My von Trott was fiction, but not to his lover
Justin Cartwright found himself in hot water when he published his novel based on the friendship between Isaiah Berlin and the plotter against Hitler, Adam von Trott Much against my will, I have found myself caught up in a long-running dispute about the German Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott Zu Solz. I received a letter from his nephew describing my novel, The Song Before It Is Sung, as a disgrace and suggesting that I had manipulated the facts of von Trott's life and shown a gross lack of taste in speculating about his death. One of his oddest charges against me was that I had made the von Trott figure a Junker.
In August 1944 von Trott was hanged by Hitler for his part in the plot of 20 July, when his friend Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg's bomb exploded within feet of the Fuhrer but failed to kill him. My novel also includes a character based, to some extent, on Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, who had been a close friend of von Trott at Oxford, really never fully trusted him after he returned to Germany in 1934. The critical moment for Berlin came when von Trott wrote to the Manchester Guardian saying that he had seen no examples of anti-Jewish acts where he was working as a prosecutor in Kassel. And furthermore, he had spoken to some brownshirts who, while patriotic people, declared that they would never harm any Jews.
For many years after the war Berlin maintained that von Trott was 'not one of us', 'not on our side' and 'certainly no hero', although he acknowledged von Trott's personal charm. I must say I thought Berlin's judgment that von Trott was no hero harsh. Whatever his motives for joining the German resistance, he risked his life bravely and lost it with enormous dignity. But for years there has been controversy about what exactly Trott's relationship to the Nazis was. His English friends David Astor and Sheila Grant Duff defended von Trott as recently as 1998. Some years before that Berlin had written emolliently about von Trott for the Balliol magazine, while in private maintaining his stance that von Trott saw himself as a world historical figure who was a German nationalist above all. That the German resistance was a very mixed bag, including traditional conservatives like Stauffenberg, spiritually and religiously inclined people like Helmuth James von Moltke, professional soldiers like Erwin Rommel, trade unionists and socialists, is undisputed and perhaps unsurprising. How many of them were primarily concerned with the fate of Germany rather than the oppressed peoples is a matter of conjecture, but the answer is surely some more than others. Von Moltke, for example, welcomed the sacrifice of his life as a contribution to German spiritual renewal and atonement. Berlin acknowledged that his distrust of von Trott may have been due to his Jewishness.
All these things I found deeply fascinating when I first started reading about Adam von Trott. He also clearly had enormous charisma, and many women found him irresistible. There was another aspect of von Trott's life which I found interesting, and that was his intense relationship with Oxford, his sense that his time at Oxford was a key element of his make-up, even an epiphany of a sort. But when I decided to use the story of his friendship with Berlin as the starting point for my novel I had no idea of how strongly a small, and diminishing, circle of people felt about him, both in Britain and in Germany.
Clarita von Trott, his wife, is still alive. I was helped in Germany by people who had a close relationship to the resistance and one of these told me that the resistors' families had a bond because of the ambivalence of their position after the war. Some families were divided by their conflicting loyalties: a brother of one of the conspirators described him as a godforsaken dog on the day he was hanged. It took years for reconciliation to be achieved. Von Trott was estranged from his own brother, who felt he had unfairly been kept in the dark. Somebody offered to introduce me to von Trott's family, but I felt that I should maintain some fictional distance, because I was, after all, writing a novel rather than a biography, and the main character, through whose eyes the whole thing is seen, is entirely fictional.
When I received the hostile letter from von Trott's nephew I found it odd that a fiction could be thought to make me guilty of manipulating von Trott's life. But I remembered that Berlin, in a reaction to some of the von Trott faithful, described him in a letter as `the sainted von Trott'. What I think he meant was that von Trott's supporters wanted to hear no ill of him: if he joined the Nazi party, it was because he needed cover; if he wrote a foolish letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1934, it was because he needed to establish his credentials to further his work; if he womanised enthusiastically and barely saw his own wife and children, it was because his important work demanded it. In fact my judgment, for what it is worth, is that Berlin regarded him as a rather second-rate mind, the ultimately dismissive Oxford verdict.
I wrote back to von Trott's nephew and explained gently the difference between a novel and a biography. But I see that the whole question of the German resistance is fraught for the families who were involved. On the one hand there are the resistors who made awful sacrifices, both of themselves and their families, and on the other there are those Germans who still believe they were traitors. For nearly 20 years after the war there was a tendency in Germany not to talk either about the crimes the Germans had committed or about the German resistance. As W.G. Sebald put it, a close examination of the horrors of the Holocaust would drive you to insanity. The resistors' families found themselves in a kind of unsettling moral vacuum. Add to that outsiders like me, who apparently question the resistors' motives, and you can see why feelings should run so high A few weeks ago I went, a little apprehensively, to the German embassy for the Adam von Trott Memorial Lecture, an annual event. Von Trott's nephew and one of his daughters were there. They did not want to meet me: expressing their disapproval of my book was enough for the family. I was relieved. The lecture was fairly high-level hokum about the spiritual basis of the united Europe — the sort of thing, in fact, which Adam von Trott spoke about and wrote about and which Isaiah Berlin found meaningless When it was over I was introduced to a woman, the daughter of Diana Hubback, one of von Trott's English lovers whom he abandoned for another. She told me something which I found astonishing and moving: her mother Diana had loved von Trott until her death earlier this year, and no day had passed without her mentioning him, even in her husband's presence. It had cast a pall over her life. Reading my book had been enormously difficult for her, reviving the painful experience of her mother's obsessive love for someone who had entered mythology in 1944. In my book, delivered nearly a year before Diana Hubback's funeral, I had written something similar but without any inkling of this story. This moving encounter suggested to me the very real consequences of fiction. I have necessarily thought a lot about the relationship of fiction to recent history, and I turn again to Sebald, who said that the moral backbone of literature is memory.
The Song Before It Is Sung is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99.
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