All That I Am [Hardcover]

As the novel opens, Ruth Becker is an elderly woman, living in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Ruth has not forgotten the past, but she prefers to keep it at a distance. But Ruth's defences crumble when she receives Ernst Toller's papers from the past. From a shared past: Toller's perspective is looking back from 1939, her own perspective adds an additional 60 years of life to that view.

`I am a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting.'

Ruth Becker and Ernst Toller are the narrators in Ms Funder's novel. Ernst Toller, a playwright, is looking back at events from his exile in New York just after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Ruth Becker moves between her present life in Sydney and events in the years between World War I and II.
This novel revolves around the events in the lives of five people: Ernst Toller, Ruth Becker, her cousin Dora Fabian, Ruth's husband Hans Wesemann, and the journalist Berthold Jacob. When Ernst Toller is imprisoned, in the 1920s, for his role in Munich's brief revolution, the others campaign for his release. Toller is released in 1925, and he and Dora become lovers. While in prison, Toller has written four plays about the human price of war: he is both a leading figure in German theatre and a leading European anti-fascist. Toller was in Switzerland during the week when Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

For Ruth, Dora, Berthold and Hans, the decision to leave Germany is made immediately after the infamous burning of the Reichstag. Dora bravely hides Ernst's papers, and joins him in Switzerland, before later moving to London. Hans and Ruth leave for London, while Berthhold moves to Strasbourg.

The British gave only temporary protection (for three months at a time) to those who fled from the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Their visas stipulated `no political activities on any kind', and they lived in constant fear that their attempts to try to alert the world to the evils of Hitler might see them sent back.

`We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it.'

Life in London is full of challenges, and not everyone is strong enough to remain true to the cause. Receiving Toller's papers sends Ruth back into that past but because we can only view events either through her eyes or through Ernst Toller's, our view is restricted. We sense that Hans is failing to adjust to this new life: `Slowly, he lost his sense of public self, and with it his private one evaporated.', and wonder about the consequences. We view Dora's bravery, without always appreciating the cost or the consequences.

Ms Funder's prose depicts these characters, with their flaws and their ambiguities, through Ruth's eyes. Memory may not always interpret cause accurately, or correctly attribute effects.

`The problem with life is that you can only live it blindly, in one direction. Memory has its own ideas; it snatches elements of story from whenever, tries to put them together. It comes back at you from all angles, with all that you must know, and it gives you the news.'

I found this novel a challenging read. I was conscious that the novel was a fiction based on real people and events. The more I read, the more I wanted to know about Dora, and the more I wondered about this period of the past. And about which lessons we could extract and apply today. For me, the characters became secondary to the issues and the challenges.

`In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Anna Funder's debut novel, "All That I Am" was a difficult book to review. A good novel should have either a strong plot or strong characters. Funder's novel has neither. I wasn't invested in either plot or characters until the end of the book, where the plot picked up and the characters became clearer.

Told by two voices, "Ruth" and "Toller", the book is set in many places and time periods. London in 1933, Germany during and after WW1, Sydney in the recent past, and New York City in 1939 are a few of the settings. There were four main characters, Dora and her cousin Ruth, and Ernst Toller and Hans Wesemann, both WW1 veterans, writers, and, along with the women, members of an organisation of left-leaning German refugees determined to get the word out about what was happening in Nazi Germany. However, as danger of Nazi reprisals grow, allegiances are torn apart. Betrayals abound but Funder actually ties things up nicely in the end.

After finishing the book, I read the afterword where Funder tells the reader that the story is based on actual historic figures and their work. And here's where I think Anna Funder may have made a mistake in her writing. The story of Dora Fabian, Ruth Blatt, Ernst Toller, Hans Wesemann would have made excellent, straight-forward telling as a work of non-fiction. As fiction, Funder has to invent and imagine scenes and personalities, and I didn't feel her writing was as strong as it should be. The end of the book was stronger because she was working with solid fact.

It's presumptuous and rather rude for an amateur reviewer to take an author to task. I don't like writing a review like that, but I did finish Funder's novel wanting to know more about the characters' actual lives. A quick trip to Wiki gave me some answers about some of the characters - including a translated page from "Wiki-Poland" about Wesemann. I wish Anna Funder had written a non-fiction portrait of these very real people. I think it would have been better written and more interesting.

I'll be anxious to see what other reviewers write about "All That I Am". I bet some will really like it. I just wish I had liked it.

This is the first novel from Anna Funder, who wrote the excellent non-fiction book `Stasiland', about numerous people's experiences at the hands of the secret police in the GDR, the former East Germany. This novel also takes Germany as it's primary setting, here though the time is the 1920s and 1930s, the days of hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic, the reaction in Germany to having lost WWI and the demands of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, followed by the rise to power of the National Socialists led by Hitler. This period interests me very much as I studied modern German history at school and University. I have read a large number of excellent novels recently taking one or both World Wars as a backdrop, yet in dealing with refugees from Germany fighting against the new regime, this one covers very well something I knew very little about and brings a whole different aspect to light; one that I feel should be more widely known, and I hope it will become so through this inspiring novel's many future readers.

Ruth Becker, her cousin Dora Fabian, left-wing playwright Ernst Toller, Hans Wesemann who Ruth marries, Mathilde Wurm and other characters play leading roles in a determined struggle to keep Germany from falling into Hitler's control. When Hitler does gain power though, they flee and yet they strive to continue their resistance efforts, however much this endangers them, from their new locations, London being the main one. Whilst trying to maintain their determined struggle, they have to cope with trying to settle as refugees into another country with a different language, to learn who they can and cannot trust both within the establishment and those close around them, all the while fearing that betrayal and enemies may be concealed everywhere. Amongst the group themselves there is immense friendship, love and heartache, and great struggles whilst trying to remain undiscovered.

Ernst Toller fought for Germany in World War I, yet now he is banished and his works burned there. Now he is looking back and amending the manuscript for his autobiography, `I Was A German', to include details of Dora's life and his feelings for her. Dora is a determined, compelling and hugely courageous woman. Toller's manuscript is sent to Ruth Becker, (whose real name is Ruth Blatt, and whom the author knew), who is now elderly and living in Australia, and this provokes her to recall all the memories from those years gone by. Ruth's story is told in the first person, alternating with chapters where Toller tells his story in 1939, where he spends his time in a New York City hotel room dictating his thoughts to his secretary Clara. She herself has many anxieties regarding the impending war and its potentially devastating effects on her family.

I admire the characters so much for their attempts to expose the build up to war and fight the injustices being perpetrated by the Nazis. The writing is wonderful, the story so moving, at times hopeful and then devastating, and it is that much more engrossing and also filled with sadness because it is true, the author having taken the actions and experiences of real people to create this novel. They existed, they fought these struggles, and they endured this terrible treatment, and still they persisted in trying to change things for the better for others in the future. It really makes you stop and think as a reader. The writer's use of language is pitch perfect. The novel really made me think about how much some people fight in their lives, how much they can achieve, and what amazing events can lie hidden in each individual's past. This is an intelligent, literary novel and I could see it being in serious contention for literary prizes in the coming year. Highly recommended.