Clara will not be daunted. Her life will not end when her beloved husband dies too young. She will become a second mother to the young children who live away from home in order to visit a rather special school. When life becomes desperate for a particular class of disabled children growing up in Nazi Germany she takes a few risks. Is her ultimate faith in the goodness of human beings a fatal flaw that leads to her tragedy, or is her story actually one of hope?
Renate Edler loves to visit her grandmother in the house on Schellberg Street. She often meets up with her friend Hani Gödde who lives nearby. This year, though, it is not to be. Just a few weeks after a night when synagogues are burned and businesses owned by Jews are looted, Renate finds out a terrible secret about her family.
Käthe wants to be a scientist. She sees herself as more than a housewife and a mother. And she is in her own eyes definitely not Jewish.
Life in Nazi Germany sees it another way however. She has to give up a promising career and her national identity. She has to leave the home she has built up for her husband and daughter. But she is not afraid of challenges. She enlists the help of a respected professor to help her fulfil her ambition, she learns how to use a gun and how to drive a car. But what will she do when she finds herself fact to face with the Führer or, indeed, with the challenges of modern life?
Face to Face with the Führer is the fourth novel in Gill James’ Schellberg cycle.
"Girl in a Smart Uniform" is the third book in the Schellberg Cycle, a
collection of novels inspired by a bundle of photocopied letters that
arrived at a small cottage in Wales in 1979. The letters give us
first-hand insights into what life was like growing up in Germany in the
1930s and 1940s.
It is the most fictional of the stories to
date, though some characters, familiar to those who have read the first
two books, appear again here. Clara Lehrs, Karl Schubert and Dr Kühn
really existed. We have a few, a very few, verifiable facts about them.
The rest we have had to find out by repeating some of their experiences
and by using the careful writer's imagination.
Gisela adores her
brother Bear, her gorgeous BDM uniform, and her little half-brother
Jens. She does her best to be a good German citizen, and is keen to help
restore Germany to its former glory. She becomes a competent and
respected BDM leader. But life begins to turn sour. Her oldest brother
Kurt can be violent, she soon realises that she is different from other
girls, she feels uncomfortable around her mother’s new lover, and there
is something not quite right about Jens. It becomes more and more
difficult to be the perfect German young woman.
We know that BDM
girls set fire to the house in Schellberg Street but got the children
out first. This story seeks to explain what motivated the girls to do
that, and what happened to them afterwards.
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