The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Better the Neville you know…
Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister is remembered as a coward who kowtowed to Hitler. Can a new film redeem his reputation?
Thanks to the ubiquity of Sir Winston Churchill in our national memory – as the cigar-chomping, V-sign-brandishing prime minister in a siren suit who won the Second World War – almost everybody has an idea of him. Even that minority of Britons who tell opinion pollsters that Margaret Thatcher was in charge during the conflict are aware of Churchill as a historical figure, whether or not they have any idea why. To the rest, he is the central character in any re-telling of the story about Britain and the last world war.
However, Churchill does not have so much as a walk-on part in the new Netflix film Munich: The Edge of War, an adaptation of Robert Harris’s clever and superbly written novel about the crisis of September 1938, when a conference between Adolf Hitler (who was determined to seize Czechoslovakia’s ethnically German territory) and Neville Chamberlain, Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, delayed war by another 11 months. The historical debate has raged ever since: did Chamberlain save Britain by postponing war until we could defend ourselves properly against the forces of Nazism? Or, in sacrificing the Sudetenland without a fight, did he execute an act of submission and cowardice that remains a blot on the national reputation?
Although Chamberlain served as prime minister from May 1937 to May 1940, after two long spells as a cabinet minister from which his considerable achievements are largely forgotten, he has nothing like the place of Churchill in our historical imagination. However, if all one has ever seen of him is the newsreel footage of his return from Germany to Heston Aerodrome on a Friday evening in 1938, standing on the tarmac waving his “piece of paper” and proclaiming “peace for our time”, one will be convinced immediately by Jeremy Irons’s performance in Munich as the much-denigrated prime minister. Irons is superb: he looks just like Chamberlain, goes as far as he can to sound like him, and has a geniality of manner – most of the time – that accords with the accounts of the prime minister given by those who worked with him and who appeared to view him objectively, rather than use him to put a particular slant on history.
Chamberlain would have been easy to caricature as a stuffy, Homburg-hatted, umbrella-toting Englishman – as indeed the Nazi propaganda machine made a point of doing at the time – had the film-makers wished to take the predictable course of depicting him as a failure. But Harris in his book takes a more thoughtful view, and the film echoes that.
While the framework is fact, the main story Harris tells is fiction: Paul von Hartmann (played by Jannis Niewöhner) – a young German diplomat who seems to share some characteristics with Adam von Trott, one of the chief conspirators in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler – attempts to supply information to one of Chamberlain’s staff that he hopes will force the prime minister to abandon his intention to conclude a peace treaty with Hitler, and instead confront the Germans without delay.
The man von Hartmann hopes to contact is the other main confected figure in Harris’s story, a young Foreign Office diplomat, Hugh Legat (George Mackay), with whom he had studied at Oxford. The German makes contact with British intelligence, who – without telling Chamberlain – order Legat to accompany the prime minister to Munich and, while there, receive the information his old friend wishes to pass over. The exchange takes place: and von Hartmann’s document returns us to the world of fact, for it is what history knows as the Hossbach Memorandum.
A summary of a meeting held on November 5 1937, the Hossbach Memorandum was written by Hitler’s military adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, and records the moment the dictator acknowledged the poor state of the German economy and outlined a plan to boost it by obtaining territory that would provide raw materials essential to his country’s preparations for a larger-scale conflict. Hitler explicitly said that he did not want, and could not afford, a war with Britain or France, but intended to take Austria and Czechoslovakia and, effectively, asset-strip them. By the time of the Munich Agreement, Hitler had already accomplished half of this, by absorbing Austria into the Reich at the Anschluss of March 1938; what the Hossbach Memorandum proved is that he did not intend to stop at the Sudetenland, but would soon demand the whole of Czechoslovakia.
In reality, Chamberlain was dead long before any British politician or official ever saw the memorandum: a copy of it reached the Foreign Office on May 11 1945, three days after VE Day, and was cited at the Nuremberg Trials. But in Munich, Legat engineers a brief meeting between von Hartmann and Chamberlain in which the memorandum is handed over.
The prime minister does not abandon his pact with Hitler, even though the memorandum provides proof that the negotiations have taken place in bad faith. However, it becomes the motivation for Chamberlain’s initiative to persuade Hitler to sign the “piece of paper” before he leaves Munich the next day. In fact, Chamberlain sought to do that to justify his trip to his colleagues and to the British public, leaving him time to continue a re-armament programme that had been under way since his time as chancellor of the exchequer in the mid-1930s. By the time Hitler took the rest of the Czech lands and established his “protectorate” over Slovakia in 1939 – one of history’s classic examples of divide and rule – Britain was close to the point where it could risk a confrontation with Germany.
