The tricky world of faction

There is something odd about a roman à clef which has the key attached. Justin Cartwright’s latest novel tells the story of ‘legendary Oxford professor’ Elya Mendel of All Souls and his relationship with German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg, who is hanged in Plotzensee on 26 August 1944 after the failure of the July Plot. In case we miss the clues (Isaiah Berlin’s father was called Mendel; Adam von Trott was hanged on that day and in that prison) there is an afterword saying that the book is based ‘in part’ on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin, and on ‘the ‘repudiation’ of that friendship by Berlin. Others in the story, such as Stauffenberg himself, are given their real names.

So does the change of the principals’ names signal anything? If so, what? There is an appalling dissonance in hiding von Trott behind the name of von Gottberg: the most famous von Gottberg was a Waffen SS general and Governor of White Ruthenia who pronounced that resisisters, Jews and gypsies in the conquered East should be hunted like game. He committed suicide after capture in 1945 before he could be hanged by the Allies. And this is the trouble with such codes and games. Is one supposed to try to unbundle them? Are we in the real world or an imagined world? In the real world, All Souls does not have a clock made by Wren; you can’t actually see people sculling on the river if you stand outside the Meadow Building of Christ Church and I am reasonably sure that the (disguised) Goronwy Rees would not say ‘Cheers’ in pre-war All Souls. Far more importantly, Isaiah Berlin did not ‘repudiate’ von Trott after the latter wrote a foolish letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1934 claiming that there was no anti-Semitism in the legal system in Hesse where he was a lawyer.