Post by Julian Rosenthal on Jun 10, 2012 1:28:09 GMT
E-Mail: jerichohendershot@gmail.com
Name: Julian Albrecht Rosenthal
Nationality: German
Rank: SS-Obersturmführer
Bio:
Julian Rosenthal is a child of postwar Germany, born from the culmination of all of its wasted splendor and noble decay. Germany itself had only conceived in 1814 and birthed in 1871, shocking and staining the aged apron of its unwilling midwife, France. The young nation, youthfully drunk on ancient tradition and tugging at its reigns nailed in the traditional, rotting posts in Alsace and Pomerania, sought to recreate an empire reminiscent of the previous centuries’ empires. Germany’s ambitions came too late; its jauntily chauvinistic demeanor was tragically paired with a new generation of gory tools. England, France, and Russia possessed the same means and, after four years of quarreling with tooth, nail, gasoline engine, machine gun, and human life, pushed Germany to the edge of the abyss. But, insulted and sore, the allies stripped Germany naked and prostrated her before them.
Dietrich Rosenthal limped, like thousands of others, from hell and back, and was never quite right after. He forgot what he was like before the war, the trenches took that from him. He washed up in Berlin in the summer of 1919, discharged from the Kaiser’s army and left with a threadbare uniform and too many memories. He rented a cheap room in a boarding house in Berlin-Mitte and was employed as a window washer, spending a year on the scaffolds at Friedrichstadt. He was quiet and grim in a damp work shirt crisscrossed by suspenders, seated at a secondhand bar as often as he lay in bed. Dietrich, pitted and scarred as he was by Ypres and Verdun, was still a man, and soon sought out a woman. He found one in Gertrude Ritter, a local girl whose father and brother had perished in the great folly and had been pushed to selling her home and herself. She was tall and plain of face, but Dietrich found solace in laying his head on her warm and ample breast and she was with child by 1920. They wed in a dirty Lutheran chapel in one of the poorer districts and decided to leave the city of depravity and humiliation to start a new, cleaner life in the niche of Germany’s green bosom.
Gertrude had family in the town of Ingolstadt and she sent word to them about moving. Dietrich removed his savings from a cigar box underneath the floorboards in his boarding room and buy them train tickets to Munich, where they disembarked for the countryside and inherited a familial plot of land and a tiny brick-and-mortar farmhouse. Dietrich, born and bred a Berliner, assimilated to the Bavarian culture and followed in the footsteps of the German lowlanders before them. From Gertrude’s uncle he learned how to yoke oxen and spread seed and could soon make his living from the earth. Gertrude gave birth on August 13th, 1920 to Julian Albrecht Rosenthal, named so after two men his father had known during the Great War and whom his family assumed had been killed or maimed. He was a robust, healthy babe with a full head of blond hair and rustically pale eyes.
Julian was followed in 1921, 1922, and 1923 by five siblings, the first three girls, Adelaide, Marlene, and Maud, and the last two a pair of twin boys, Wolf and Hans. They were all reared on potatoes and venison, children of the fresh countryside and forested mountains. Julian, from a young age, was inquisitive, nearly too much so. He possessed an endless energy that wore his parents to the core and drove his father to raise his hand more than once. His sisters were mild-mannered and taught by their mother to be young maidens, while Julian and the twins, two years behind their brother, were expected to exert their indefatigable personalities into farm work. As Julian reached into the ages of eight and nine, his personality began to unfold. He was quick-witted and intelligent, able to grasp new concepts better than most. As a counter, however, he was loud, brash, and jaunty, fighting amongst the local boys and punished corporally at his grammar school on multiple occasions. Julian’s pride was inflated and easily punctured, during which it would loudly and noticeably deflate. He took remarks too hard to heart, anger seething through tears and the grit of a wound after a lost schoolyard tussle. He was quick to argue with his father and teased his siblings and classmates, but even as he made fun of them they were drawn to him, like moths to a scalding flame. His teasing and energetic charisma made him an innate leader.
The American stock market seized up crashed on its own reckless capitalism and moral decay in 1929, rippling throughout the global money-grab. The Rosenthal’s hometown was centered on a small pet bank, which sent out loans, like tentacles, to each individual farm surrounding it. This aforementioned bank contracted like a dying spider with the market crash, sucking in its loans and repossessing farms through legal and illegal means, using hired thugs where eviction notices wouldn’t do. Gertrude’s family was not immune and the farm was repossessed, forcing the Rosenthals into the street in a whirlwind of financial catastrophe too great for Dietrich to understand. He returned to the only other place he knew; the city of sin, Berlin.
