Anna Funder’s award-winning debut book ‘Stasiland’ is a fascinating read offering a unique insight into the machinations of the Stasi and those who resisted them within the walls of the former East Germany.
Her much anticipated novel ‘All That I Am’ also has a German theme. Set in present day and in pre-war Europe, it traces the stories of a clique of German left-wing dissidents who risk their lives in their attempts to open the eyes of the world, or at least their own country-men, to the insidious brutality of the budding Nazi regime.
Cleverly structured, the stories interweave past and present through Ruth, now elderly and infirm, who looks back on events from her home in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. Her memories have been reignited by the autobiographical musings of the long dead revolutionary playwright, Ernest Toller, whose notebooks have now fallen into her hands.
We follow the group of dissident friends as they flee to London, where they still constrained from communicating the horror stories that reach them from their homeland for fear that the British government will revoke their visas and they will come to the attention of the Gestapo operations active within Britain.
Funder’s writing is strong and purposeful, her research both deep and wide. Based on real events and people, her novel illustrates the struggles those courageous ‘revolutionaries’ who predicted all that was to come and were shunned by a society in denial. These people lived in desperate times, fighting a battle without resources or power, facing constant danger and fear of betrayal. It would be years before history proved to them to be heroic standard-bearers of truth.
It’s a complicated structure for a writer to work with (essentially a story within a story) but deceptively easy to read. I saw Anna Funder speak recently at the University of NSW and she made it clear it is not an approach she would recommend as it ‘almost did her head in’ – I believe it. You only need to read her (or hear her speak) to get that she has both high intellect and emotional intelligence in spades. She should be enormously proud of two exceptional books to her credit.
