It was the 1930s and Berlin, Germany was burning. Klaus huddled up with the other men at Club X, a secret gay club in the heart of the city. The club had to be a secret because of the political climate and the vehement opposition to gay people by many Germans. However, in recent months, there had been a political shift and the right-wing Nazi Party was losing power as more and more people began to speak out against their authoritarian, racist and anti-Semitic agenda.
“Where can we go? What can we do?” Klaus’s boyfriend asked. It was a rhetorical question because there was nowhere they could go and nothing they could do.
The entire city was burning and it seemed like the entire world was in flames; for all Klaus knew, maybe it was. Just an hour ago, he had watched his apartment burn to the ground. He had cried out in despair at the loss of all his worldly possessions, but most of all at the loss of a script he’d been working on for three years.
It was a semi-autobiographical story about a gay couple and Klaus had been in discussions with an important film studio that was interested in acquiring the rights to it. Klaus believed in the power of fiction and he believed that his script, once made into a film, would humanise the gay community in the eyes of other Germans and alleviate some of the hostility and prejudice they encountered on a daily basis.
He thought of the world that he’d created in that script, the world that had existed only on paper, paper that was now ashes, floating in the air. And he realised with a sense of terror that he too would soon be reduced to ashes, because the club was now burning, and there was nowhere to run to.
In a higher dimension, the one in which this story is being written, the only copy of an unpublished novel by Magnus Hirschfeld had just turned to ashes too. The novel was about a gay screenwriter living in a version of 1930s Germany in which the Nazi Party had failed to come to power.
Hirschfeld believed in the power of fiction and had hoped that his novel, once published, would change the perspective of Germans who read it, and reduce the hostility towards the gay community —just as his main character, Klaus, hoped his screenplay would achieve the same thing.
But now, in May 1933 in Berlin, Klaus and the world Hirschfeld had brought to life through the written word had been destroyed, along with around twenty thousand books and journals, many of them documenting Hirschfeld’s research on intersexuality, homosexuality and transsexuality.
Both the unpublished novel and the research documents had been retrieved by members of the Deutsche Studentenschaft (DSt), or German Student Union, from the Charité University in Berlin where Hirschfeld had been the head of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute of Sex Research.
The DSt had hauled the institute’s entire library and archives out onto the streets and was burning them in an enormous bonfire in a nearby public square. This was just the beginning of a national campaign by the DSt party to burn books that they perceived to be subversive or represent ideologies contrary to Nazism.
They would go on to burn tens of thousands of books and other documents, and every time they burnt the sole copy or copies of a work of fiction, they also burnt the world within it and the characters it contained.
Just as Klaus had no idea that he was simply a character in a story, Hirschfeld and the members of the DSt had no idea that they too, along with the world they lived in, were the subject of another book; one written in a higher dimension, part of an ongoing series called Planet Earth.
As Klaus and the world he lived in turned to ashes, the author of Planet Earth finished writing about the burning of Hirschfeld’s unpublished novel along with the other books and documents. This was the opening scene of what would become one of the darkest chapters in the Planet Earth series so far —and the series had more than its fair share of dark chapters— about the rise of a far-right political party, a devastating, six-year-long war, and the genocide of millions of people.
The entire series spanned thousands of years and almost two hundred countries, but eventually, it too would be lost to history in a post-apocalyptic event in this higher dimension that would destroy all written works. And when that time came, the world below would be destroyed, along with all the worlds that its inhabitants had created through the many works of fiction that still existed (and the worlds within these works, such as the one contained in Klaus’s script), for that, though few in any dimension know it, is the real power of fiction.