Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24032 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Independent
`Cartwright's song does truly soar'

The Scotsman
Cartwright is a beautifully evocative writer; also one who makes you think.

Independent
`A harrowing read about Hitler and execution, from one of our finest novelists'

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking
Very few books seem utterly true to life as most of us live it. Very few books can reduce me to tears. This is one. It is a book of enormous beauty and absolute honesty. Bravo!

A very good novel
This is a fascinating novel about the unlikely friendship - and tensions - between a philosopher who distrusts ideologies and theories of history and a German aristocrat obsessed with the destiny of his country and seeking to overthrow Hitler. The story is told in a number of ways - from the vantage point of the present day, through the lens of memoir and historical reconstruction. I enjoyed it a lot.

An unhistorical historical novel
This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.