Fables & Lies:
* Goodreads Giveaway *
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/442105-fables-lies-a-wwii-novel-based-on-a-true-story
Praise for Fables & Lies:
"A powerful and heartbreaking story set in war-torn Berlin, FABLES & LIES charts the slow dawning horror of a young woman as she realises all she has been taught about Hitler and the Third Reich is a lie. Impeccably researched and sensitively rendered, Elisabeth Storrs has shone a light on little-known aspects of life in Germany under the Nazi regime."
~ Kate Forsyth, bestselling author of Bitter Greens
"Elisabeth Storrs has indeed broken the mould by writing 'from the other side'. Evocative, detailed and heart-rending as the heroine journeys through disillusion and danger in the Third Reich."
~ Alison Morton, author of the Roma Nova series
"A chilling and meticulously researched journey into the shadow world of the Ahnenerbe. Blending historical rigor with gripping fiction, FABLES & LIES reminds us of the devastating consequences when history is twisted to serve power."
~ Leah Kaminsky, author of The Hollow Bones
Journey to Enlightenment under the Nazi Regime
by Elisabeth Storrs
Thanks so much for inviting me to write a post about my protagonist, Freyja Bremer, in Fables & Lies. By way of background for the inspiration for the book, I am a great lover of the ancient world. In my reading, I came across the story of the archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who not only proved Troy existed but also discovered a fabulous cache of gold there known as Priam’s Treasure.
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| Priam's Treasure. Public domain. |
During WWII, the treasure was kept in the Pre and Early History Museum situated next door to Gestapo Headquarters and SS House in Berlin. I was intrigued with the journey of this priceless trove which was smuggled out of Turkey then “bequeathed” to the German people by Schliemann. Now it is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow after the Soviets plundered it in the fall of Berlin. Its ownership remains hotly debated by all three countries.
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| Diadem display. Pushkin Museum. Public domain. |
When researching the Trojan gold, I discovered the little-known story of German museum curators who protected their nation’s (and the world’s) treasures from constant aerial bombardment. As such, I wanted to tell their tale which contrasts with the Nazis plundering both private and public collections across Europe.
Freyja Bremer is a patriotic museum assistant raised on Nazi dogma. Through her love affair with Cambridge educated archaeologist, Darien Lessing, her eyes are opened to the rot beneath the Regime’s lies, as they both strive to protect Priam’s Treasure and other antiquities. Intertwined is Freyja’s forced marriage to Kaspar Voigt, one of Himmler’s racial studies experts, and her quest to discover what her husband’s malicious research entails. As such, Freyja’s safekeeping efforts and her journey to enlightenment form the spine of the novel. However, I also explore the promulgation of the “Aryan Myth” by fanatical SS scholars who exhorted Germans to believe in their superiority. It is a deep dive into the psyche of the Nazis, their skill at propaganda, and their warped racial studies program that justified conquest, dispossession and genocide.
Fables & Lies is written from the viewpoint of the “everyday” German surviving in Berlin throughout the entire war. The reader experiences the war not from the battlefield, but from within the fragile walls of daily life. The book presents the cocooned world in which Germans were trapped where everything they heard was through the filter of Nazi censorship. Only those who risked the death penalty for listening to foreign radio heard news of the outside world.
Moral dilemmas
I love writing books that depict strong female protagonists trapped within a man's world while finding their own strength to navigate constraints and overcome them. Fables & Lies poses this basic question - what does it cost a woman to survive with her conscience intact inside a world designed to crush her? Freyja answers this inside the collapse of Nazi Germany, standing in a Berlin museum trying to protect the past from the madmen destroying the present.
When the reader first meets Freyja, she has been inculcated with Nazi propaganda throughout her schooling including the pseudo-science relating to Aryan prehistory. It was a huge challenge to write the book from the perspective of a “child of the Reich”. Hitler understood the importance of indoctrinating children. The education system was immediately attacked in 1933 with only Nazi teachers employed. The curriculum was limited, with physical fitness a priority. Girls were destined to be wives and mothers, boys to be soldiers.
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| Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2000-0110-500, BDM, Gymnastikvorführung |
Nazis worked hard to alienate children from parents who may have harbored anti-fascist sentiment, actively encouraging them to inform on them. And there was a seductive element to teaching children they were superior due to the “Aryan Myth” which asserted they were part of the “Master Race” who were “bearers of culture” compared to “sub-humans” who “destroyed culture”, i.e. Travelers, Slavs, People of Color and, most particularly, Jews.
Knowing this, I could not easily gloss over Freyja’s indoctrination as many novels do when depicting young German protagonists. However, I looked carefully at the preconditions leading to the rise of Hitler and developed Freyja’s backstory first to work out how I could create an empathetic character who is likely to listen to the heretical views of an outsider like Darien. At 21, Freyja represents a cohort that was exposed to liberal education before falling under the domination of Nazi dogma in their impressionable teens. She also has the benefit of living with her father who acts as a moral compass due to his Christian beliefs. Additionally, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in her about the future offered to women under the National Socialist life path. The growing repressions of the Regime also unsettle her, especially when she sees her young neighbor beaten by the Gestapo for playing Jazz music.
More importantly, Freyja is fiercely loyal. She retains her integrity by remaining silent about her father’s resistance activities, and subsequently allows herself to be trapped in marriage to Kaspar Voigt in order to protect him. In doing so, I hopefully show Freyja is innately caring and unwilling to betray those whom she loves.
Nevertheless, to reveal the operations of the Himmler’s scholars, I was faced with the ethical dilemma of first marrying the brainwashed Freyja to the ethnologist, Kaspar Voigt, who sees her as the ideal Aryan wife. I saw it as the only credible plot device to reveal his despicable racial studies research. It was disturbing to write the earlier scenes where Freyja is enthralled by Kaspar who is a famous explorer when they first meet. I knew I was spouting dangerous rhetoric but, in doing so, I also reveal how persuasive esoteric Nazi beliefs were to those insulated within its realm. As Primo Levi said: “When understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary.”
The stakes are high for Freyja throughout the novel, too. Apart from showing physical courage in safekeeping exhibits under aerial bombardment, she also shows bravery in assisting a Jewish doctor and his wife (Darien’s sister), and in secretly working undercover as an SS wife to find out what Kaspar’s research involves. As a result, she is vulnerable to the risk of execution should her quiet resistance be discovered. Moreover, Freyja is constantly faced with the need to compromise in order to survive. Hopefully I’ve conveyed the complexity of her predicament– give her little finger to the devil but pray Satan doesn’t take her entire hand.
I hope you’ll enjoy learning a lot of little-known stories in Fables & Lies, a novel that demonstrates history is never neutral, and courage can be found in the quietest acts of defiance.
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