Memories in a world of forgetting

It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about a week. Funder’s point of entry is Ruth, who, some 60 years later as a very old lady in Australia, receives in the post a copy of Toller’s auto-biography, I Was A German, with some manuscript amendments made by him in the week before he died, in 1939.

Despite the gap in time and place, they are united by their passionate attachment to Ruth’s cousin, Dora Fabian, who was Toller’s amanuensis and the love of his life. Dora was tireless in her resistance to Hitler both in Germany and, after her exile, in London in the early 1930s, where the group attempted to alert the British, and the world, to Hitler’s danger.