Heart of Evil

As Adolf Hitler was being appointed German chancellor and the crowds,punctuated by the SA and SS,were celebrating everywhere in Berlin,Ruth Wesemann (nee Becker) stepped out of the bath and unfurled a small red flag out of her apartment window,partly in protest,partly jest. Ruth and her husband Hans,her cousin Dora Fabian along with the likes of playwright Ernst Toller,soon found themselves exiled in London,organising the leftist anti-Nazi resistance abroad,taking enormous risks to smuggle information about the reality of Nazi Germany out to England,where it kept falling on deaf ears. Their life in Germany taken away from them,they were barely tolerated by the authorities in Britain,spied upon by the Nazis and betrayed by their own. They were mostly Jews. And they were still patriotic Germans. So they took it upon themselves to save Germany by initiating the process of Hitlers destruction. They failed,although Hitler would be dead and gone within 12 years.

Australian writer Anna Funder,award-winning author of Stasiland (2003),makes her debut as novelist in All That I Am,with a tale that its protagonists didnt live to tell. Barring a few minor characters,Funders novel is the story of real-life Ruth Blatt (her German-language teachers teacher in Melbourne),who was a photographer,Blatts cousin,her husband,and Ernst Toller,the expressionist playwright and week-long president of the still-born independent Bavarian Soviet Republic proclaimed during the German Revolution after World War I. Blatt used to ask Who am I?,and Funders title draws from both Tollers autobiography,I was a German (1934),and Primo Levis If this is a Man (1947,translated 1958).

At the heart of the novel,developed through parallel narratives Tollers in May 1939 and Ruths in the early 21st century,shortly before her and Blatts death is a London newspaper report from the 1930s of two women,Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm,found dead in Fabians apartment in an apparent suicide pact. This report is a fact,and that is all that there was to a case of suspected murder,cover-up and betrayal,in which the British government paid no heed to those who knew Dora and the unlikelihood of her taking her own life. At its heart is also another betrayal that by Ruths husband,Hans,star journalist and master of satire,who could never match up to Dora,the über-intellectual,feminist,socialist activist,in zeal and ability. This incident,while breaking Ruth,is also a stark account of a Jewish man giving up his comrade to the Gestapo. Toller,in fact and fiction,ended up in the United States,where,dictating changes to his autobiography in May 1939 and having asked his assistant to book his tickets to London,he killed himself in a New York hotel. It is when his notebook lands with Ruth,in Sydney in 2001 recovered from the basement of the now condemned New York hotel that her long-term memory (she has begun losing its short-term version) is triggered and her story told.

Funders effort works splendidly as a discussion of freedom and betrayal through lucid and unpretentious prose,poignant in its understated pathos and retrospective ease. Her years in Germany and the research she did for Stasiland had produced a strikingly original work of non-fiction that salvaged and brought alive individual and communal life in a police state that had already begun to be forgotten,where the Firm (the Stasi) was privy to how much time one spent in the toilet,who ones husband or wife was sleeping with,who was likely dreaming a dissident thought at the moment,and not just who was an enemy of the state. The real improvisation of Stasiland was the device of the interviewer and narrator (Funder herself) as a character. However,while the nature of her discoveries made it impossible for Stasiland to be a work of fiction,All That I Am doesnt take itself seriously as a novel. Thats not because of the tangibility of the history underneath every line Funder in fact invents most of the narrative detail but because the book is a structural failure. The narrative alternations and temporal switches are contrived and produce a mechanical imposition on the reader. But if you believe that it matters to read about how the 20th centurys definitive barbarism swept up and swept away the Dora Fabians,Ernst Tollers or I am a nobody Ruth Blatts,read this writer who has already contributed fairly to keeping alive the memory of the darkness of the human soul in what was our century till the other day. Toller penetrated the heart of that evil even before World War II began. Few had paid heed. Historys warning is the sentinel of the future.