In this post I made a reference to Schuldig yearning for the glory days of the Stasi. This was an inadvertent private joke, and one which relies for its explanation more than a little on my own take on where exactly Schuldig is coming from. This would be something I decided on in conversation with rokesmith, and may require a little bit of explaining. So, here I am explaining myself.

Being as I am not a big Schwarz fangirl, my understanding of the back doubles of their canon is slight. Being, however, a fangirl at all, this hasn't stopped me freely speculating based on what I do know about him - namely that he's a German, that he's in his early 20s, that he's a professional bastard and that he works, or worked, for Esset.

So, I don't know a lot - but I know enough about him and about German history to know that there are some serious unanswered questions implied in all this.

If we run with the idea that Weiss Kreuz is set in 1998 - which it clearly is given the onscreen confirmation of the year in Episode 19, an episode I would not recommend watching for any other reason unless of course you really like bloody awful electronic music - and Schuldig is around 23 years old during the series itself, this puts him at 15 years old during German reunification in 1990 and suggests that he must have been born sometime in 1975. Considering that Rosenkreuz must have gotten their claws into him and dragged him off to Austria by the time he was in his early teens at the very latest, this means that Schuldig spent his childhood in a divided country and may well never actually have lived in a unified Germany.

This, of course, begs the question of precisely where in that divided country he was living. There's a theory, of course, that Schuldig lived in West Berlin. I'd go with that if it wasn't for knowing where the theory came from: Sidara's Sünde. Now, Sünde is a decent enough fanfic, but it is just a fanfic. Just because Sidara said it doesn't mean we all have to go along with it. I don't. I think he's from that kind of area, but not from West Berlin. Or, in fact, from Berlin at all.

This is about where I start making shit up, so hold onto your hats, folks.

For some reason I think Schuldig is from Brandenburg. Specifically Potsdam. I'm going somewhere with this, so please nod, smile and move on.

This, for the record, makes him an East German. I think there's something about Schuldig's attitude that makes him uniquely suited to being brought up in the former Eastern Bloc. Knowledge, after all, is power, and nowhere more so than in a totalitarian state where even thinking the wrong way is strenuously discouraged, where kids are brought up from birth aware that there's a right way and a wrong way to think about things. An untrained but still-powerful psychic in a situation like that could very easily prove very dangerous.

Simply put I think Schuldig, growing up in the Eastern Bloc, would have been a very dangerous child indeed. I think that he realized from a very early age the power that his gift gave him over people, and that he wasn't at all averse to exploiting this. I think he may well have informed for the Stasi, more to settle scores with the people who'd wronged him or for the feeling of power it gave him than because he genuinely believed in the Soviet state's goals; I think, in the end, that this is why Rosenkreuz managed to track him down, because how in the world did a child know all these things? Underage informers were nothing new, of course, but one who knew quite as much as Schuldig did, and was quite as uncannily accurate, would be something to worry about. Where, exactly, would he have been getting all this from?

From there on, of course, I defer to canon and superior Schwarz-fangirl knowledge.

And, of course, this is simply my take on it. I may or may not be wrong about any or all of it, but to be totally honest I don't care if I am. I enjoy my little Schuldig fantasy origin story and I want to keep it. Permit me my girlish dreams a minute, please?