Ursula Pflug

I have a new Substack, NATURE IS MY CONTENT PROVIDEROnce upon a time I used Goodreads to repost the reviews I published over the years. I wrote mostly about Canadian speculative fiction for The Peterborough Examiner, Strange Horizons, The New York Review of Science Fiction, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, 49th Shelf and elsewhere. Please check out my Goodreads if you’re interested in reprints of my reviewing.

I thought of doing something similar on Substack, posting essays I had to cut, musings about this and that, and so on. But there is too much of that on Substack, and much as I appreciate that there’s a place for long form work, the platform is mostly moving away from that now.

Back in winter, my son and I worked on digitizing my Berlin grandmother Regine Faust’s wartime memoir. I’ve been putting it up in chapters. The excerpts from her book are my most popular posts, and I would probably abandon Substack if it wasn’t for how much people seem to enjoy them. Even family members who have copies of the book, Fifty Years Later: The Way I Saw It, are telling me they are reading it for the first time.

We’re all so used to reading online, and now that her memoir is broken up into manageable chunks it’s less daunting. AI could have handled the OCR, but we needed to do it ourselves. There are handwritten additions, and the usual first draft circles, arrows and inserts that AI wouldn’t have been able to manage. My son did a terrific job decoding his great grandmother’s manuscript, and enjoyed how much he learned about my maternal family. There was a time everyone digitized family photos and those are mostly taken care of now, but there are a lot of ancestral memoirs and journals waiting to be digitized. If you’d like some help with a project, please get in touch with us.

NATURE IS MY CONTENT PROVIDER

The first installment is “A Small Circle of Art School Friends” followed by “Kristallnacht,” “As Summer Ended, The Nazis Invaded Poland,” and “Kitzbühel, 1943.”

The posting is slow going, as there is always work, (I’m still doing developmental editing for private clients) personal writing projects, and seeing family and friends.

From the intro to Part 1, “A Small Circle of Art School Friends.”

Regine Faust was my maternal grandmother. As a young woman in Berlin, she was involved in “Gegner” magazine, a Dadaist precursor to the German resistance alliance Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle).

She left us a memoir, written for her American granddaughter Zoe after Hurricane Iniki (1992) destroyed her and her husband Peter Faust’s house in Kaua‘i, where they had retired. It is written in her excellent English, and switches between third and first person. I have respected her choices, even though I was tempted to tweak.

In the excerpt below, her boyfriend Harro Schultze-Boysen, a leading figure in Rote Kapelle, is arrested and beaten by the Brownshirts, and she begins working in knit design. Regine’s father supported her right to an education, and she was one of the first women in Germany to obtain a graduate degree. While he disagreed with Hitler, he told her she had to look after herself financially if she continued her activism.

In addition to her early resistance work, she was gang raped by Red Army soldiers, became a nurse and foreign correspondent for the German Red Cross, an American POW in Paris, one of Germany’s top fashion editors, and a single mother of the painter Christiane Pflug.

Together in Berlin we went to the premiere of Fassbinder’s “Lili Marleen” (1981). In one scene Günther Weisenborn (played by Fassbinder), a member of the resistance is seen cycling through the night city on his way to a rendezvous. My elegant grandmother stood up in the crowded theatre and said loudly, “I knew him, and he didn’t look at all like that!”

Everyone turned and stared. Who was she?

Her experiences resonate as we witness the alarming rise of fascism.