#gstm

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gstm characters // lisette m. dietrich

“sometimes i worry. and sometimes i come home, hoping that he’ll have changed. after all, aren’t fathers supposed to love their daughters?”

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gstm characters // beatrice “bunny” keller

“men are silly, aren’t they? they think that just because i work in a brothel, i belong to them. i’m not an object.”

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it will sink its teeth into anything and everything, and it’s our job to kill it. — hans eberhardt, gstm

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some moodboards for gstm! lyrics are from vera lynn’s the white cliffs of dover.

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gstm characters // luisa e. schweitzer

“men are the fighters. they start the wars. women like us are the ones who finish them.”

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gstm characters // elias a. kowalczyk

“i doubt god will forgive me for what i’ve done. i suppose it doesn’t matter, though. he abandoned me a long time ago.”

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some of my fav quotes from gstm so far:

• “Once you have a sip of wine, you have to drink until the bottle is empty. It’s the same with power. Once you get a taste, the thirst is insatiable.”

• “There is no good. There is no evil. We are all lost souls, drifting in the morally grey.”

• “Everyone dies, Luisa. It’s what you do when you’re alive that matters. A legacy is what defines you when you’re gone. I want mine to be memorable.”

• “I’ve been holding onto this guilt for so long. I’ve been drowning in it. I’ve forgotten how to breathe, because this whole time, I believed that the deaths in my family were my fault. But now that I’m old enough to understand that I did nothing wrong, I feel like I can swim again.”

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a sad excerpt from gstm

some of you have been asking to see some more of my wip, so i give you this. it made me cry (mainly because i can, unfortunately, kinda relate to this on a personal level and i projected it onto one of my characters, but also bc i’m sensitive):

Lisette sighed, her breath creating an icy cloud in front of her as she exhaled. “Here we are," she announced softly, looking down at the three snow-covered headstones in front of her. “This is my family. The ones you haven’t met yet.”

Luisa looked from Lisette to the ground, unable to speak. She hadn’t known. Every time she had mentioned meeting Lisette’s family, she never would’ve guessed that it would be in an unkempt graveyard at the edge of town. Putting her hand up to her mouth, Luisa slowly kneeled down, not minding the fact that her dress was now covered in powdery white. She carefully raised a hand and brushed away the fresh snowfall that had blanketed the stones to reveal three names.

Ingrid Dietrich, age 34.

Martin Dietrich, age 4.

Peter Dietrich, age 7 months.

A mother and her two sons were swaddled together in the poorest part of town, each of them younger than the next. “They died about two weeks after my eighth birthday. Peter and Martin went first,” Lisette started, her voice trembling. “My mother...stuck around for another three days. And then she was gone too.”

Luisa turned over her shoulder to look up at her lover. “How?” She asked breathily, her voice shaking and catching painfully in her chest.

Lisette took her hands from her pockets and breathed into them, frantically rubbing them together to keep herself warm. “Pneumonia. The doctor was able to diagnose it, but our medical resources at the time weren’t as strong as they are now,” she chuckled bitterly. Wolfberg had been little more than a mountain village before its military base was built years later. Government funding began to provide more and more for the townspeople, but it had been too late for Lisette’s mother and siblings. Pneumonia waited for no one. “My father wanted to send them to the Charité hospital in Berlin for treatment, but we didn’t have the money. When they died, we could barely afford their headstones, let alone bury them somewhere nicer.”

Luisa slowly stood up, her legs freezing from the cold. “And that’s why you decided to be a nurse. So that you could help save people.”

“I figured that if the doctor couldn’t save my family, I could help save someone from the same fate someday once I had the proper training.”