They moved into an apartment with no hot water, not unlike the one Dietrich had been living in before. The dingy city air was a shock to Julian and his brothers and sisters. Dietrich began working construction, which was slumping because no one wanted to put the money on the line to actually construct something. Julian and his brothers became odd-job boys and shoe shiners. Dietrich was silent and angry, Julian was loud and angry. His brothers and sisters were wide-eyed to what was happening. Dietrich found an outlet in politics, which he had not cared for much until he heard Adolf Hitler speaking on public radio. He became a National Socialist Party member, voting for worker’s rights and national pride, which struck home in a Great War veteran’s gut. He helped vote Hitler into the chancellor’s seat in 1932 and supported his supreme ascension in 1933.
Living in a newly National Socialist Germany was refreshing to Julian. He began attending school again at 13. Possessing a strong back and shoulders thickening quickly from puberty, he joined a local rugby team and soon moved on to track and field, bringing with him an air of light arrogance that hung on him like cologne. It was not warranted, he was the son of a laborer. But in the new Germany, he was able to thrive. He joined government youth organizations and fraternized with his peers during swimming matches and quasi-military marches. When he graduated he found himself destined for a life in the military, and on his eighteenth birthday he looked to enlist in the Heer, but was instead targeted by a Waffen-SS recruiter who encouraged him that by enlisting in his branch he had better opportunity and was a more patriotic German. To say nothing else, Julian was entirely convinced.
Julian excelled during basic training and was able to pass all of the rigorous natural and racial conditioning needed. He was one of the three in his platoon designated and SS-Rottenfuhrer before he left basic and chose to follow the career path of an officer. Julian was selected for the SS-Junkerschule at Bad Tolz and attended for two years, receiving instruction on armored infantry command and training. He was released in the summer of 1939 at the rank of SS-Obersturmfuhrer in preparation for the upcoming invasion of Poland.
Writing Sample:
Julian Rosenthal made a promise to himself that he would not die in that trench, with the mud and stink of smoke and war heavy around him, with the rain and blood spattering everything until one is so wet they are numb, with his men leaderless and blind on the fringe of the American line. A fog clung to the buildings behind the two targeted trenches and floated ghostlike over the no-man’s-land they had advanced through. The raindrops and bullets sliced the twisting vapor open, only to have the scars pull back together like a healing wound. The twin MG-42’s covering the German advance were made just as dangerous to their comrades as they were to the defenders by the mist, their staccato chattering back and forth limited due to fear of friendly fire. The Americans, strung out and stressed at the seams against the offensive, were just as cautious. Everything was painted grey and dismal by the weather, smeared and stroked like a cheap oil painting.
Other than his will and resolution to survive, Julian knew little else about what had been done in the last five minutes. His platoon had made the dash against the first trench after a testing strike of mortar fire and taken heavy losses in the process. He had been shouting orders and encouragement as they went over, the meat of which he couldn’t remember or even care to remember at the moment. Hauptsturmfuhrer Holtzmann had gone down, probably dead. Julian had gradually lost sight of the other members of the platoon as they approached the American trench and had leapt over the lip alone. After that it became hazy, and now he lay on the bottom of that very trench, soaked and squelching in the mud, with a pair of foreign hands around his throat.
The American on top of him was visible only as a helmet and an
unshaven chin. His hands were pressing hard against windpipe.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
Julian could only assume the American meant to say ‘I am going to fucking kill you’, but the first few syllables came out as a rough wheeze. Julian’s left hand clawing at his face did not help his pronunciation. His right hand was frantically searching the mud
under the American for his MP-40 or the American’s lost knife.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
Julian mouthed inaudible words and gasped. He silently prayed to Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, clutching at the wispy white robe of faith.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
He was beginning to see tiny black dots with fleeting, colorful edges dance across the American’s face. Julian’s left hand pulled at his cheek and groped for his eye, trying anything that would release the American’s primal hold. A small stream of rainwater dribbled from the visor of the American’s helmet and splashed on Julian’s face. He could feel himself sinking into the mud, the earth stroking his frame like the hands of dead men pulling him into purgatory. If he died here, he would be swallowed by the trench. But he would not, he told himself.
“…onna fuckin’ keeeeel you…”
Julian began to panic as his vision narrowed. The spots grew more agitated, bouncing and leaving trails. He sank his nails into the American’s face and pinched at his nostril, the skin slick with blood and rain. He picked up a rock with his right hand and hurled it against the American’s side. It made a dull thump and slipped from his grasp on impact. He lowered his hand and groped in the grime for the rock. He heard a horrid ringing sound.
