Fictional Autobiography

by Andrew Denning

“When students play with history through the eyes of first-person avatars and interact with virtual historical worlds, they build knowledge through experience and share their creations with one another and the world. Recognizing the potential of historical play, let’s join in the fun.”

Andre Denning, “Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary,” The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 1, March 2021.

Full Assignment

You will compose a fictional autobiography of 8-12 pages, making reference as necessary to readings assigned in Weeks 6-10.

 

The Setup:

It is January 1933. You are the 26 year-old child of Hans and Greta Schneider [choose your sex, give yourself a name]. Hans, like his father before him, is a trained tailor with his own shop in Munich, and Greta keeps the books and serves as the main interface with customers. Your parents are devout Catholics who have long supported the Catholic Center Party. Although not rich, your parents have been able to provide you and your two younger siblings (Stefan - 23 years old; Eva - 17 years old) with a stable and comfortable life. 

 

Your parents attended school only through fourth grade, but always placed a high value on education. With the support of your parents and scholarships from the Catholic Church, you and your siblings had the great fortune of attending a prestigious Catholic Gymnasium in Munich. Although your education was shaped by the Catholic Church, you are not yourself a particularly devout individual. After completing your training at the Gymnasium at age 19, you attended the University of Heidelberg, where you studied Classics (the languages, literature, and history of Ancient Greece and Rome). You have since returned to Munich, where you serve as a private tutor of Greek and Latin to the children of the elite.

 

You see your family once a week for Sunday dinner. Your father's shop has been struggling, with usual customers forgoing suits and shirts in light of ongoing economic turmoil in Germany. Your younger brother, Stefan, has become a passionate follower of the National Socialists, which has led to many heated arguments between him and your father.

 

Your task:

Compose an autobiography of your life between January 1933 and the Summer of 1939. Narrate the events important to your life and the lives of your family/friends, while maintaining historical accuracy in relation to the sketch above. The best autobiographies will create a believable cast of characters in your life, as family/friends of both sexes, various political leanings, and diverse ethnic origins, class backgrounds, and religious beliefs, will have very different experiences. You will also need to think through how your goals, ideals, and actions will change over these years, and how your own life will interact with the big historical changes roiling Germany in this time period. This said, your character MAY NOT alter the fundamental course of history (by assassinating Hitler, for example).

 

Also think through the format that works best for you and your aims. You may wish to compose your character’s memoir from the perspective of 1939, or 1945, or later. You may wish to compile it as diary entries composed in the historical moment. You may wish to have your character(s) engage in exchanges of letters or other messages. The only requirement is that you write this narrative in the first person (I/me) rather than the third (s/he; his/her).

 

I am open to experimental formats for this assignment, so long as you meet all of the requirements laid out above. Artistic? Make a graphic novel! Into theater? Create a video blog for your character! Amateur programmer? Make a website or an interactive game! Socially networked? Create a twitter feed! Or a Tumblr! Or a blog! However, if you want to experiment with a format that involves something besides 8-12 pages of text printed out and turned in to me, you’ll need to meet with me to discuss your plans first. If you feel uncreative [points thumbs at self], don’t worry! A simple narrative of your life is perfectly acceptable.

 

Further to this point, your grades for this assignment will not be determined by your creative writing skills or your experimentation with novel formats. Rather, you will be assessed based on the historical richness and believability of your autobiographical sketch. You want to demonstrate that you’ve thought deeply and critically about how the historical developments of the years before 1933, and those that occurred 1933-39, would have affected the character you’ve created and how s/he would have even taken part in some of these events. Although your paper won’t have a traditional thesis statement, the best papers will make an argument, told through your character’s life, about creation of the Volksgemeinschaft in the early years of the Third Reich.

 

The best narratives will be specific and detailed, rather than chronologies of events offered in only the most general terms. If asked to write your own autobiography, you wouldn’t offer a blow-by-blow political history of the United States under Obama and Trump, but in certain ways your life might intersect with larger historical events and trends: the 2008 economic crisis might prevent your older siblings from attending college, terror scares might make it difficult to travel internationally, the Jayhawks winning the NCAA championship might mean riots on your doorstep. The decisions you make are of course deeply personal, but also informed by the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts that surround your life. Look to strike a believable balance between an individual’s ability to shape his/her life (agency), and his/her dependence on historical contexts beyond his/her control. You could have been a wonderfully intelligent and industrious person, but if you were a communist or a Jew in Germany in the mid-1930s, your economic, social, and political opportunities were limited.

 

Finally, I expect you to do outside research when necessary to maintain historical accuracy. Please maintain a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and cite your references in text as necessary using University of Chicago style footnotes. The best narratives will be detailed with reference to verifiable evidence from lectures, course readings, and individual research - be careful to avoid baseless speculation. That is to say, "show your work.” For this assignment, it is useful to create more narrative footnotes that editorialize/explain your thinking. An example (after noting that a character attended a Nazi training camp): 

1. Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Belkap Press, 2008), 100-102. Fritzsche discusses how the regime used trips to join work columns or training camps for professionals to build a sense of common purpose and engagement with the larger national movement.

 

Things to consider:

  • Regardless of how your character responds to the Nazi Party, why did many Germans who were not passionate about the National Socialists’ extremist platform come to support the Nazis, either fervently or with reservations, between the economic crash and the beginning of World War II (1929-39)?

  • What was the relationship between coercion and consent in Nazi Germany? How did material improvements in Germans’ lives and emotional appeals made to the German people influence their attitudes towards the party?

   •            What is the proper balance between individual rights and collective needs in a modern society? Should Germany be organized on a universalist acceptance of all peoples, or should Germans have a more particularist notion of membership in the national community?

   •            How much personal freedom would you be willing to sacrifice for guarantees of security and stability? Does living through an unstable time justify unprecedented change?

   •            To what degree should Germany adhere to traditional norms and practices, and to what extent should Germans seek to transform their society, unmoored from past precedent? What rights does a state have to impose new duties and responsibilities on its citizens?