This will be the first author’s eye look at one of my works of fiction, where I explain the origin of the story idea and my thought process behind the story as written. I don’t think the essay should rob the story of its magic, but let me know in the comments.
WARNING
This will spoil EVERYTHING in The Chilling Account of the Wolf-Bann of Krallenburg. If you haven’t picked up a copy of the Fall 2023 issue of Cirsova Magazine yet, you should do that (and read the story!) before continuing further.
/WARNING
I’ve wanted to write werewolf stories since I was a kid, and I had a partial story idea brewing for a long time about a paranoid ruler assassinated by infecting one of his close live-in servants with lycanthropy. But it was when I combined this idea with another that had been floating around in my head that Krallenburg really took shape.
This separate story idea would have been a Noir-style story loosely based on a real-life events in Germany immediately following World War II. A group of Holocaust survivors had formed a paramilitary group called Nakam, or “revenge” in Hebrew. Their purpose was to enact retribution on the Nazis - and Germans as a whole. Their ultimate goal was to kill six million Germans as payback for the six million Jews killed in the holocaust - “a nation for a nation.”
In addition to attacking (more or less) legitimate targets, Nakam hatched a plan to poison the entire municipal water supply in Nuremberg. Ultimately they were not able to go through with the plan, but the idea really took hold in my brain.
On the one hand, it is hard to argue with Nakam’s premise. If anyone has any legitimate claim to revenge, it is victims of the Holocaust against the Nazis. On the other hand, if it went through as planned, Nakam’s operation would have murdered thousands of children who had nothing to do with the sins of their fathers. But the Nazis certainly didn’t spare Jewish children, and it has a twisted kind of logic to it.
Thus came the idea of a genuinely sympathetic victim as the antagonist of a morally-gray post-War Noir. The story would have followed an American MP and a German police officer tracking down what they think is a serial killer. The killer turns out to be a rogue member of Nakam, and the MP discovers his partner was actually a Nazi prison guard in hiding. The MP would have arrested the murderer, but not before letting him get revenge on his prison guard.
I put the two story ideas together when researching the werewolf witch trials of the Early Modern period. From 1560 to 1670, more than 40,000 people were put to death under suspicion of witchcraft. It doesn’t come close to the devastation of the Holocaust, but those innocent victims similarly have a legitimate claim to revenge against their persecutors. I set my story in the fictional village of Krallenburg in the remote forests of the Northwestern Holy Roman Empire in the year 1610. This was a time of turmoil for the region when Protestant and Catholic lords regularly fought amongst each other, and the crop failures of the Little Ice Age led the people to increasingly accuse their neighbors of witchcraft, culminating in mass torture and executions in places like Trier.
A victim falsely convicted of making a pact with the Devil could reason that they might as well get the benefits of the real thing.
This idea was the basis of the character of Katherina, a girl whose mother was burned as a witch and chased from her home. Posing as a nurse and member of an invented religious order, Katherina becomes the witch her mother never was, sic’ing her werewolf servants on the village that persecuted her, hoping for a chance at the shut-in Lord Eigenstolz, the man who drove Krallenburg’s persecutions.
By luck, Katherina gets access to the Lady Eigenstolz, desperate to conceive another child after the werewolf murdered her only son. Katherina uses her magic to aid the conception of Matthias Eigenstolz, cursing the child with lycanthropy while still in the womb and ensuring that she has her revenge on the lord that executed her mother.
Into this picture steps Fr. Friedrich Rosch, a Jesuit priest and witch hunter. Rosch is the mirror image of Katherina. Where she is a victim turned villain, Rosch is a villain turned protector. He knows the dangers of a witch hunt spiraling out of control because Rosch was the one doing the spiraling, and he vows to never to let it happen again.
Rosch is based on the real-life Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee, who in the 1620’s and 30’s acted as confessor to accused witches as they were tortured and before execution. Spee became convinced of the accused innocence, and eventually wrote a treatise on the unreliability of confessions produced under torture.
Unlike Spee, Fr. Rosch has to battle both the secular authorities eager to put the accused to the rack and actual witches and werewolves that pose a real threat to the lives of innocent Krallenburg villagers. And while Rosch recognizes the injustice that Katherina suffered at the hands of people like himself, he won’t allow her to take out her revenge on the innocent people of Krallenburg, especially not an infant child.
Spee reveals to Katherina that she became no different than the monsters she suffered under - perhaps worse, because she acknowledged the innocence of her victims. The atrocities inflicted on her were real and horrible. They even provided her a twisted sense of righteousness as cover for her reprisals. But in the end, no matter how terrible her victimhood, it would never justify her equally atrocious villainy.