1. The Rubicon
2. The Anzem Gauntlets
3. The Partisans of Goblynsrefuge
4. The Tetrarchy
5. Dalgormad
Most of the plot of Penumbra was planned out before the release of Deathly Hallows, but The Anzem Gauntlets, out of the five stories, is unique in the respect that it was conceptualized and added after Deathly Hallows; in fact, I first began developing it just over a year ago. The reason I added The Anzem Gauntlets was to give better precedence to the plot of Dalgormad, which will explore a concept actually central to Penumbra which has no background foundation from the first six Harry Potter stories.
The Anzem Gauntlets, as it's currently planned out, is an intense story about politics and intrigue, as well as the central plot, in which both Harry and Ginny end up searching for some device, supposedly of tremendous magical power, which Voldemort is looking for. It follows my usual motif of having parallel protagonists in Harry and Ginny, who are operating separately, but their stories are actually heavily connected, even if that isn't obvious at times.
Opening Chapter:
I've always figured that if someone left a phoenix feather for Harry or his allies before giving them a warning or a tipoff, Harry would find them trustworthy, especially if the feather proved to be from Fawkes. That is the scene that kicks off the plot of The Anzem Gauntlets. At the same time, we have the side-plot of a goblin uprising starting in Germany, in which the Koboldic goblins revolt against the German Ministry of Magic because of their refusal to prosecute a man they are certain had murdered one of their populace. They especially are furious because the man in question is son of a Triskelion, and he himself might be in league with the Neo-Triskelion movement.
If I haven't ever clarified it before, I will do so now: the Triskelions are Grindelwald's followers and the wizarding equivalent of the Nazi party. They have a very similar ideology to the Death Eaters, but the Death Eaters operate more as a terrorist organization, while the Triskelions, like the Nazis, were a political party. In the background, I might have explained somewhere that the Triskelions similarly were democratically elected into power, and I have definitely implied that Grindelwald was somehow involved in Muggle politics as well, in direct contact with Hitler.
I have studied Nazism since I was in high school, and an in-depth examination of Germany in that period, while often grim, is also very instructive in the role of fear in collective decisions. This subject is naturally fraught with debate between both liberal and conservative scholars, each of them interpreting Nazism differently and sometimes trying to claim that the Nazis were on whatever side of the political spectrum. Liberals claim they were conservative. Conservatives claim they were liberal. Both are wrong. The Nazis were neither.
But I'm not here to discuss where the Nazis lie on the political spectrum (which, on the scale of liberal-conservative, I don't think they fit in at all). I'm here to talk about supremacism, and why the Nazis were what they were, and why the Germans bought into their ideology. Liberals tend to think of evil in terms of taking advantage over somebody or causing oppression; the "-isms" liberals think of as enemy ideologies, such as sexism, racism, classism, etc., all oppress some minority class, and this is the source of injustice in the world. Moreover, I've heard liberals exhibit the attitude that these "-isms" are primarily motivated by the thrill of having power over somebody, and they accuse conservatives of "-isms."
Having grown up in a very conservative part in America, I can confidently say that this is rarely the case, and just as confidently point out that extremists on the left are just as guilty of this accusation as extremists on the right. Most of my conservative friends and neighbors would be offended by accusations of sexism or racism, and particularly of classism (as many conservatives are from the working class). What motivates conservative ideology is primarily fear of their world crumbling around them, and this is the basis on which I built both the Triskelion and Death Eater ideologies, something J.K. Rowling failed to do.
Rowling seemed to put classism (represented by Lucius Malfoy) as the source of Death Eater ideology, but this is a shallow foundation. What fuels the Death Eaters' hatred of Muggles and Muggle-borns needs to be something much more foundational, even primeval, than upper-class arrogance. While the upper classes have a history of arrogance and condescending attitudes towards the lower class, they never sought to wipe out the lower classes, because historically they depended on them too much. Feudalism originated as a symbiotic relationship between the nobility and the peasantry. In the early Middle Ages, Europe was a dangerous place to live. The continent was, at that time, almost completely covered with forest, and that forest was full of wildlife that could be quite dangerous. Wolves were much more common then, as were bears and wild boars; until about the 1st Century AD, there were also lions in some parts of Europe.
