Anna Funder is an Australian journalist whose award-winning first book, Stasiland (2003), provided dispassionate reportage of the former German Democratic Republic’s bizarre Big Brother security establishment and its toxic impact on east German society.
All That I Am is her second book, a work of “faction” based on an unresolved murder in Britain in 1935. Involving Nazi thuggery and Jewish/Left martyrdom, it is rather more emotional in tone than Stasiland, perhaps because Funder was friends with one of the protagonists of that drama.
All That I Am draws on a lengthy article by Charmian Brinson in German Life and Letters titled “The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm”. Fabian and Wurm were exiled German Socialists who were found dead in their safe house, both tucked up in bed, facing one another and holding hands. The room was locked from inside. Predictably, the deaths caused a sensation at the time, but the inquest and verdict of suicide were transparently a cover-up for murder by Nazi henchmen.
Why was the British establishment so eager to look the other way when the circumstances demanded a deeper investigation? Brinson’s paper examines these events against, among other things, the complex questions of evolving Anglo-German relations, the post-World War I Left movement and the angst and dislocation of exiles from Hitler’s Germany.
Funder delivers the story in overlapping time shifts, the nineties and the thirties, and through two sets of reminiscences. The first are those of Ruth Becker-Weseman, Funder’s friend, a former Social Democrat who emigrated to Australia, where she lives alone, with old-age infirmities and uncomfortable memories.
The second are those of Ernst Toller, the hugely popular poet and playwright, once imprisoned by the Nazis, now in America, a prisoner of exile in the land of the free. Funder has him dictating his memoirs and musing about his life in Germany and Dora, his comrade-in-arms, occasional lover and former secretary.
The title derives from a question Ruth was fond of posing and answering: “Who am I? I am a nobody.” But growing up in the shadow of her adored cousin, the dynamic and unconventional Dora Fabian, and as wife of a prominent Left dissident journalist, Ruth, then a photographer, unwittingly acquired a ringside seat to this story. As she muses all those years later, “The sun, streaming through my front window, appears to have cleared a patch on my head; oh, the advantages of female pattern baldness! I wasn’t always so spare up there. But I must say it has been, in general, a boon not to have been a beautiful woman. Because I was barely looked at, I was free to do the looking.”
Flashbacks work well in film; in print, they run the risk of creating an unwieldy story-line, especially in a narrative as complex as this one. Funder puts her journalistic skills to good use, managing the complexities of fact, space and time deftly. The brevity of her prose, infused with a gentle irony, keeps the plot taut and enhances the atmospherics of this multi-layered story of love and betrayal.
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The ten words of the opening line, for instance, powerfully capture how liberals, leftists, and, indeed, most of the world were caught unawares on a fateful day in January 1933. “When Hitler came to power, I was in the bath.” It sets the tone for the rest of the novel, though the actual story begins some 18 pages later when Ruth receives a parcel of documents from New York. They are Toller’s papers that Dora Fabian had rescued from Nazi Germany at considerable personal peril. That sets off the train of dual reminiscences that carry the plot forward - and it’s a page turner even if you know the basic story, not least because Funder introduces many unexpected elements.
As a novel All That I Am certainly works. Funder has put in a prodigious amount of research to present a compelling portrait of everyday life in Weimar Germany and the early days of the Third Reich and for that, as much as the story, it is a compelling read.
But if Funder is making a political point, there are flaws. The impression it creates of the Communists and Democrats as essentially good guys, the hapless, idealistic victims of the Nazis. Many of them also suffered because, coincidentally, many Leftists were also happened to be Jewish. It is easy to demonise Hitler but the Left played no small part in Germany’s descent into chaos in the thirties.
It is true that the Left movement was ruthlessly suppressed in the first months of 1933. But in 1932, the last fully free election before Hitler took power, the Left parties polled 13.1 million votes to the National Socialists’ 11.7 million. As British historian Richard J Evans has pointed out in the second volume of his monumental study of the Third Reich (and Funder namess the second volume as a source) these parties were best organised for underground resistance, having been suppressed since Bismarck’s time. Bitter ideological divisions prevented them from putting up a united front to the Nazis. Counter-factual history is speculative by nature, but it is worth wondering whether 50 million people would have died as the result of one tyrant’s ambitions had the German Left allied to keep the Nazis out of power.
Besides, as an expert on the Stasi, Funder would know that it was Communist East Germany that was the natural successor to Hitler’s regime in many ways. The iron courage of the major players of this story tends to mask those tragic realities.
ALL THAT I AM
Anna Funder
Penguin
363 pages; Rs 550