Characters Part 5: Jakob Schmidt

I’ve said it before: I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the bad boys. I have a genuine hope that there’s good in them and that it will prevail in the end, or that they’ll have a total redemption experience and use their strengths for good.

In light of that, I guess it should come as no surprise to me that Jakob “Helmuth” Wilhelm Schmidt became one of my primary characters, and one of my favorites.

When we meet him in Sani: The German Medic, he is every bit the stereotype we think of: a tall, handsome, proud, violent Nazi who fights American-born hero Frederick Smith out on the Russian Steppe.

I finished Sani and figured I was done with Helmuth, but he wouldn’t leave me alone (authors occasionally say that about people who don’t exist). I already knew that my next book was going to be a backstory, but I didn’t intend for it to be his.

Writing The Prodigal Sons forced me to get to know Helmuth, beginning with his conception between teenaged, unwed parents in 1915. After this prologue, the story jumps to his life as a seven year old boy named Jakob and follows him over the course of eleven years to the time he is 18. These happen to be the years between the attempted Nazi coup we know as the Beer Hall Putsch and the first year of the Third Reich. I found myself getting to know him as a complete person, with his joys and loves and wounds and fears.

The deep dive into the rise of the Third Reich gave me a real understanding of what a German boy might’ve gone through in those ten years. It wasn’t just personal wounds or the allure of Nazi dramatics that shaped who he was. It was a combination of both. And for Jake, the wounds of his youth were ultimately overshadowed by the promise of future greatness, for his nation and for himself.

I think each of us are a unique combination of the experience of our formative years, the society in which we live, and our own personal “wiring.” Yet there is another element to that equation. People say that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you choose to do about it. This has been true for a number of my characters, and I am really honing in on this in The Rubicon as I contrast Jakob’s story with Christian’s.

The two initially meet in The Prodigal Sons when, by all visible accounts, Christian is a strong, solid, heroic Aryan that any German boy would look up to. As they get to know each other however, they find themselves commiserating over their respective childhood traumas.

The Christmas We Both Needed deals more directly with Christian, while The Rubicon will primarily continue with Jake and Emmy’s story. The reader will take brief ventures into Christian’s life that will serve to flesh out the drastic differences between the two men, their choices, and the results.

It was Christian that first gave Jakob the idea that he could not only be better, but one of the elite. Advice Christian eventually comes to regret. However, it reflects the reality that there were many young men who volunteered for the SS simply because of the prestige it represented—and because the uniforms were indisputably schick. In many cases, they had no idea what they were signing up for.

I am currently reading a biography entitled The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich. (Heydrich was one of the top Nazis and the architect of “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”) In it, I came across an excerpt from the diary of a woman named Bella Fromm:

In my office works a young photographer. He is tall, blonde, a perfectly cast Aryan. After Hitler seized power, this young man was seen only in the black SS uniform. After June 30^th, he was absent from the office for several days. Finally this morning he came in a changed man. He was jittery and uneasy and was constantly watching the door. When questioned as to his strange behavior, he broke into tears and stammered, “I had to shoot in the Gestapo cellar. Thirty seven times I shot! Thirty seven are haunting me. I can’t escape from those thirty seven ghosts.”

The book goes on to say this:

[The young man] could not escape the consequences of his rash honesty either. A few days later, he disappeared and another SS man told Frau Fromm that he had talked too much and was now dead.

It stung me. Perhaps I am too close to my characters, or perhaps, my characters have brought my heart close to that generation. Either way, to me, that young man could have been Jake Schmidt. The same age, same experience, except that in The Prodigal Sons, Jake portrays a great deal of pride in his experience, rather than fear, remorse, and shame. Why?

The events of June 30^th, 1934 and the days following are usually referred to as the Nazi Blood Purge or The Night of Long Knives. The term “Nazi bloodletting” is also used, because in many ways, that’s what it was. At the time of the Purge, my character Jakob Schmidt is 18 and has completed his SS training. He finds himself being pulled into a firing squad whose task it is to murder members of the SA (aka “Storm Troopers” or “Brownshirts”).

For Jake, this is not just an opportunity for the SS to vanquish their SA predecessors (who by this time had become their rivals), it is an opportunity to enact a sort of quasi-retribution against his drunken, absentee father, who was a member of the SA for most of Jakob’s young life.

This event occurs in The Prodigal Sons, but as I continue work on The Rubicon, I find myself winding back to it and reexamining Jakob once again. In The Prodigal Sons, readers are much more likely to sympathize with his girlfriend Emmy, because Jakob is still young and idealistic. It is much easier for him to put on a mask and pretend that he is not only okay with the violence, but thrives on it. Perhaps he is not entirely okay with it. Unfortunately, it is only the beginning of a pattern. It has led me to ask myself, is it something he learned, or is it possible it was there all along?

In The Rubicon, we finally get to see what is really going on in Jakob’s adult mind. He is a complex character who you just can’t bring yourself to hate, in spite of all his darkness. Of all my characters, he elicits the strongest emotions in me. I ache for the things that hurt him. I get angry about the things he was led into. I slam my palm against my forehead when he makes a stupid decision. I want to weep when he gives full vent to his violent side.

I also feel the passion between him and his woman. One thing I can’t get over is how vivid and dynamic the love story is between Jake and Emmy. By the end of The Prodigal Sons, it is hard to tell whether they love each other or hate each other. But without giving too much of a spoiler I will hint that, by the middle of The Rubicon, you will think they have set the bar for an ideal marriage. What makes it ideal is not that their marriage is perfect, but they are both willing to fight for it. Especially during such a volatile period of history.

The Rubicon is set to release before Christmas (if I can get the 113K manuscript down to 105K, which is my current challenge). In the next few months I’ll be boosting TPS and sharing insights on Instagram and Facebook. If you haven’t read The Prodigal Sons, now is a great time to get to know Jakob’s story from the beginning.