1. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Writing Atrocities - Thoughts?

    Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by Commandante Lemming, Feb 23, 2017.

    So, not so much a question, but had a writing experience that I was wondering how other people handle.

    I have an on-and-off Urban Fantasy side project that I've mentioned a few times that deals with anti-Semitim and white nationalism using Nordic Mythology (specifically Valkyries as portrayed by Wagner) and a liberal sprinkling of Jewish mysticism. I knew eventually, if I was dealing with immortal characters and historic anti-Semitism, I was eventually going to have to confront the Holocaust in a big way. So, I re-wrote the prologue last night so that instead of starting with a flashback to the mythical burning of Valhalla, the story opens at Auschwitz in 1943. And since I wanted suspense, I needed a character who didn't actually know what was going on with the magic system - so I wrote the whole thing through the point of view of a pretty despicable SS officer (who dies a particularly painful and darkly ironic death at the end of the scene).

    The problem with that is that I now have four pages that contain some pretty gross images, told through eyes of someone who actually supports what's going on and is himself deeply anti-Semitic. And I'm trying to figure out how to make this thing simultaneously respectful, semi-palatable, and not whitewashed. If I put too many grisly images on the page, I feel like I'm being gross and disrespectful - if I put too few then I'm minimizing what's actually going on. Same with the point of view - I don't want to twist the knife too hard in terms of his anti-Semitic thoughts, but if I'm writing from the point of view of someone who is personally involved in mass-murder at the ground level, I can't really "lighten him up" (I almost had him think about his kids back home and then cut it because I didn't want to humanize him too much). The way the first draft came out, it feels like I didn't dwell long enough on how bad it is and glossed over some of the really horrifying stuff, but it's still pretty disgusting as is, and I don't want to turn it up even farther - or make it longer, because I don't want to drag out the horror or slow the pace.

    So, anyone else here ever written scenes that take place during really bad atrocities (especially historical) and how do you handle that? I practice Judaism myself, so I have enough grounding in the history to give it a shot, but actually putting the narrative on the page presents a LOT of problems in terms of judgement and technique.

    (Oh, and it does end with justice - I leveled a crematorium in a massive explosion and had the Nazi die a fiery death at the hands of a very angry Valkyrie. I've known for a while that blowing up that building was going to be a big emotional centerpiece, but putting it on-page makes me wonder if I just shouldn't use the setting at all.)
     
  2. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    I haven't written much about it (though I most definitely have one simmering) but I was a Holocaust historian in school. Like you said, the tonal balance is extremely tricky. What have you done for research? If you haven't read Primo Levi I would start here. He is the go-to guy for Holocaust memoirs, namely because he doesn't emphasize the brutality so much as the inexplicable milieu that led him to Auschwitz. Personally, I would find the SS officer infinitely harder to portray. There is a tendency to chalk up the actions of the SS to an inhuman mad-dog thirst for blood, and while there were plenty of Eichmann/Himmler/Heydrich personalities in the death camp ranks, the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of SS were just as sickened by what they were doing as we are looking back at it seventy years later. And this isn't a guilt/regret thing on their parts either. These are primary sources encoded during the Nazi rise to power and both before and during the implementation of the Final Solution as official "legal" Reich policy. For this you should read "Ordinary Men" but John Browning, which blew the fucking roof off Nazi historiography when it came out (late 90s? early 00s?). It might not apply too much to your particular SS character, who by virtue of his position in a death camp would mean he would have been extremely vetted before he acquired his position, but I wouldn't hesitate to humanize him if that's a direction you wish to pursue. The death camps were implemented mainly because the Reich found the mass executions in the East inhumane to the SS einsatzgruppen who were asked (not forced-this is crucial) to carry them out. That and they kept running out of bullets and couldn't clean the skull fragments from their rifle barrels fast enough to make the executions efficient. Think about that for a second.

    (side note: If you've read "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen you will get an opposite portrayal of Nazi motivations. And while he wasn't exactly discredited, Goldhagen was sharply criticized by the historical community for his conclusions that the Holocaust was a result of inherent Jew-hate on the part of the Nazis. I believe it nearly ruined his career, but I've been out of the academic game for awhile, so opinion may have shifted back into his camp)
     
  3. Robert Musil

    Robert Musil Comparativist Contributor

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    I wonder if Stephen King's advice about horror--"there's nothing more frightening than a closed door"--applies here? In the sense of, maybe you can achieve the properly horrifying effect without having to go into too much graphic detail. It's a little hard for me to get more specific than that without having the passage itself to look at. If you want to put it up in the workshop I'd take a look.
     
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  4. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    No, I don't think so.

    'Following orders' held sway for many years. These people believed 'they were right, and actually doing the right thing, and still do, but they lost' is popular at the moment, lots of parallels being drawn - on Radio 4 roundtable - our descent blah blah Brexit, Trump..
     
