Before Everything Else

A cold, sparse orphanage room with two metal beds and thin blankets.

I often find that the truest beginnings of a character’s story are not dramatic, but spare. For my characters, everything begins with loss and movement—rooms that never felt like home, and a childhood shaped by what was missing.

“Loss becomes loyalty. Survival becomes conviction.”

I wanted their childhood to feel spare and unsettled—because instability often shapes people more deeply than ideology.

This is one of the earliest scenes I wrote for them:

“As soon as Ludolf could grasp the meaning of loss, both his parents were gone. The Köhler boys were cast into an orphanage—a cold, sterile place that smelled of disinfectant and discipline. In rooms where only the strong endured and the weak learned to stay silent, Erich learned to fight. He became the shield, the aggressor, the boy who would never let fate claim him again.

By the time Ludolf was a preteen and Erich sixteen, they had been transferred through five foster homes. Stability was a rumor. Hunger was not. Erich began stealing food and small amounts of money to keep them fed, and by eighteen, he was slipping into cramped basements where older men spoke of revolution, justice, and revenge. In those dim rooms, Erich found a language for his anger.

Ludolf followed, as he always did. His doubts stayed quiet, but they never disappeared.”

Research Notes

• Postwar German orphanages and foster systems often moved children frequently, with limited emotional support.

• Radical political groups in the late 1960s and 1970s recruited young men through private meetings, often in informal basement spaces or student flats.

In Wolf Coat, these early years echo long after the boys leave those narrow rooms and thin blankets behind. Loss becomes loyalty. Survival becomes conviction. And what begins in quiet childhood corridors eventually crosses oceans and decades, landing in places no one expects.

I often wonder which small details linger most for readers—those quiet moments that shape a character long before the plot begins.

Lynda DuBois