![]() ![]() When Toller leaves prison, where he has managed to write his well-loved plays, Dora becomes his secretary and passionate lover. ![]() Among the pacifists and socialists working to gain his release is Ruth’s older cousin Dora. While visiting Dora, 18-year-old Ruth falls deeply in love with journalist Hans Wesemann, whose courageous satirical articles make vicious fun of Hitler and his cronies. Toller, a decorated soldier during World War I, has been imprisoned for his pacifist activism. ![]() Ruth and Ernst’s paths cross in the 1920s. ![]() Both narrators are historical figures, as are almost all the “characters” in the book, despite a few name changes. In 1939 Manhattan, Ernst Toller, a world-renowned playwright and human-rights activist, holes up at the Mayflower Hotel where he dictates to his secretary the events that happened six years earlier. In 2001 Australia, as her short-term memory fails along with her health, Ruth Becker remembers back 70 years to her early adulthood in Germany and England. The author uses an unnecessary framing device, having two of the dissidents tell their sometimes-overlapping versions of events. Funder follows her critically acclaimed nonfiction debut ( Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, 2003) with the novelized account of German activists who opposed Hitler before World War II. ![]()
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