This is the kind of historical fiction I so very much love. You learn history and at the same time feel the emotions of the people who live through the historical events. I would suggest reading Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way and then continuing with this book by Anna Funder. Barry’s book takes you to the trenches of Belgium during WW1. WW1 is the basis for what happens in Germany leading up to Hitler and WW2.The people who are the prime protagonists in Funder’s book lived through WW1 and were shaped by it. They were pacifists and became socialist activists who sought to prevent Hitler’s rise to power. You cannot understand one event without understanding what came before. You have to feel in your gut what those who lived through WW1 felt. Funder’s book of historical fiction is based on true events and real people. The author has gone beneath the events and depicted the emotional underpinnings of these people’s lives. It is the emotions that Funda has imagined, drawing from her in-depth study of the known facts. I cannot recommend these two books more highly. When I read a wonderful book of historical fiction I need to know exactly what is true and what imagined. Half-way through I was going crazy because search in Wikipedia did not provide all the answers. My GR friend Jennifer helped me find the link about Dora. She pointed out an interview with the author, where she speaks of what she intended to achieve with this novel. Please take the time to read this interview. This interview is worth reading: http://www.readings.com.au/news/q-a-with-anna-funder-author-of-all-that-i-am
Funder’s book revolves around the lives of five people:
Playwright Ernst Toller: Information about Ernst Toller is accessible at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Toller
Information about the German Revolution of 1918-1919 may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919
Activist Dora Fabian(1901-1935): http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-2591302988/fabian-dora-19011935.html
Ruth Becker: This figure is based on the real person, Ruth Blatt (née Koplowitz) (1906-2001). She was a friend of the author. In the book Ruth is fictitiously said to be Dora’s cousin. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=52726
Hans Wesemann (1895-1971) was a real person too. See the second section of this link: https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/20032004_FallWinter/amherst_authors
As was Berthold Jacob (1898-1944): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Jacob
The three central characters are Toller, Ruth and Dora. Dora, she was loved by both Toller and Ruth. What they share is not only their love for Dora but also common political beliefs. There are two narrators, Toller speaking from NY in 1939, and Ruth from Sydney in 2011. It is these two people who tell you about Dora and what their fellow activists did. You will find out what they did, why, and how and who was betrayed….. and by whom. The events are very exciting. As mentioned, the time periods are different, and there are flash backs. You do have to pay attention, if only because you are so drawn in that you want to pay close attention. You want to understand what actually happened and you want to understand how these people felt, what motivated them and why they chose to make the decisions they made. You care because the events are gripping and the author has excellently imagined their internal, emotional struggles.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by two people Judy Bennett for Ruth and Saul Reichlin for Toller. This makes it easier to understand who is speaking. Ruth is an elderly, frail woman in her nineties, and she sounds it. Toller’s narration is equally superb. When the two narrators impersonate another person, this is equally convincing. I have zero quibbles with the narration. However, there was no author’s note at the end of the book. I am not sure if this is lacking only from the audio version or if it also is lacking from the paper book. This is why the links above are essential, at least from my point of view. In addition, I was not patient enough to wait to the end to even find out if there was an author’s note!
To be clear: the events are extremely interesting and exciting. The relationships between the figures feel so real. There is love, real love portrayed in this book. The love relationships are messy….. There is betrayal and disappointment and fear. I believe the author has succeeded with what she intended to do, as described in the interview above! She succeeds because she is a talented writer. I have also read, enjoyed and learned from her book Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. That is one reason why I picked this book up!
And how does she succeed in making these characters into real people that live and breathe? Of course, it is through her prose, through her choice of words. The characters are believable and fascinating. This is due to the author’s ability to intrigue us with what they do and say and think. Ruth, as a child, is living with Dora’s family as she recuperates from scarlet fever. Dora has a box camera. In this home, which is not home, Ruth is tantalized by this camera:
It fascinated me: a box with an eye. I held it to my chest and looked down into the small glass. Everything was contained there, in round miniature . Her (Dora’s) steel-framed bed and white counterpane. A tottering pile of books on the floor next to it. I sensed the instant layer of protection between me and the world. I could be looking down but seeing straight ahead. Most of all I liked the way it gave me a reason to be looking.
And what she snaps on that camera is interesting too:
I got cook’s floury hands on the ceramic mixing bowl. And once, Dora’s face so close I caught the flickering mahogany lights of her iris. A pigeon on my window-ledge turned into a gray blur of speed on the print.
These words so well illustrate how Ruth felt living there in her relatives’ house, her sense of being an outsider no matter how kind they were to her. I am drawn to books where the writer intrigues me with such images. I prefer such subtleties over blatant ordinary descriptions.
What the protagonists are concerned with interests me. Listen to these thoughts of Ruth:
In those days we believed of freedoms of every kind. So many boys had died in the war that we knew that life was short and cheap. There was no point not loving when the occasion arose. Those hippies of the 60s and 70s seemed so tame and vane to me. So derivative! They marched for peace but had never really known war. They confused the freedom simply to have sex with the freedom for one’s sex not to matter.
I am doubly interested when I hear this. I have been reading about WW1. There is so much in this book that relates to that experience. What followed the war? How did the war change people’s behavior afterwards? Also, I am a child of the hippie era. Her thoughts are so true here too. We didn’t fight in any war! We knew nothing of it. It is true too that we fought primarily for the right to have sex, when and where we pleased. The freedom for sex not to matter, that came later.
There are glorious lines like this:
We lied on sand so clean it squeaked.
Or
…too busy exhausting myself by not sleeping.
Or
I don’t know how much freedom the heart can bear.
A book with such lines will always draw me in, regardless of the central theme. Here that theme is the political climate between the two wars, real people who shaped history and their fight to make Hitler’s intentions known outside Germany. What more can you ask for? Superb characterizations. Well, you get that too.