“…onna…fuckin’…..keeel you.”
He found something with his right hand and smacked it against the American’s side. His opponent let out a deep sigh, acrid breath tickling Julian’s nose air flooded back in. He had released his grip somehow. Julian knew that he had found something in the mud, something wicked and pointed, and he was winning now. With all of the strength Julian could muster he flung the American off of him and against the wall of the trench. He twisted and then ripped his right hand free before plunging down again two times in the American’s body, grunting with anger and victory each time. His opponent was reduced to nothing but a crumpled frame in a dirty uniform, still and pattered by rain.
Julian rose to his knees and stole a quick glance at the sky. The fog was still thick and lardy in his throat, the air cool on his raw esophagus. He had lost his helmet in the fray and it lay discarded and filling with rain, unmissed. His flaxen hair was tangled with black earth and sweat, his face a mottled red and white like a raw steak. His chest heaved under his sodden uniform, a virgin again to oxygen. He nearly smiled with gallant victory and unbelieving horror before looking down again to his belt. The American’s knee had pressed his hip holster into the ground during their quarrel, preventing him from getting at his Walther. Now he withdrew it and pulled the slide, the click of a bullet into the chamber ticking above the rain. With newfound, exhausted strength he rose to his feet and yelled.
“Männer! Auf mich!”
Julian was met with the slosh of boots in mud from further down the trench, just around a tight bend. He crouched and braced his pistol, wary of whether it was friend or foe.
“Show yourself!”
He ran the opposite direction, entering a section of the trench which had bored under the foundation of a building. It was dark and dripping, but it provided a small hallow which he crammed himself into just as a timid spray of Thompson rounds flew down the trench’s channel. He thought fast and logically as this new American asked for his surrender. He definitely would not give it to him. Julian looked to his belt, the Wehrmacht eagle on the buckle obscured by filth. A drawstring bag hung from it and in its camouflage belly was a single stick grenade. Each soldier had been given two in preparation for the assault; one for the trench Julian was marooned in presently and the other for a second just beyond. His first grenade had already hit its designated target. The second would hit its own soon.
Name: Julian Albrecht Rosenthal
Nationality: German
Rank: SS-Obersturmführer
Bio:
Julian Rosenthal is a child of postwar Germany, born from the culmination of all of its wasted splendor and noble decay. Germany itself had only conceived in 1814 and birthed in 1871, shocking and staining the aged apron of its unwilling midwife, France. The young nation, youthfully drunk on ancient tradition and tugging at its reigns nailed in the traditional, rotting posts in Alsace and Pomerania, sought to recreate an empire reminiscent of the previous centuries’ empires. Germany’s ambitions came too late; its jauntily chauvinistic demeanor was tragically paired with a new generation of gory tools. England, France, and Russia possessed the same means and, after four years of quarreling with tooth, nail, gasoline engine, machine gun, and human life, pushed Germany to the edge of the abyss. But, insulted and sore, the allies stripped Germany naked and prostrated her before them.
Dietrich Rosenthal limped, like thousands of others, from hell and back, and was never quite right after. He forgot what he was like before the war, the trenches took that from him. He washed up in Berlin in the summer of 1919, discharged from the Kaiser’s army and left with a threadbare uniform and too many memories. He rented a cheap room in a boarding house in Berlin-Mitte and was employed as a window washer, spending a year on the scaffolds at Friedrichstadt. He was quiet and grim in a damp work shirt crisscrossed by suspenders, seated at a secondhand bar as often as he lay in bed. Dietrich, pitted and scarred as he was by Ypres and Verdun, was still a man, and soon sought out a woman. He found one in Gertrude Ritter, a local girl whose father and brother had perished in the great folly and had been pushed to selling her home and herself. She was tall and plain of face, but Dietrich found solace in laying his head on her warm and ample breast and she was with child by 1920. They wed in a dirty Lutheran chapel in one of the poorer districts and decided to leave the city of depravity and humiliation to start a new, cleaner life in the niche of Germany’s green bosom.
