USA TODAY International Edition
‘Munich’ offers history from a front-row seat
In the Oscar-nominated movie Darkest Hour, Prime Minister Winston Churchill (played by Gary Oldman) thunders the famous exhortation that roused leery Britons in 1940: “We shall never surrender.”
Two years earlier, Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, returned from Nazi Germany and uttered the words of appeasement that live in infamy: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
Peace with Herr Hitler was not to be. In his new novel, Munich (Knopf, 303 pp., ★★★g), English author Robert Harris sets the stage for Darkest Hour (and fellow Academy Award nominee Dunkirk) with a crackling and intelligent thriller spun from the ill-fated Munich Agreement.
Set over four days in late September 1938, Munich unfolds against the backdrop of the Munich Conference, as Chamberlain tries to prevent the Führer from invading Czechoslovakia to repatriate native Germans in the Sudetenland. A fool’s errand for Chamberlain, of course, despite a temporary reprieve.
This is irresistible material for historical fiction, yet Harris cleverly raises the narrative stakes (and our blood pressure) by telling the tale through the eyes of two young men: Hugh Legat, a junior private secretary to Chamberlain, and Paul von Hartmann, a staffer in the German Foreign Office and a member of the secret antiHitler resistance.
Legat and Hartmann, now in their late 20s, were friends at Oxford but are estranged for reasons we don’t learn until late in the novel. Hartmann, determined to stop Hitler’s madness, anonymously sends a memo to Legat in London about the Führer’s true intentions, and we’re off.
Both Legat and Hartmann are corralled for the Munich Conference, and these young men provide our frontrow seat to history, dodging danger at nearly every turn. Hartmann has another document, even further proof that Hitler wants war, that he’s desperate to get into Chamberlain’s hands at the conference, with help, he hopes, from Legat.
But Hartmann is in the sights of the suspicious Sauer, a vile SS man. In a brilliant scene in Hitler’s train on the way to Munich, Sauer tells Hartmann: “We have made Germany great again.” Think about that for a moment.
Harris, author of the 1992 best seller Fatherland, is particularly astute in his character studies of Chamberlain and Hitler.
The British PM is portrayed as sympathetic, naïve and foolish: “In his ostentatiously modest way, (Legat) thought, Chamberlain was as egocentric as Hitler.”
The appalling Hitler, of course, is a riveting figure on the page, disturbingly charming and charmless at the same time. Listening to a Hitler speech on the BBC, Legat thinks his voice “metallic, remorseless, threatening, selfpitying, boastful — impressive in its horrible way.”
History tells us the terrible outcome of the Munich Agreement, but Harris keeps us guessing about the fate of our two young friends.
Munich, an artful blend of truth and imagination,would make one heck of a movie or TV series.