Memories in a world of forgetting

It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about a week. Funder’s point of entry is Ruth, who, some 60 years later as a very old lady in Australia, receives in the post a copy of Toller’s auto-biography, I Was A German, with some manuscript amendments made by him in the week before he died, in 1939.

Despite the gap in time and place, they are united by their passionate attachment to Ruth’s cousin, Dora Fabian, who was Toller’s amanuensis and the love of his life. Dora was tireless in her resistance to Hitler both in Germany and, after her exile, in London in the early 1930s, where the group attempted to alert the British, and the world, to Hitler’s danger. Impoverished, isolated, caught between fear of Nazi agents operating in London and the disingenuous British requirement that refugees should not engage in political activities, their efforts apparently came to nothing. Although history justified their fears and actions, it has forgotten them.

The novel is structured as a counterpoint between Ruth and Toller in what proves, for each of them, the last week of their life. Intercut with Ruth’s reflections on the events of long ago is her wry, shrewd commentary on her present condition and surroundings. Toller’s part is anchored to a New York hotel room in 1939, where he dictates to another young émigrée the amendments that eventually find their way to Ruth. Perceiving the failure of his political and literary achievements, he is anxious to write Dora into the central position that his published autobiography denied her.