  5. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Actually I've dealt with a bit of this exact subject in grad school lately. Even the most brainwashed SS got physically ill from shooting people (which is one big reason the Nazis devised mechanized killing). You can suspend morals to a very large degree but after a while instinct starts kicking in, and there is an instinct-level physiological response to that kind of violence, even if you've been intellectually convinced that what you are doing is permissable. You can totally believe that what you're doing is okay, but you're still eventually going to start throwing up.
     
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  6. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah I haven't gone deep on this piece of it yet because it's a small piece of the larger story - most of which takes place in the present day, and most of the research I've already done is into medieval Rabbinic history where the character's backstory is grounded. I do have a pretty good layman's knowledge, and part of the reason I wrote this part now is that the history class I'm taking for grad school has been in WWII for the last few weeks, so I've spent part of that time neck deep in the operations of Nazi high politics and the various personality differences between the likes of Hitler/Himmler/Goering/etc (not to mention Stalin, Molotov, Musolini, and the rest of the parade of horribles).

    For the story, I'm trying to figure out how deep I need to go for a four page flashback - especially when I have 900 years of back story for an immortal protagonist. So this is a really key, climactic moment, but this is all the time I'd be spending with this setting and this character (I might show more of WWII but this would be it for the camps - my heroine spent most of the war in the Vilna ghetto and the villain would have spent a lot of it in Nazi high command - this is one 24 hour period where they intersect).
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2017
  7. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    I may put part of it up after at leaat one more rethink. The closed door thing is something I tried to use here, and it does work, although I ran into the difficulty in not making it flippant when the POV character knows exactly what's going on behind the door and thinks it's fine.
     
  8. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    Very true. And this was the mantra used by those who wished to exculpate themselves after that fact. However, the evidence paints a different picture. The commandos of the einsatzgruppen were given the option to beg off the extermination details if they couldn't handle it. Very few did (mostly because of an adherence to duty, Stanley milgram, etc...), but those who took the out were not disciplined in any way. This is only for the SS operating in the East. The death camps were a different story, and though the Nazis kept excellent records for us historians to pick through later, many of the primary sources from the camps were destroyed.
     
  9. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    I didn't write my post properly...but I'm only spouting a mix of 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' + some modern theory off the radio...but I can't unravel the difference between the two, so a dead end. It's late now.

    I was only irked by a sense of a writer 'reeling himself in.' Those messianic moments in the bedroom produce your best stuff, I don't really get @CLs way of thinking. We're just different writers. Thanks for your interesting responses, @HP et al, @CL :)
     
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  10. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    Almost even more chilling...
     
  11. BayView

    BayView Huh. Interesting. Contributor

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    Is it essential that he thinks it's fine? Could you show him struggling with it, and doing the wrong thing anyway?
     
  12. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Not and have him in the position he's in (for which he would have been vetted for extreme ideological conformity). I threw it to my writing group tonight and got some good feedback. Will probably let it breathe for a while because if I edit it the next step is to do a bunch more research on things that I'm only going to research if I have to (like how long it takes to unload a train full of starving, frightened people). For now it's a good placeholder and I'll come back to it later with more rigor if it ends up staying as the beginning.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2017
  13. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    Depends on how many dead have built up around the door and how frozen or advanced the rigor mortis is. And, Lord, I wish I didn't know the answer to that.
     
  14. Pinkymcfiddle

    Pinkymcfiddle Banned

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    As moustache said, the scariest stuff is created in your imagination. Leave it off screen.
     
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  15. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    Scene 1,

    @CL approaches door

    MUSIC OF DOOM

    CLOSE

    Scene 2

    @CL walks through woodland

    MUSIC OF DOOM

    CLOSE

    Scene 3

    @CL strolls toward fairground

    FAIRGROUND MUSIC

    ...

    The End
     
  16. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Ummm.....okay :p
     
  17. Commandante Lemming

    Commandante Lemming Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah that was one of those things where it ends up on the page....and then you realize that aside from the subject being revolting, you now have a very technical problem with the blocking and the timeline - and that resolving that technical timing issue requires some really disgusting research.

    [​IMG]
     
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  18. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    I did entirely too much research into the mechanics of the death camps for a flash piece I wrote, and I'm horribly fascinated by the mentality of the people who ran the places. Eichmann in Jerusalem, which dealt with how the victims were brought to the camps, turned out to be completely different than I expected. Death Dealer, the autobiography (ish) of Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, on the other hand, scared the hell out of me. There's a point in one of the appendices where he condemns the Holocaust, and you start to feel that he's realized the error of his ways, until he says that it set back the "cause" of anti-Semitism, and that that setback is a Bad Thing. I don't know what the percentages were, but you could realistically portray your SS Mann as enthusiastic, duty-bound, sickened, or anywhere in between.
     

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