Well, I hope everyone in America had a fabulous Fourth of July. I think it’s fairly obvious that I took some time off last week since I didn’t even put up the Fact vs. Fiction page last week.
And since Chapter 6 goes up bright and early tomorrow morning I figured I’d better get this done.
So!
Fact: Ulm Minster is a real place. Here … take a look …
Fiction: VanBuren’s house, like VanBuren himself, is completely made up. To be honest, I sort of envisioned the Von Trapp family home from Sound of Music when I was writing this.
I love The Sound of Music. I watched it religiously as a kid. My parents say I watched it and Mary Poppins over and over again. Much like my son watches Lego Ninjago now.
Fact: You’ll notice the name “Gunter” has a cool little accent over it sometimes. That’s the umlaut and it alters the pronunciation of certain vowels … such as “u”.
We can thank my German teacher for that little tidbit staying with me. However, you’ll also notice that I don’t always use it. That is because this particular chapter is one of the ONLY chapters that even has a fragment of the original text in it.
Honestly … I couldn’t remember how to put the umlaut on there again. (It’s alt +0252 according to my research just now.) And since I already changed vernacular like “Frauline” to “Miss” for my primarily English audience, I figured it was unnecessary.
Fiction: The town of Ulm itself has been described based off pictures I reviewed recently. That means these pictures are of New Ulm, which had to be completely reconstructed after WWII thanks to a bombing that happened at … uh … um … NO SPOILERS!
If you know you’re history then you know when it’s coming. If you don’t, then I’m not going to spoil it for you. Suffice to say, I picked Ulm for a reason.
But anyway, I have no idea what Ulm actually looked like prior to the bombing. So the description there is primarily fiction.
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