The Looking Glass

  Immersive Storytelling: Worldbuilding George Digby (U6T) Worldbuilding is a crucial part of storytelling. It is the act of creating and cultivating a world for your reader/readers to immerse themselves in. In my opinion, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing a story is the preparatory work, a time when you aren’t bogged down with the flow of language, a point when you can simply create and cultivate a world in your mind without the restrictions of narrative. Worldbuilding is something I find fascinating. However for many of the fellow writers and storytellers I talk to, worldbuilding is often a slog, with the fundamentals of cause and effect often acting as a weight in the mind of those who struggle with it. This article will serve as an overview of my process and hopefully act as a guide to those of you interested in creating your own settings for use in writing or elsewhere. However, do not take this article as doctrine - this is simply what worked for me and what I hope c...

J. Zimmatore (Lower Sixth) From the first Sieg Heil to the new Führer in 1934, to the bullet in the bunker eleven years later, art was dead in Germany. Fascism is an ouroboros that took its first bite in 1920 , sticking its fangs deep into the German population and paralysing them- morally, spiritually and artistically. Whilst Hitler's venom of vitriol only took full effect in 1934, Germany was not devoid of hatred before this. The Treaty of Versailles left Germany in ruins, and where there is tragedy, there are scapegoats.  Much is said about Hitler's skills as an orator, how he could silence thousands of people with a single word, bring crowds to sheer ecstasy with just a sentence, and radicalise an entire country through his speeches;  less is said of just how immense the scale of Germany's propaganda machine was and how it was created. During his time in Vienna, Hitler politically sympathised with the Greater German People's Party, but believed that to gain a follow...

Andre Garcia Repression is the subjugation of a person or group. It is a parasite that wriggles gradually into our governmental systems if left unchecked. This is hauntingly depicted in Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First They Came": “Then they came for me—and there was no one left—to speak out for me.” Nazi Germany is one of the most infamous cases of wide-scale repression. It came to be as a result of cumulative radicalisation; a term coined by the historian Hans Mommsen, who did extensive research on the Third Reich. It describes the slow buildup of radical ideas that eventually accumulate into calamities. In this essay, we will be delving into the causes and effects of repression in Nazi Germany. In essence, one of the main reasons for repression initially was to facilitate Hitler’s consolidation of power. Once his power was secure, he then started to purge on the basis of his ideals. During his first attempts at taking power in the early 20’s, such as in the Munich Putsch, ...