Sigrid is in many ways a more traditional Lutheran than Luther is. Luther takes his religion for granted until it is endangered by Nazism, but Sigrid always held to the tenets of her faith because she believes them to be true and representative of Germany.
However, she is unlike many German women of those days in that she thinks for herself and doesn’t go along with the trending national socialism. She is akin to Marlene Dietrich, who rejected Goebbels’s offer to make her the grand dame of Nazi cinema, more than she is to Leni Riefenstahl, who made the infamous propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, that celebrates Hitler’s rise to power. She has empathy for the minorities that suffer under Hitler’s regime. She does believe in marriage and family, so she never becomes just a baby factory for the state because she knows that being and doing involve more than subservience to the nation state. She wants more for her boys than choosing which branch of the military to serve in. She even reprimands her husband in the early days of Nazi rule when prosperity was returning and before the war started and Luther had hopes that the Nazis wouldn’t be as bad as they had thought.
I originally wrote in the manuscript one chapter from Sigrid’s point of view, but it was wisely deleted from the published version of the book. I subsequently turned that chapter into a short story. It tells the story of the firebombing of Dresden in the final months of the war, and shows her to be the strong, resilient woman that stays true to herself and her husband.
I am considering publishing that short story in this blog because I think it would interest anyone who has read Nightmare Enemy, Dream Friend.