That time we went to Munich
History has been profoundly unkind to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. His infamous “Peace for our time” proclamation became a tragi-comic slur as the troops mustered in 1939.
Appeasement — Chamberlain’s policy towards Adolf Hitler’s claims on Czechoslovakia — became a byword for capitulation and grovelling. The cult of Winston Churchill looms large above this skewered legacy.
“Poor Neville will come badly out of history,” the old bulldog once said. “I know, I will write that history.”
The journalist-turned-novelist Robert Harris (Fatherland, Pompeii) attempts to exhume Chamberlain from the casket of condemnation in his new book Munich. It’s a suspenseful, if baggy, fictionalisation of the 1938 conference where Britain did its best to avoid total war over what Chamberlain once derisively called “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”.
Harris wriggles his way into the smoke-plumed meeting rooms of the British and German foreign ministries with two cypher-ish creations: Hugh Legat, a young upper-crust private secretary and Paul Hartmann, ensconced deep in the Reich. They went to university together and, as the storm gathers, they are forced to reunite covertly through backchannels, conducting espionage to save their respective countries from conflict.
Legat and Hartmann’s proximity to the heights of power allows Harris to closely observe the central players: Hitler inevitably passed off as a brute, Mussolini a preening matinee idol, Goering corpulent and the French hand-wringing.
Harris saves his more rigorous characterisations for Chamberlain himself, a “corvine profile … hard, stubborn; belligerent even … a Victorian figure.” The negotiations themselves are, well, negotiated with subtle clarity; Harris never feeling obliged to lecture the intricacies.
He has an undeniable touch for pace and intrigue, for leaving narrative threads tantalisingly suspended, although, at times, his research clogs his prose with the desiderata of the period: florid descriptions of architecture and hotel tablecloths, typewriters, telephones, car models and cigarette brands. “Dinner was chanterelle soup followed by veal and noodles.” Mercifully, we don’t hear about dessert.
All the while, Harris makes his case that Chamberlain was doing his best with what circumstances gave him. The Munich deal gave Britain time to rearm and when Hitler went on to threaten Poland, the Fuhrer was revealed to be a warmonger. Of course, Harris runs headlong into Churchill again and cannot avoid him. After all, Churchill was clear-eyed on Nazism as early as 1934.
The price of appeasement in the short-term implies a foggy view of the future.
MUNICH
by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, $39) Reviewed by James Robins