January 2, 2012
Funder follows the success of Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall with a debut novel “reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast.” Ruth Becker glimpses that beast outside her Berlin apartment in 1933, as her showy journalist husband, Hans, makes mojitos on the day that Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The heart of the novel, however, belongs to Ruth’s cousin Dora Fabian, leftist agitator, doomed idealist, and soul mate of playwright Ernst Toller. Ruth helps Dora hide Ernst’s writings as the Reichstag burns, and she flees with Hans the next day after being questioned about her Communist affiliations. Outside Germany, she works tirelessly for the cause, bringing Nazi preparations for war to the attention of the British. But her relationship with Hans, whose secret activities endanger everyone, crumbles. As the Holocaust begins, Ernst, in New York, relates Dora’s role in his life to a typist whose document reaches Ruth in Australia almost 60 years later. By alternating between Ernst and Ruth, Funder leaps through time with alacrity. She adds an integral perspective on a shopworn subject by invoking the lives of Nazi dissidents whose attempts to alert the world to the growing menace were ignored until it was too late. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency.
September 15, 2011
While visiting her cousin Dora in Munich, teenaged Ruth falls for charismatic journalist Hans Wesemann, and the three try to get World War I hero Ernst Toller released from prison. Then Hitler comes to power, Ernst is forced out of the country, and the four friends end up in London, trying to persuade the British that the danger Hitler poses is very, very real. This book isn't getting the biggest first printing--only 30,000 copies--but the buzz is starting to build and rights have been sold to over a dozen countries. Also, Funder's first book, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, won Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 1, 2012
Dora is a passionately political woman. She is the thread that holds together her cousin Ruth, journalist Hans Wesseman, and Ernst Toller, a fellow activist and Dora's lover. The quartet flee Germany in the wake of Hitler's rise to power, but they refuse to be silent about the Nazi threat. Shifting back and forth in time through the framing device of Toller's autobiography, this debut novel by the author of Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a spiraling account of political activity and love during World War II. The social aspect of the politics, rather than the war, is the author's main focus in following Dora as she pulls Ruth and Toller along with her. VERDICT Inspired by the life of German Jewish activist Ruth Koplowitz, this beautiful tapestry of friendship and loyalty during one of history's darker times will appeal to fans of novels about World War II as well as those who enjoy biographies of figures from that period. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/11; the author got to know Koplowitz in her later years after she immigrated to Australia.--Ed.]--April Steenburgh, George F. Johnson Memorial Lib., Endwell, NY
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 15, 2011
Funder follows her critically acclaimed nonfiction debut (Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, 2003) with the novelized account of German activists who opposed Hitler before World War II. The author uses an unnecessary framing device, having two of the dissidents tell their sometimes-overlapping versions of events. In 2001 Australia, as her short-term memory fails along with her health, Ruth Becker remembers back 70 years to her early adulthood in Germany and England. In 1939 Manhattan, Ernst Toller, a world-renowned playwright and human-rights activist, holes up at the Mayflower Hotel where he dictates to his secretary the events that happened six years earlier. Both narrators are historical figures, as are almost all the "characters" in the book, despite a few name changes. Ruth and Ernst's paths cross in the 1920s. Toller, a decorated soldier during World War I, has been imprisoned for his pacifist activism. Among the pacifists and socialists working to gain his release is Ruth's older cousin Dora. While visiting Dora, 18-year-old Ruth falls deeply in love with journalist Hans Wesemann, whose courageous satirical articles make vicious fun of Hitler and his cronies. Ruth and Hans marry. When Toller leaves prison, where he has managed to write his well-loved plays, Dora becomes his secretary and passionate lover. Toller, scarred by his wartime and prison experience, suffers bouts of serious depression. He wants to marry Dora, but she is a committed feminist who refuses to be tied down. Life as an anti-fascist in late 1920s and early '30s Berlin is a heady mix of idealism, passion and drinking. Then the burning of the Reichstag occurs. Dora is arrested briefly, but it is Ernst the authorities want. Soon Ruth and Hans find themselves in London with Dora, Ernst and numerous other Germans trying to raise the alarm about Hitler. Some find adapting to expatriation harder than others, and one becomes a traitor to the cause. The disquieting historical facts entwined by themes of love and betrayal are powerful enough to make up for flat-footed storytelling.
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May 4, 2012
Given the striking intelligence and originality that Anna Funder brought to the subject of the East German Secret Police in her award-winning Stasiland, it comes as no surprise to find her first novel All that I Am so assured and poised. The two books share more than their German political and historical focus, and that’s Funder’s capacity to delve into the moral complexities of lives trapped in very difficult circumstances.
Part one of All That I Am opens in a Sydney hospital with a beautifully understated sentence: ‘I’m afraid, Mrs. Becker, the news is not altogether comforting.’ Ruth Becker (Wesserman) is at the end of a long life, lived, we soon realise, in the most discomforting circumstances imaginable. Born in Germany in the first decade of the 20th century, Ruth has lived a remarkable life, at the centre of the small but passionate group of engaged activists who saw early on the repugnant brutality of Nazism, and who resisted. It’s an old cliché about the personal being political, and every act being a political act, but it holds true in this book, as the relationships between Ruth, her charismatic cousin Dora and the dramatist Ernst Toller (who was, in fact, president of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919) unfold in the Weimar and early Nazi years.
This is a story based on real people, and the powerful subject matter is brilliantly organised through a dual narrative, told by Ruth and Toller, rendered more complex by being told across time shifts of 80 years. Interwar Germany, London and New York, as well as contemporary Sydney, are vividly present, all the while contextualised by the dramas of heroism and betrayal played out before us. This is a genuinely moving novel, which challenges the reader’s perception and judgement, at the same time as it works as a political, and historical, thriller. And the moral dilemmas present for all the historical characters, real and imagined, are at the absolute centre of the novel. It’s not just the potential of the consequences of anybody’s actions that is so riveting; it’s the contest between courage and cowardice, risk and safety, loyalty and betrayal, in a world of increasing terror, where the stakes are, as we know from history, so high.
David Gaunt is co-owner of Gleebooks in Sydney. This review first appeared in the August 2011 issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine. All That I Am has been shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Awards.