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MWF ‘11 Coverage: Anna Funder in Conversation

Rebecca Bauert September 13

After the success of Anna Funder’s Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Stasiland, the anticipation for her second book has been immense. Funder discussed the writing of All That I Am, which is also her first novel, with Jason Steger as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Blending fact with fiction, All That I Am is about a group of (largely Jewish) German writers, artists, and thinkers who protested against the Nazis’ rise to power. The characters are based on real people: playwright Ernst Toller, Ruth Blatt (renamed Becker in the novel), and her friend Dora Fabian (cousin, in the novel), amongst others. Exiled in London during the 1930s, the group covertly tried to thwart the Nazi regime and alert the world to Hitler’s intentions for war.

Utilising what is known about the group’s activities as the skeleton for her story, Funder uses fiction to represent their inner lives, and imagines particular incidents and relationships – particularly the romantic bond between Toller and Fabian – to create plausible explanations for real-life events. The ability to reveal consciousness through fiction allowed Funder to show how various characters are “prescient and blind at the same time”, within their personal relationships if not politically as well. Many people (including Steger) have assumed that the entire novel is true, and it’s a testament to Funder’s talent that her account of events is so convincing.

Predictably, much of the festival event was dominated by a discussion about the differences between fiction and non-fiction. Funder asserted that the novelist’s fundamental purpose is plausibility: to create believable characters, in a believable world, doing believable things. Funder revealed that Stasiland had actually begun its life as a novel, but became a work of non-fiction when she realised that the extremity of the characters’ lives would be deemed implausible within a work of fiction. As Funder herself said, “reality really outstrips fiction”.

Knowing the real Ruth Blatt probably helped Funder give All That I Am its narrative credibility. Blatt taught Funder’s German teacher German, and the writer has previously written a radio documentary about Blatt’s life. However, perhaps surprisingly, during their friendship, Funder and Blatt said they never discussed Dora Fabian or Ernst Toller. It was through reading about Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of which Blatt was a member, that Funder encountered Fabian’s story, and immediately became “smitten… like a fool in love”. In writing the novel, Funder felt a sense of responsibility to these two women who fought for the ‘Other Germany’, and although writing fiction was “liberating”, she considers it the artist’s duty to get things “morally right”. (In the Guardian, Funder astutely criticised the film The Lives of Others for misrepresenting the Stasi.)

According to Funder, it is a deep passion for the story that generates great writing, an element that can be discernably absent to readers when it is lacking in the work. Funder’s own love for her characters was clear during the discussion, and is obvious in reading All That I Am. She also claimed that writer’s block derives from “self-concern” and “self-consciousness”, whereas focusing on the story itself allows the writer to become “liberated” from themselves. Of course, the writer’s process is a lot more complicated than this, and Funder spoke of the struggle mapping the novel’s various narrative threads and delineating both Ruth and Toller’s individual stories.

The second main subject of the discussion was courage and bravery, themes of both Stasiland and All That I Am. Funder’s writing explores the differences between those that see and then act, and those who engage in “moral blindness”. The book honours those who display a “fundamental decency”, or what Steger called a duty to “common humanity”, and those who believe that responsibility to others is more important than personal risk. Funder said that for novelists, it is the “unknown areas of the psyche” that contain fertile material, as people don’t know how they’ll act until their tested, and whether “unknown reservoirs of courage” will appear.

Funder referenced Festival guest Malalai Joya, as well as Anna Politkovskaya, as contemporary examples of tremendous moral courage and bravery. She claims that the basic narrative of All That I Am – about those who bravely resist authoritarian powers – could have been told in many other contexts, such as Afghanistan, Russia, Libya, or China. Funder argued that history repeats itself, and that it’s no longer possible to believe in an Enlightenment ideal of humanity’s linear moral progress.

It’s unfortunate that Funder revealed one of the novel’s major plot points during the event, given that the book was published just over a week ago. Although the plot strand was relevant to the discussion regarding cowardice and moral choices, and the novel is more than just a political thriller, the revelation did drain the experience of reading the book, for me anyway, of a significant amount of its narrative tension.

However, the event held a few more pleasant surprises. Funder admitted that she enjoyed writing Toller and “being a bloke”, and the decision to move Ruth from Melbourne (her real home) to Sydney was because the city allowed a better portrayal of the “venal fecundity” of Australia. Although Funder also confessed that her own “caustic nature” seeped into Ruth’s character, it was the writer’s determination to tell Ruth and Dora’s story, and to honour their courage, which was most evident during the discussion.

 

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