All That I Am by Anna Funder

All That I Am

Imagine what might have been. In 1918, Bavaria was declared a free state and, even after the assassination of its leader, Kurt Eisner, in 1919, it survived for a few months more as a Soviet Republic until - to cut a complicated story short - it was crushed by the German army and the Freikorps. Had the experiment succeeded, and had a certain embittered corporal not been around taking notes, the history of the world would have been very different indeed.

In this novel, Anna Funder, an Australian writer who has long been fascinated by Germany - her first book was the award-winning Stasiland, a moving account of life in Cold War East Germany - helps us to remember things that might have been forgotten. It is, specifically, the story of a group of German refugees from the growing menace of Nazism: a story of courage and betrayal, and, quietly, that of Funder's own dedication and perseverance.

It was because of her own friendship with the longest-living survivor of the group, Ruth Becker (née Blatt), that this novel has been written in the first place.

And she has, remarkably, captured the atmosphere of what it must have been like to have been at the centre of the Left-wing movement in post-war (and then pre-war) Germany: although never exactly a lark to begin with - the playwright Ernst Toller, once fêted throughout the world, now largely forgotten, spent years in prison, and even refused to be released until other prisoners of conscience were freed too - being on the Left in Germany got progressively more dangerous as Hitler's grip on power grew stronger.

Even exile proved no haven - Britain's shabby treatment of German refugees is given blood-boiling treatment here, and quite right too. There were break-ins, abductions, sinister machinations in embassies, murders staged as suicides, daring escapes and terrible betrayals, as well as, of course, the larger stories of politics and persecution, and Funder has clearly done a great deal of research to knit the details into a novel.

My only problem is that I am not quite sure why she did, rather than leave it as non-fiction. (Why the title? I never really worked that out.) The narrative is shared alternately between Toller and Becker, the latter doing her reminiscing in 2001 in Sydney, the former dictating his memoirs in Manhattan in 1939 (where he hanged himself). We
have entertaining cameos: a scene
in which German post-war hyperinflation is imagined, a scene of cocaine-fuelled decadence in Weimar Berlin which recalls Cabaret, a walk-on appearance by W H Auden (who reminds us, quoting one of his own yet-to-be-written lines, that "poetry makes nothing happen"), and other appearances from such historical figures as Fenner Brockway, one of a small but doughty band of Brits who in this novel and in real life emerge with their honour intact.

The effect, with such historical boxes being ticked, is of a work composed more through duty than inspiration, and although there is not a single stupid word in it, and it tells an important story, you can't help feeling that this will do much better as a really classy mini-series.