by Catherine Hokin

I am a visual writer.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. What I mean by that statement is that I am inspired by the things that I see and by the way images are used to tell stories.

 Pictures or films or photographs are most often the inspiration for my novels. If you know me you won’t be surprised by that. The walls of our house are covered in paintings and film posters and prints. My noticeboard plays host to the maps I draw – from country down to street level – of the places I am writing about and the cinema is my favourite hang-out.

Like all historical fiction writers, I am obsessed with research and my starting point for this – and for idea generation – is usually physical places. I prowl round art galleries, museums, streets and sites of historical interest like a magpie with a smartphone, snapping at anything that sparks my interest. And, because my books are set in Berlin, it’s usually Berlin where I can be found going walk about.

Both The Commandant’s Daughter and The Pilot’s Girl, the first two books in what will be a four-part series about photographer Hanni Winter, started this way. A good photograph –which my main character becomes a master of, although not in the way she imagined that she would – can take us on a journey. It can also tell a very different story to the truth and that’s where my writer brain starts. And where book one of the series, The Commandant’s Daughter began.

The image which kicked off Hanni’s story is in Berlin’s German Historical Museum and was taken in 1933 on the night Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. It records a moment from the torchlight procession which Goebbels organised to sweep through the Brandenburg Gate, past the Adlon Hotel and along Wilhelmstraβe to the Reich Chancellory where Hitler was waiting to be adored. The photograph is in black and white and yet it isn’t: the river of torches springs out of the frame like molten silver. It is glorious and it is also, when you stop and consider what the picture commemorates, truly terrible. And that was my starting point. A little girl standing on a balcony, staring down enraptured at the dancing flames, who is about to be taught to properly look at them. A little girl who, from that moment, will never see the world in the same way again.

The Pilot’s Girl also had its start with a museum and a photograph, but this one can also claim an artifact (a very big one) and a film in the mix as well.

The museum this time was The Allied Museum which is located in an old movie theatre in the area which was once the heart of the American forces in Berlin. I went there already knowing that I wanted Hanni’s story to advance from 1945/46 into the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49. What I didn’t know was that I would be able to climb into one of the airplanes that was used to fly supplies into the city and is now a museum exhibit. And what I also didn’t know was that I would find my key character – the blockade pilot in question – grinning down from a wall there. The first thing I noticed about him was that he bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery Clift, the American heartthrob from the 1940s and fifties. I grew up in the days of Sunday afternoon films which I used to watch with my father who was a massive film buff and I’ve had a bit of a thing for a chiseled jaw ever since.

When I got home, I started to watch a number of films which were made and set in Berlin at the end of the war and one of those – The Search – starred the aforesaid Mr Clift. The film  tells the story of an American soldier who is stationed in occupied Germany in 1945 and finds a young boy living wild in the ruins of the city. The film is fascinating for lots of reasons – not least that most of the children who feature in it were actually from Displaced Persons Camps and had lost everything in the war, including their families and sometimes their names. Clift also apparently made a lot of alterations to the script so that his character was less a hero and more a flawed human being shocked by the truth of life in post-war Berlin. His character is part of the city and also not; highly visible but also able to retreat back into his American safety-net. And that was where I picked up the thread…

My character Tony in The Pilot’s Girl looks like Montgomery Clift but that is where the resemblance ends. I have taken the idea of a dashing hero who is the toast of the city and made it very dark. But his beginning was in a photograph in the same way that Hanni’s was.

And what about book three in the series which is coming next year? I’ve gone back to a film again – a shocking piece of propaganda shot by the Nazis in the ghetto town of Theresienstadt – and to photographs of the bombed out remains of Dresden and the empty spaces in Czechoslovakia where towns like Lidice were raised by the Nazis to the ground. And Hanni is now something of a celebrity herself, mounting – rather dangerously given what it contains – her first exhibition.

As I said, I am a visual writer. Images tell stories to me. I tell stories from them. Fingers crossed for the next magpie expedition…

Catherine Hokin is from the North of England but now lives very happily in Glasgow with her American husband. Both her children have left home (one to London and one to Berlin) which may explain why she is finally writing. You can find her on  Cat Hokin FB page or on twitter @cathokin