Gertrude had family in the town of Ingolstadt and she sent word to them about moving. Dietrich removed his savings from a cigar box underneath the floorboards in his boarding room and buy them train tickets to Munich, where they disembarked for the countryside and inherited a familial plot of land and a tiny brick-and-mortar farmhouse. Dietrich, born and bred a Berliner, assimilated to the Bavarian culture and followed in the footsteps of the German lowlanders before them. From Gertrude’s uncle he learned how to yoke oxen and spread seed and could soon make his living from the earth. Gertrude gave birth on August 13th, 1920 to Julian Albrecht Rosenthal, named so after two men his father had known during the Great War and whom his family assumed had been killed or maimed. He was a robust, healthy babe with a full head of blond hair and rustically pale eyes.
Julian was followed in 1921, 1922, and 1923 by five siblings, the first three girls, Adelaide, Marlene, and Maud, and the last two a pair of twin boys, Wolf and Hans. They were all reared on potatoes and venison, children of the fresh countryside and forested mountains. Julian, from a young age, was inquisitive, nearly too much so. He possessed an endless energy that wore his parents to the core and drove his father to raise his hand more than once. His sisters were mild-mannered and taught by their mother to be young maidens, while Julian and the twins, two years behind their brother, were expected to exert their indefatigable personalities into farm work. As Julian reached into the ages of eight and nine, his personality began to unfold. He was quick-witted and intelligent, able to grasp new concepts better than most. As a counter, however, he was loud, brash, and jaunty, fighting amongst the local boys and punished corporally at his grammar school on multiple occasions. Julian’s pride was inflated and easily punctured, during which it would loudly and noticeably deflate. He took remarks too hard to heart, anger seething through tears and the grit of a wound after a lost schoolyard tussle. He was quick to argue with his father and teased his siblings and classmates, but even as he made fun of them they were drawn to him, like moths to a scalding flame. His teasing and energetic charisma made him an innate leader.
The American stock market seized up crashed on its own reckless capitalism and moral decay in 1929, rippling throughout the global money-grab. The Rosenthal’s hometown was centered on a small pet bank, which sent out loans, like tentacles, to each individual farm surrounding it. This aforementioned bank contracted like a dying spider with the market crash, sucking in its loans and repossessing farms through legal and illegal means, using hired thugs where eviction notices wouldn’t do. Gertrude’s family was not immune and the farm was repossessed, forcing the Rosenthals into the street in a whirlwind of financial catastrophe too great for Dietrich to understand. He returned to the only other place he knew; the city of sin, Berlin.
They moved into an apartment with no hot water, not unlike the one Dietrich had been living in before. The dingy city air was a shock to Julian and his brothers and sisters. Dietrich began working construction, which was slumping because no one wanted to put the money on the line to actually construct something. Julian and his brothers became odd-job boys and shoe shiners. Dietrich was silent and angry, Julian was loud and angry. His brothers and sisters were wide-eyed to what was happening. Dietrich found an outlet in politics, which he had not cared for much until he heard Adolf Hitler speaking on public radio. He became a National Socialist Party member, voting for worker’s rights and national pride, which struck home in a Great War veteran’s gut. He helped vote Hitler into the chancellor’s seat in 1932 and supported his supreme ascension in 1933.
Living in a newly National Socialist Germany was refreshing to Julian. He began attending school again at 13. Possessing a strong back and shoulders thickening quickly from puberty, he joined a local rugby team and soon moved on to track and field, bringing with him an air of light arrogance that hung on him like cologne. It was not warranted, he was the son of a laborer. But in the new Germany, he was able to thrive. He joined government youth organizations and fraternized with his peers during swimming matches and quasi-military marches. When he graduated he found himself destined for a life in the military, and on his eighteenth birthday he looked to enlist in the Heer, but was instead targeted by a Waffen-SS recruiter who encouraged him that by enlisting in his branch he had better opportunity and was a more patriotic German. To say nothing else, Julian was entirely convinced.
Julian excelled during basic training and was able to pass all of the rigorous natural and racial conditioning needed. He was one of the three in his platoon designated and SS-Rottenfuhrer before he left basic and chose to follow the career path of an officer. Julian was selected for the SS-Junkerschule at Bad Tolz and attended for two years, receiving instruction on armored infantry command and training. He was released in the summer of 1939 at the rank of SS-Obersturmfuhrer in preparation for the upcoming invasion of Poland.
