So we learn what Ruth thinks in her old age, and what she thought back in the 1930s (or what she remembers that she thought). The story is told in alternating perspectives: Ruth Blatt’s, from the vantage point of her fading old age in contemporary times and Ernst Toller’s, in the mid-to-late 1930s. It’s very difficult to judge, when reading about heroic people who risked their lives against a monstrous regime, to know whether or not their lives have been idealised, when real-life people and events have been used to write a novel. And now she’s in a book, where I can get to know her. To me, Ruth Blatt is not an historical figure at all, she’s one of my mother’s friends who died a little while ago. I wonder if it is because my mother also knew, and was fond of Ruth Blatt, that I feel a bit uneasy about this? I never met Ruth Blatt myself, but like others of my mother’s friends, she was a real person to me because my mother talked about her.

The book is dedicated to Ruth Blatt, (renamed as Ruth Becker in the novel) and Funder has drawn on Blatt’s life to write this story of a group of idealistic young people who challenged Hitler, ridiculed him in the press until they realised what a serious threat he was, fled to Britain when the repression began and – not without risk – tried to continue their activism from there in the hope of achieving international assistance to save Germany. Like fire, which can be intensely harmful or benign, Funder’s art in this novel is to use the history of real people – including someone now dead that she personally knew and was obviously fond of – to write, as she has before in the non-fiction Stasiland, about the need for public vigilance to guard against totalitarianism. This is a conversation we’ve had before – about the temptation of art, like fire, to use people as fuel. (She was also a real person but she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page):

Fabian was his one-time lover and fellow-activist against Hitler and is the central character in the novel. Auden(the poet) his reluctance to write about Dora Fabian in his autobiography. Ernst Toller, (the left-wing activist playwright) is discussing with W.H.

Anna Funder, as one of her characters in her debut novel All That I Am, makes a cunning observation about authors using people that they know in their writing.

Anna funder