Furthermore, when civilization collapses (as Roman civilization had), it leaves chaos. Europe at that time was full of bandits and criminals, and politically it became divided. After the Romans left, the place was overrun by the Germanic tribes, who developed a mutually beneficial system in which they selected their strongest and smartest members and gave them the role of protecting the rest of the population, who cultivated farmland. This is the feudal system: the peasants cultivate the land and support the noblemen, who in return protect the peasants. It was a survivalist system, and in such systems people stick to their prescribed roles because it's about survival. They don't concern themselves with matters such as classism or women's rights, because those are the concerns of societies in periods of relative safety, when those prescribed roles become less important.
But often survivalist rules become tradition over time, and people fear change, or more deeply, the unknown. Notions of racism or sexism develop later, over time, as people become conditioned to the system they and their ancestors lived in.
What conservatives are afraid of, at the most fundamental level, is usually not becoming "tainted" in some way, but of their world crumbling around them. Every human being builds an order and a world for themselves, the foundation on which they live, and it is always a terrifying thing is something upsets that. It's a perfectly legitimate fear, which liberals, in fact, share; but liberals' world is built on a different foundation from conservatives'. At its most fundamental definition, conservatism is an ideology based on the established order, the status quo; while liberalism is an ideology based on the reform or overthrowing of the established order (depending on how radical the ideology). They thus appear to change over time; two hundred years ago, liberalism advocated democracy, and conservatism advocated monarchy. Now neither do, but they continue to struggle over different issues.
In The Rubicon, there's a scene in which Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dr. Grobschmied, and Rok Grimrook discuss the Death Eaters in this light:
GRIMROOK: Their most important weapon is fear, and to fight them, we need to turn that weapon against them. So what do they fear? They are pureblood supremacists. How do pureblood supremacists think? The answer can be found in the past few centuries and why the movement emerged.
RON: Salazar Slytherin, yeah? He started it?
GROBSCHMIED: It's not as simple as that; history never is. The supremacists turned Slytherin into a legend, but in reality I'd say he was incidental. He was not the first to set wizards in a hierarchy above Muggles, and he didn't really start any particular movement. As far as I can tell, true supremacists, in the sense of Death Eaters or Triskelions, didn't actually start to appear until the early 18th century.
HARRY: Why? What happened then?
GROBSCHMIED: What indeed? I think you'll agree that little has changed in Wizarding lifestyle as a general rule, and certainly not in societal structure. The Wizarding World is remarkably static, but at least since the 18th century, there has been such a thing as pureblood supremacism. So what changed?
HERMIONE: The Muggles did.
GROBSCHMIED: Exactly. Only a few years after the Statute of Secrecy was put in place, Sir Isaac Newton published "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," which revolutionized Muggle science. It set off a whole new range of thought which completely changed Muggle society. They have rapidly advanced in three hundred years, to the point of being unrecognizable. Before the 18th Century, the lifestyle of Muggles was like the lifestyle of wizards without the benefit of magic, but now their technology has put them on an equal footing with wizards.
RON: You think so?
GROBSCHMIED: I know so. I've heard otherwise reasonable wizards make remarks like "I don't know how Muggles manage," or "Muggle attempts to substitute for magic," but that's not how it is. Muggles don't substitute for magic. Frankly, they don't need magic.
HARRY: But what's this got to do with the Death Eaters?
GRIMROOK: Because the idea of Muggles on an equal footing with wizards completely shakes the traditional world view of Wizardry. To make matters more difficult for traditionalists, as the Muggle population grows, so does the number of Muggle-borns, who enter the Wizarding World with all sorts of ideas Muggles developed in the past few centuries, which are foreign to wizards because they separated themselves from the rest of the world. Wizards completely missed the developments taking place, sometimes right in front of them. In other words, the line between the magical and non-magical worlds is starting to fade. I believe the Death Eaters fear that if things carry on the way they do, the walls between worlds will crumble completely. I might add that though they'd never admit to it, I think that deep down they're terrified that Muggles will surpass wizards. ... To preserve the society they believe in, they are determined to stamp out all Muggle influence, starting with Muggle-borns.
