A few years ago, I became obsessed with the leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS) in Hitler’s Germany, Heinrich Himmler. He managed the murder of six million people. He was the very epitome of evil. What, I wondered, did he think of himself? How did he think about what he was doing? What stories did he tell himself about his actions?
I read biographies of him. Obsessively.
Himmler joined the Nazi party in 1925 when he was twenty-five, and rose to be head of the SS which included responsibility for the concentration camps, the gestapo.
He was very good at organising. The Third Reich was the project which gave him kudos. He was a success.
The story he told himself was the story a significant proportion of the German people believed for a while, which was about a great nation which had been injured by a ‘race’ of people which had brought them down, and to avoid that happening in the future the best thing would be to exterminate them.
All religions are based on stories, as are nation states. Human beings share stories to give our lives meaning and to organise ourselves into societies.
That particular story caused Himmler to believe that the murder of six million people was a public good. In his own mind, he was a hero.
It made me wonder, does anyone think they are bad?
We all have self-talk, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Some of us are full of self-recrimination and regret. But all of us, I think, have an internal narrative which justifies, minimises, attributes blame, makes good the bad things we do.
Because we all do bad things. We are all a blend of light and dark. Some of us don’t have much light. Some of us don’t have much dark. But even those with a dominant dark side will have a narrative which explains it; excuses it. It may be for a higher purpose; it may be despising your victims, thinking they are less worthy, less human.
Each of us has our own origin story by which we explain and excuse and justify ourselves to ourselves. And we can gloss over, or forget altogether the bits which we don’t want to acknowledge. Because stories are as much about what we leave out, as what we include.
That is how I develop characters. What story do they tell themselves about themselves? When they do something bad, how do they explain it away? What is their idea about the world and their place in it which drives them forward; which inspires them to act as they do?
There’s light and dark, funny stories and dark stories. None of the characters are all good, but nor are they all bad. They make bad decisions and stumble into bad situations.
That’s life. Usually, we survive it.
In crime fiction there’s always at least one person who doesn’t. And that’s why we keep turning the pages.
More info about Joanne Jenkins here. Review of her latest book, The Bluff here.