Writing Sample:
Julian Rosenthal made a promise to himself that he would not die in that trench, with the mud and stink of smoke and war heavy around him, with the rain and blood spattering everything until one is so wet they are numb, with his men leaderless and blind on the fringe of the American line. A fog clung to the buildings behind the two targeted trenches and floated ghostlike over the no-man’s-land they had advanced through. The raindrops and bullets sliced the twisting vapor open, only to have the scars pull back together like a healing wound. The twin MG-42’s covering the German advance were made just as dangerous to their comrades as they were to the defenders by the mist, their staccato chattering back and forth limited due to fear of friendly fire. The Americans, strung out and stressed at the seams against the offensive, were just as cautious. Everything was painted grey and dismal by the weather, smeared and stroked like a cheap oil painting.
Other than his will and resolution to survive, Julian knew little else about what had been done in the last five minutes. His platoon had made the dash against the first trench after a testing strike of mortar fire and taken heavy losses in the process. He had been shouting orders and encouragement as they went over, the meat of which he couldn’t remember or even care to remember at the moment. Hauptsturmfuhrer Holtzmann had gone down, probably dead. Julian had gradually lost sight of the other members of the platoon as they approached the American trench and had leapt over the lip alone. After that it became hazy, and now he lay on the bottom of that very trench, soaked and squelching in the mud, with a pair of foreign hands around his throat.
The American on top of him was visible only as a helmet and an
unshaven chin. His hands were pressing hard against windpipe.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
Julian could only assume the American meant to say ‘I am going to fucking kill you’, but the first few syllables came out as a rough wheeze. Julian’s left hand clawing at his face did not help his pronunciation. His right hand was frantically searching the mud
under the American for his MP-40 or the American’s lost knife.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
Julian mouthed inaudible words and gasped. He silently prayed to Saint Anthony, patron of lost things, clutching at the wispy white robe of faith.
“…onna fuckin’ kill you.”
He was beginning to see tiny black dots with fleeting, colorful edges dance across the American’s face. Julian’s left hand pulled at his cheek and groped for his eye, trying anything that would release the American’s primal hold. A small stream of rainwater dribbled from the visor of the American’s helmet and splashed on Julian’s face. He could feel himself sinking into the mud, the earth stroking his frame like the hands of dead men pulling him into purgatory. If he died here, he would be swallowed by the trench. But he would not, he told himself.
“…onna fuckin’ keeeeel you…”
Julian began to panic as his vision narrowed. The spots grew more agitated, bouncing and leaving trails. He sank his nails into the American’s face and pinched at his nostril, the skin slick with blood and rain. He picked up a rock with his right hand and hurled it against the American’s side. It made a dull thump and slipped from his grasp on impact. He lowered his hand and groped in the grime for the rock. He heard a horrid ringing sound.
“…onna…fuckin’…..keeel you.”
He found something with his right hand and smacked it against the American’s side. His opponent let out a deep sigh, acrid breath tickling Julian’s nose air flooded back in. He had released his grip somehow. Julian knew that he had found something in the mud, something wicked and pointed, and he was winning now. With all of the strength Julian could muster he flung the American off of him and against the wall of the trench. He twisted and then ripped his right hand free before plunging down again two times in the American’s body, grunting with anger and victory each time. His opponent was reduced to nothing but a crumpled frame in a dirty uniform, still and pattered by rain.
Julian rose to his knees and stole a quick glance at the sky. The fog was still thick and lardy in his throat, the air cool on his raw esophagus. He had lost his helmet in the fray and it lay discarded and filling with rain, unmissed. His flaxen hair was tangled with black earth and sweat, his face a mottled red and white like a raw steak. His chest heaved under his sodden uniform, a virgin again to oxygen. He nearly smiled with gallant victory and unbelieving horror before looking down again to his belt. The American’s knee had pressed his hip holster into the ground during their quarrel, preventing him from getting at his Walther. Now he withdrew it and pulled the slide, the click of a bullet into the chamber ticking above the rain. With newfound, exhausted strength he rose to his feet and yelled.
“Männer! Auf mich!”
Julian was met with the slosh of boots in mud from further down the trench, just around a tight bend. He crouched and braced his pistol, wary of whether it was friend or foe.
“Show yourself!”
He ran the opposite direction, entering a section of the trench which had bored under the foundation of a building. It was dark and dripping, but it provided a small hallow which he crammed himself into just as a timid spray of Thompson rounds flew down the trench’s channel. He thought fast and logically as this new American asked for his surrender. He definitely would not give it to him. Julian looked to his belt, the Wehrmacht eagle on the buckle obscured by filth. A drawstring bag hung from it and in its camouflage belly was a single stick grenade. Each soldier had been given two in preparation for the assault; one for the trench Julian was marooned in presently and the other for a second just beyond. His first grenade had already hit its designated target. The second would hit its own soon.
