s original owner had meticulously collected each of the 160 geographic cards showing where those glamorous ladies were heading in their convertible. Scotland, Indochina, Malta, Greece, New Hampshire and Arkansas and Wisconsin, there was no apparent order or rationale behind the places they went to see.
As I wrote the scene with Ingrid going through her dead husband’s things, the Abdulla book found its place in the story. This book also gave me a way to understand Georg, who longed only to escape. These places would have been beautiful to him and as unreachable as the moon.
This book tugged at me, though I didn’t know why at the time. Sponsored by the Abdulla Cigarette Company, the book is filled with picture cards of two women in a convertible traveling the world. The book’s original owner had meticulously collected each of the 160 geographic cards showing where those glamorous ladies were heading in their convertible. Scotland, Indochina, Malta, Greece, New Hampshire and Arkansas and Wisconsin, there was no apparent order or rationale behind the places they went to see.
As I wrote the scene with Ingrid going through her dead husband’s things, the Abdulla book found its place in the story. This book also gave me a way to understand Georg, who longed only to escape. These places would have been beautiful to him and as unreachable as the moon.
July 23, 2020
Objects that Inspire -- #1
Writing The Vanishing Sky was in some ways an act of time travel. One way I found my way back to Etta, Max and Georg’s world was often tied to physical objects that I came across as I was working. These objects helped me see my characters more clearly and some of them even changed the course of the story.
The object that probably inspired me most was the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. I kept one of these coins on my desk for many days as I wrote. There is something timeless about its design — the female figure draped in the flag and holding her branches of laurel and oak.
The younger Huber son, Georg, uses these coins for his magic tricks and carries them in his pocket after he runs away from his post on the Western front. For someone like Georg who has an eye for beautiful things, how irresistible these Ami coins must have been, especially when compared with the German coins of the era, with their eagles and jowly portraits of von Hindenburg.
But to him the coin is more than a pretty object. People are vanishing all around him, and Georg longs for the chance to vanish, too -- from the Reich and the dangers it poses. He wants to be palmed away the way he palms his coins. The coin on my desk was a reminder of the dangers he faced on his journey and how much he wanted only to come home.
The object that probably inspired me most was the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. I kept one of these coins on my desk for many days as I wrote. There is something timeless about its design — the female figure draped in the flag and holding her branches of laurel and oak.
The younger Huber son, Georg, uses these coins for his magic tricks and carries them in his pocket after he runs away from his post on the Western front. For someone like Georg who has an eye for beautiful things, how irresistible these Ami coins must have been, especially when compared with the German coins of the era, with their eagles and jowly portraits of von Hindenburg.
But to him the coin is more than a pretty object. People are vanishing all around him, and Georg longs for the chance to vanish, too -- from the Reich and the dangers it poses. He wants to be palmed away the way he palms his coins. The coin on my desk was a reminder of the dangers he faced on his journey and how much he wanted only to come home.
March 20, 2020
In German lands fresh graves
August von Galen, the bishop of the German city of Münster, saw the evil of the Nazi regime from the very beginning of its rise to power. As early as 1935 he warned, "there are in German lands fresh graves" where the victims of Nazism were buried. In August 1941, he openly condemned the Nazi T4 program under which mentally ill and physically disabled Germans were murdered. Again and again he encouraged Catholics and Germans in general to do the right thing -- "if like those saints we are put to the test,.. we want, like them, to die rather than to sin."
Von Galen wasn't the only German who dared to speak out against the regime. Willi Graf and the White Rose group, Georg Groscurth and the European Union resistance group, Georg Häfner and Walter Klingenbeck, there are many, many more. But for every von Galen or Oskar Schindler there were thousands of decent, compassionate German civilians who saw what was happening and failed to resist, who did little or nothing at all.
How to understand this failure? In his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen makes the compelling argument that genocide in Germany was the direct result of a virulent eliminationist racial anti-Semitism that motivated ordinary Germans to participate in and/or condone the slaughter of Jews in Germany and abroad. Goldhagen notes that even Catholics like von Galen who protested the T4 program generally failed to oppose the regime's treatment of the Jews with the same outspokenness.
The German population wasn't a monolith, of course. There were those who were steeped in anti-Semitism, but there were plenty of people who weren't. And yet even the Germans who weren't anti-Semites generally failed to resist the regime. They kept their heads down and went about their lives. Why? Why would decent and honorable people behave in this way?
We will never really know. The people who were adults during that terrible time are all dead now. And even if they were still alive they would be unlikely to give us meaningful answers. Some were no doubt afraid. The regime, after all, killed those who dared to dissent. Others may have been in denial about what was really happening. Fiction may be the closest we can come to putting ourselves in their place.