It is all too easy to see the Second World War from our vantage point, more than 80 years later, with all we know of its unprecedented horrors, and conclude that Chamberlain was derelict. The film Munich, like the book on which it is based, gives Chamberlain the benefit of the doubt as a politician, and it is right to do so. It seldom strays from strict probability when it moves from fact to fiction, and therefore it should never forfeit credibility in the eyes of an intelligent viewer.
Churchill’s absence from the screen has its disadvantages. One is not reminded how so much of his career, until the late 1930s, had been a litany of semidisastrous and disastrous errors: the Dardanelles; the Russian War of 1919; the return to the Gold Standard in 1925; his opposition to Dominion status for India (which now has him increasingly dismissed and vilified as a racist); and last but not least, picking the wrong horse in the Abdication less than two years before Munich by ostentatiously backing Edward VIII when it should have been clear to a statesman of Churchill’s experience that it was constitutionally impossible for the King to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson and stay on the throne.
At the time of the Munich crisis, Churchill was yet to earn the full devotion of the British public. The exceptionally high regard in which he has been held since the Second World War was shaped not so much by his achievements during that war – in the weeks and months after he succeeded Chamberlain as leader in May 1940 – but because of the way he would go on to write the history of those events in the first of his six volumes about the conflict, The Gathering Storm (1948).
Churchill’s interpretation of himself and the role of Chamberlain before the war has been too little questioned, and Harris and the film-makers are to be commended for seeking, quite subtly, to do so. They are part of a small but increasing body of opinion that could be dismissed as revisionism, but which some prefer to see as a long-overdue redressing of the balance.
One difficulty with any period drama is historical inaccuracy, and, having brought the world The
Crown (on which Munich’s German director, Christian Schwochow, has also worked), Netflix has rather too much form on this question. Thankfully, the solecisms in the new film are relatively few. Photographic evidence suggests that Oxford undergraduates at a Commemoration Ball in 1932 would have dressed in white tie and not black; Sir Nevile Henderson, Britain’s man in Berlin in 1938, had been knighted in 1932, so no one would have called him “Mr Henderson” as they do here. One imagines that Chamberlain’s regard for Lord Halifax would have been enough to prevent him from exclaiming ‘Damn the Foreign Secretary!’ The proChurchill school routinely depict Halifax as a mere cypher, but his influence over the making of policy in this period was greater and more positive than he is ever given credit for.
Played in Munich by Alex Jennings, Sir Horace Wilson – whose role during the appeasement period was (given that he was a civil servant) often highly improper and (given that he was supposed to be an adviser) usually highly unquestioning – is poorly developed as a character in a film that rather underestimates his baleful influence.
But the weakest link by far is Ulrich Matthes as Hitler, and one fears Matthes must know it: he played, rather more convincingly, Goebbels in the 2004 film Downfall, which included the late Bruno Ganz giving indisputably the greatest cinematic portrayal of this monster that one is ever likely to see. Matthes’s Hitler has none of the presence, menace or madness of Ganz’s, but just comes over as a silly and unpleasant little man.
Fundamentally, though, Munich: The Edge of War is about Neville Chamberlain, and in its depiction of him and of his personality, it is both realistic and intelligent. There are hints of his legendary vanity, but abundant evidence of his decency, his honesty and integrity, and of his commitment to public service: one gets an idea of the man who as a visionary local government minister in the 1920s had laid the basis for the National Health Service, and who as chancellor of the exchequer in the 1930s had steered Britain out of the slump. Irons’s depiction of him is unlikely to be surpassed: it certainly eclipses earlier performances, among them Eric Porter’s in the 1981 ITV series The Wilderness Years (too doddery), Robin Bailey’s in the 1974 film The Gathering Storm (too camp) and Ronald Pickup’s in the deeply flawed 2017 film Darkest Hour (too slight). History without truth is merely a fantasy representation of the past: if history is to have any value, it has to embrace the truth, however uncomfortable some may find it.
As a visionary politician in the 1920s, Chamberlain laid the basis for the NHS
Munich: The Edge of War is in cinemas now and on Netflix from Jan 21. Robert Harris’s Munich is published by Penguin at £8.99