I'm re-reading Capra and tbh since I first read it I've been wondering, why Rostock? Just seems like a pretty obscure/random German city (though it also turns up in my favorite alt-history story so maybe not), so curious if there was a reason you set Ed & Noah there. (Also, sorry to hear you're going through it, hope things get better <3)
There were a few reasons, actually.
First off, it was physically far enough away from Munich, where CoS takes place, that the geography and culture of the city would be different. It’s a seaport city, with a 16km river running into the baltic going right down the centre. I didn’t want to accidentally get tied down by what happened in CoS by setting it closer.
Second was historical stuff: Rostock, for a time, was massive for new art, especially on the stage. They had these massive, beautiful theatres and ran hundreds of operas, operettas, and ballets per season. It was a place where young artists used to go because it was such a musical place like, street performers and gigs at every local place—they could springboard pretty easily from smalltime stuff to the stage.
I knew early into writing that I wanted theatre, particularly tragic theatre. And to have theatre, you kinda need a place to preform it. So I looked into places that had a history in theatre and Rostock has been going strong since the 1700s. There’s the Rostock People's Theatre, or Volkstheater Rostock. It was a series of venues that were all run by the same company, and one of those venues is what I based the theatre Ed lives in off of.
This is the Rostock Stadttheater.
[ID: two images of a large, very ornate theatre. The first image is from the outside and the architect is almost church-like. The second image is from inside, looking down from a balcony to the stage. End ID]
This place was struggling during the actual uh. war. Because no one really wanted to go see shows anymore, but of course all these freshly hired and trained performers kept going in the hopes that interest would be sparks again. The success was middling.
Another reason was the Heinkel aircraft manufacturing company. It started business in Rostock around 1942 and was used for, you guessed it, weapons and aircraft manufacturing. Its existence gave reason for there to be attacks on the city with the goal of stopping the production and whatnot. Again, middling success.
From June 1940 to April 1943, 21 air raids were carried out in Rostock. The Rostock Stadttheater did not survive this. It fell in 1942 and was not reconstructed. The company moved to another venue, farther away from where the raids typically were. So it no longer exists.
Because of all the bombings and the fact that the city was right against the baltic, people did evacuate by boat. Some of them were official evacuations when the fires were spreading too much, and some of them were for people wanting to escape. A lot of them ended up going to Sweden, starting in (again) 1942, when the country started to receive refugees. Some sought refuge through legal channels, but a lot didn’t.
The research I did for that singular chapter was insane. Especially because a lot of the articles about the Rostock People’s Theatre were in german. I don’t know any german, so I spent hours translating and double checking. I’m glad I did, though.