Rowling never sets forth this kind of explanation; but this kind of fear is usually the reason that violent ideology arises. I'm currently reading a fascinating book, The Nazi Conscience, by Claudia Koonz, which explains a lot of this. Koonz's thesis is that Hitler won German support in three ways: addressing their fears, deception, and seduction. The first reason is very important, because as a look at Hitler's speeches in the early 1930s will show, he hardly mentions anti-Semitism. Hitler was not elected by Germany because he was anti-Semitic; he was elected because he was anti-Communist. At that time, Germany's easternmost border was less than two hundred miles from the Soviet Union, and the first few years of the Weimar Republic were fraught with fighting between German communists and returning war veterans, to such an extent that part of the reason the German government operated in Weimar was that the situation in Berlin was too chaotic for the government to function there.
Thus, to the Germans, communism was a very real and close threat, not some abstract threat on the other side of the planet like it was for Americans. Most Germans were absolutely terrified of the ideology and of the Soviet Union, for good reason. Their government was dysfunctional even outside of Berlin; their economy had been ripped apart by the Versailles Treaty. The French were occupying German lands. To the German people at that time, order and restoration of the country they knew and loved was a very appealing thing. So when Hitler came along and condemned communism, condemned the Versailles treaty, and condemned the disorder in the Weimar government, most Germans agreed with him. The following excerpt from The Nazi Conscience explains it well:
"In the nineteenth century, despite the protests of antisemites, Jewish Germans had been admitted to universities without quotas and had participated in cultural life, elite social circles, the professions, business, politics, and the sciences... During World War I, Jewish Germans fought and died for theri fatherland in the same proportions as Christian Germans. Of 38 German Nobel Laureates named between 1905 and 1937, 14 had Jewish ancestors. More Jewish young people married Christians than married Jews, and until 1933 the term "mixed marriage" referred to Protestant-Catholic and AFrican- or Asian-German unions, not to Jewish-Christian couples. A comparison of antisemitic acts and attitudes towards Jews in the popular press of Germany and four European nations (France, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania) from 1899 through 1939 demonstrates that Germans, before 1933, were among the least antisemitic people. Perhaps the best evidence of the relative openness of German society to Jews was the fact that no census had gathered data on ethnicity. ... In January 1933, all Germans belonged to the same nation.
"From 1928 to mid-1932, when electoral support from Nazi candidates leapt from 2.6 percent to 37.4 percent, antisemitism played little role in attracting voters to Nazism. Masses of Germans, disillusioned with a foundering democracy and terrified of communism in a time of economic catastrophe, were drawn to the Nazis' promise of a radically new order under Hitler's control. Archival research as well as memoirs and oral histories make it abundantly clear that Germans attitudes toward 'the Jewish question' began to depart from Western European and North American norms only after the Nazi takeover. Germans did not become Nazis because they were antisemites; they became antisemites because they were Nazis." (9-10)
To really understand how political and social disasters like Nazism and the Holocaust could take place, it is essential to understand the mindset of the populace that allowed it. Koonz goes on to explain the methodical process with which Hitler indoctrinated Germany into the Nazi mindset, so that by the 1940s, Germans were more inclined to believe what the Nazis told them about the Jews, where they were less likely in 1932. Koonz, in fact, demonstrates in a lengthy historical discourse that Hitler had to tread very carefully in his first few years in power to keep both popular support and the support of radical Nazis, because most Germans did not approve of the violence and harassment the SA perpetrated against the Jews.
I've done my best to set up both the Death Eaters and the Triskelions in this way; fear is the foundation of their ideology. Yes, there are people like Bellatrix Lestrange that are primarily motivated by the thrill that they get from holding power over somebody, but historically and demographically speaking, it makes more sense for the Death Eaters to be motivated primarily of fear of the unknown, even if they themselves aren't consciously aware that that's what they're afraid of. In that sense, as one reader remarked, I made them "just as bigoted and fearful of the unknown as the Dursleys."
A lot of people are not comfortable with this view of Nazism and similar ideologies because of the implications. It is the same reason that a lot of people were upset with the way the film Downfall portrayed Hitler. Essentially, looking at these ideologies in this way means acknowledging that people like Hitler and like the Nazis are human beings with human fears. It is more comfortable to define evil and extremism through the narrow lens of ideology rather than the much broader lens of human psyche. But understanding Hitler as a human being brings the rather disturbing realization that regardless of ideology, given the right circumstances and the right frame of mind, anybody could become something like Hitler.
I will only remark further, however, that if you portray Hitler as a monster rather than as a human being, you are essentially making him superhuman, which was exactly the kind of image he wanted to be remembered by. By refusing to acknowledge that he was a human being gone very badly wrong, you are handing a psychological victory to Hitler.
