Free All That I Am by Anna Funder Page A

cheek. ‘Who was that?’
    ‘Hans Wesemann.’ Dora had already started to type something.
    ‘From the paper? The Hans Wes—?’
    ‘M-hm.’
    I fell back on the bed. I knew Hans from his ‘Despatches from the Front’, which had appeared every week or two in our newspaper at home. I knew he’d been leading a platoon near enemy lines when he stopped ‘ostentatiously’ (he’d admitted it himself) to light a cigarette, and a piece of Tommy’s shell tore through his neck and pierced his windpipe. He coughed and hacked till it came up again, and then pocketed it as a souvenir. I knew that other times, when the smoke from his pipe got in his eyes as he took aim, he’d put the whole thing in his pocket alight, to save on matches. And I knew he’d helped carry his mate Friders, killed six minutes before the armistice took effect, back to Germany in a zinc bathtub. I saw in Hans’s pieces a heroism and anti-heroism combined, a willingness to do the deed but a reticence about taking the glory that was seductive beyond all measure. I know it’s possible to fall in love with someone by falling in love with their writing, because I already had.
    ‘But he’s so young,’ I said.
    ‘Went to war at nineteen.’ Dora didn’t look up. ‘Lots of veterans are young. Toller’s the same.’
    In this way I was swept up at eighteen into Hans and into the party at the same time. If Stockholm Syndrome describes a prisoner falling in love with her jailer, there should be a name for how a cause cements two people, masks their differences as secondary to the purpose at hand. We were all of us subsumed into an aphrodisiac atmosphere of self-sacrifice. So many of our generation had lost their lives for Germany that now, though we did not fully know it, the stake for our commitment to stopping it happening again was our lives.
    I stayed in Munich for two months. When all the local members of the Independents met, we used a hall at the university. There were probably fifty of us. But more often a few, a sort of unofficial leadership, would get together in Dora’s room. It felt like being at the centre of the world. We drafted leaflets, arguing over the wording. We worked the cyclostyle to print them and made pails of lumpy grey glue. We went out nights pasting them up all around town, making sure to put plenty around the electoral offices of local members. We addressed student meetings in smoky rooms and crowds in the quadrangle. Half our energy came from the cause, the other half from each other.
    As the weeks went by, I was infected by the others’ excitement about Berthold Jacob coming. Bertie, I learnt, had served on both the eastern and the western fronts with distinction, but after he was gassed his life developed a single, pacifist focus that, Hans said, ‘borders, quite sanely, on mania’. Bertie had become celebrated by progressives all over the country when he uncovered documents that proved Germany’s responsibility for starting the war. This made a lie of the government’s claims of a defensive war.
    Since I’d joined the Independents I had become used to talk about opposing government measures and proposing new ones, but it was an entirely novel notion to me that the government would lie to the people, even in the most serious of matters, such as sending men to war. I can remember the shock of this awareness, the feeling of radical aloneness: if we couldn’t trust the authorities, who could we trust? The answer was: us.
    Bertie was now, Hans told me, on a mission to stop the new war this government was planning. He had turned his energies to revealing the secret, illegal build-up of the Black Army, and the manufacture and stockpiling of weapons to furnish it. His method was ingenious. Bertie sought out information already on the public record–in military bulletins, official government publications, the conservative press–information that most people did not know how to interpret. He monitored the personal columns