Von Galen wasn't the only German who dared to speak out against the regime. Willi Graf and the White Rose group, Georg Groscurth and the European Union resistance group, Georg Häfner and Walter Klingenbeck, there are many, many more. But for every von Galen or Oskar Schindler there were thousands of decent, compassionate German civilians who saw what was happening and failed to resist, who did little or nothing at all.
How to understand this failure? In his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen makes the compelling argument that genocide in Germany was the direct result of a virulent eliminationist racial anti-Semitism that motivated ordinary Germans to participate in and/or condone the slaughter of Jews in Germany and abroad. Goldhagen notes that even Catholics like von Galen who protested the T4 program generally failed to oppose the regime's treatment of the Jews with the same outspokenness.
The German population wasn't a monolith, of course. There were those who were steeped in anti-Semitism, but there were plenty of people who weren't. And yet even the Germans who weren't anti-Semites generally failed to resist the regime. They kept their heads down and went about their lives. Why? Why would decent and honorable people behave in this way?
We will never really know. The people who were adults during that terrible time are all dead now. And even if they were still alive they would be unlikely to give us meaningful answers. Some were no doubt afraid. The regime, after all, killed those who dared to dissent. Others may have been in denial about what was really happening. Fiction may be the closest we can come to putting ourselves in their place.
For more information about Bishop von Galen, check out Lion of Münster.
March 7, 2020
for my mother
Lacuna
This poem will soon be available online. I'll provide a link when it's available.
This poem will soon be available online. I'll provide a link when it's available.
March 6, 2020
Kriegskind
My father was born in 1930. He was a Kriegskind -- a child of war -- old enough to be called into the Hitler Youth to defend his country but still a schoolboy. His was a generation raised on a hateful ideology and indoctrinated from their youngest years. His father was the head schoolteacher in a small town, and he had extremely high expectations for both his sons. My father struggled under these constraints.
These struggles continued even after the war ended. My father's older brother had more or less finished his education before being sent to fight, and his younger sister was just a baby at the end of the war and would grow up and go to school and find a life for herself. But my father was part of what I call the lost boys. Boys (and girls) who were too young to participate -- or even understand -- the evils of the regime during the early war years but old enough to be called upon to defend it at the end. They came back to cities and schools destroyed by bombs, but their dislocation was psychological and not just physical. How could they resume their lives when everything they'd been taught was now suspect?
My father never talked about these things. He died when I was sixteen, and I can't recall a single anecdote he ever told me about his childhood. But his story (gleaned from my mother and my aunt and from old childhood photos) inspired me to write my novel. He's a mystery to me and always has been. But we're all mysteries to each other, and sometimes our imagination is all we have to fill in the gaps.
These struggles continued even after the war ended. My father's older brother had more or less finished his education before being sent to fight, and his younger sister was just a baby at the end of the war and would grow up and go to school and find a life for herself. But my father was part of what I call the lost boys. Boys (and girls) who were too young to participate -- or even understand -- the evils of the regime during the early war years but old enough to be called upon to defend it at the end. They came back to cities and schools destroyed by bombs, but their dislocation was psychological and not just physical. How could they resume their lives when everything they'd been taught was now suspect?
My father never talked about these things. He died when I was sixteen, and I can't recall a single anecdote he ever told me about his childhood. But his story (gleaned from my mother and my aunt and from old childhood photos) inspired me to write my novel. He's a mystery to me and always has been. But we're all mysteries to each other, and sometimes our imagination is all we have to fill in the gaps.
Alfons Heck's memoir provides a fascinating -- and disturbing -- account of his time in the Hitler Youth and its long-term effects on his life. I have additional sources about the Hitler Youth on my website.
March 2, 2020
The Allied Bombing of Würzburg
On March 16, 1945, the British Royal Air Force bombed the city of Würzburg in Germany. They dropped almost 600 tons of bombs on the city. More than 4,000 people died, and the inner city with its half-timbered buildings was destroyed. Churches, schools, hospitals and houses -- above all houses -- were reduced to rubble, and the fires were still burning three days later.
Würzburg wasn't an industrial or military center, but the RAF wasn't targeting industry at this point. They were aiming squarely at civilians. They wanted to destroy entire cities and the people in them, and so they leveled Würzburg -- and Dresden and Köln and Hamburg and many, many more.
Some say the bombings were immoral and motivated by vengeance. Others say the Germans had it coming. The reality is, of course, more nuanced. I'm working on a longer piece about the bombing, but it's hard for me to think about it with any detachment. The statistics and the photos of the rubble are abstractions now. The intervening year have stripped them of their power. But I think about my mother, who was only five at the time. She's eighty now, but she still remembers her father coming home bloodied from the bombs.
Würzburg wasn't an industrial or military center, but the RAF wasn't targeting industry at this point. They were aiming squarely at civilians. They wanted to destroy entire cities and the people in them, and so they leveled Würzburg -- and Dresden and Köln and Hamburg and many, many more.
Some say the bombings were immoral and motivated by vengeance. Others say the Germans had it coming. The reality is, of course, more nuanced. I'm working on a longer piece about the bombing, but it's hard for me to think about it with any detachment. The statistics and the photos of the rubble are abstractions now. The intervening year have stripped them of their power. But I think about my mother, who was only five at the time. She's eighty now, but she still remembers her father coming home bloodied from the bombs.
February 28, 2020
some stories start as poems
Every story I write starts with a character. And sometimes the characters first come to me in a poem. My short story "Galatea" started as a poem --
Paradiso
Himalayan Black
Indian Aurora, this forest of stones
has many names.
The sun warms them
when it shines.
Like your hands, remember.
Always cold like the stones.
Remember how I could
warm them with mine.
It took months for me to figure out who this character was and why she was in a cemetery and whose hands she used to warm with her own. Once I figured these things out, I could finally write the story.
How I figured out the story is sort of funny, and it begins with a pimple. Yes, I had a pimple on my chin, and instead of letting it get better on its own, I took some lemon juice and dabbed it on my skin. I remembered this from my childhood (maybe it's a German thing), but I forgot something important. You're supposed to dilute the lemon juice. I put a lot of pure lemon juice on my skin and when my skin started to look irritated, I wanted to disinfect it with some hydrogen peroxide, but I accidentally put rubbing alcohol on it instead.
Now I had a burn. A real burn that looked pretty nasty, and because my regular old-school dermatologist was on vacation, I ended up in the office of a very fancy dermatologist I had never visited before.
I felt underdressed the moment I stepped into his office. It was like another world in there. The light was gentle and vaguely amber-colored. There were phalaenopsis stalks submerged in cylinders of water and relaxing music on speakers I couldn't see. The receptionist and technicians were all beautiful and slightly android-like, with their oval faces and skin that had no freckles or moles. And as I sat in the empty waiting room surrounded by posters for Juvederm and eyelash conditioners, the character of Carol came to me. She was absolutely real in that moment. She was sitting right beside me, and I began to understand who she was and why she was in the cemetery.
Carol had been at a mall with her daughter Jenny, and in a moment of distraction she lost track of Jenny and Jeny vanished. Twenty years later, thirty years later, and her girl is still gone. The city has changed and Jenny's classmates have all grown up, and Carol wants to stop time. She wants to stay the same so that Jenny will still know her face when she comes back home. People look at Carol and assume she's trying to stop the clock because of her vanity. They think they know what's at play when they have no idea at all.
Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is likely to be true. And that might be right in areas like physics and chemistry, but it doesn't apply to matters of the heart. Writing has taught me this. We are strange and complicated creatures, and time and time again our hearts defy explanation. And so I wait for more characters to appear and tell me their secrets.
Paradiso
Himalayan Black
Indian Aurora, this forest of stones
has many names.
The sun warms them
when it shines.
Like your hands, remember.
Always cold like the stones.
Remember how I could
warm them with mine.
It took months for me to figure out who this character was and why she was in a cemetery and whose hands she used to warm with her own. Once I figured these things out, I could finally write the story.
How I figured out the story is sort of funny, and it begins with a pimple. Yes, I had a pimple on my chin, and instead of letting it get better on its own, I took some lemon juice and dabbed it on my skin. I remembered this from my childhood (maybe it's a German thing), but I forgot something important. You're supposed to dilute the lemon juice. I put a lot of pure lemon juice on my skin and when my skin started to look irritated, I wanted to disinfect it with some hydrogen peroxide, but I accidentally put rubbing alcohol on it instead.
Now I had a burn. A real burn that looked pretty nasty, and because my regular old-school dermatologist was on vacation, I ended up in the office of a very fancy dermatologist I had never visited before.
I felt underdressed the moment I stepped into his office. It was like another world in there. The light was gentle and vaguely amber-colored. There were phalaenopsis stalks submerged in cylinders of water and relaxing music on speakers I couldn't see. The receptionist and technicians were all beautiful and slightly android-like, with their oval faces and skin that had no freckles or moles. And as I sat in the empty waiting room surrounded by posters for Juvederm and eyelash conditioners, the character of Carol came to me. She was absolutely real in that moment. She was sitting right beside me, and I began to understand who she was and why she was in the cemetery.
Carol had been at a mall with her daughter Jenny, and in a moment of distraction she lost track of Jenny and Jeny vanished. Twenty years later, thirty years later, and her girl is still gone. The city has changed and Jenny's classmates have all grown up, and Carol wants to stop time. She wants to stay the same so that Jenny will still know her face when she comes back home. People look at Carol and assume she's trying to stop the clock because of her vanity. They think they know what's at play when they have no idea at all.
Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is likely to be true. And that might be right in areas like physics and chemistry, but it doesn't apply to matters of the heart. Writing has taught me this. We are strange and complicated creatures, and time and time again our hearts defy explanation. And so I wait for more characters to appear and tell me their secrets.
