Anna Funder is the author of internationally acclaimed 'Stasiland' and the bestselling novel 'All That I Am', which has been long-listed for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. She spoke to SBS about what motivates her writing, the issues of refuge and exile, and gender equality in literary prizes.
Interview by Farid Farid, SBS.
Interview by Farid Farid, SBS.
Stasiland: True Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall tells the personal stories of people who resisted East Germany's communist regime and some of those who worked for the secret police, the Stasi.
Her first novel, All That I Am, is a story of love, war friendship and betrayal and is based on real people and events. A tight-knit group of friends and lovers became outlaws in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. United in their resistance they flee to London, which was not the safe-haven they expected. One of the narrators of the story is Ruth Blatt.
1. How did your friendship with Ruth Blatt start? Were you honouring her voice?
I knew Ruth all my adult life. We met when I was 17 and just starting at the University. She had taught my German teacher German. I was amazed by her, and loved her dearly till she died in 2001. All my many times in Germany I had her somewhere in my mind, as an example of courage and straight-talking prescience.
I was honouring what she did, but I wouldn't say I was honouring her voice in ALL THAT I AM. The voice of the Ruth character is quite different from that of the real Ruth – though I do have Ruth Becker say some things (for instance her argument with God at the beginning) that Ruth Blatt did say. Ruth Becker is her own self; more regretful, and, as an old woman more caustic than Ruth Blatt. I was doing different, more complex things with her character and her relationships than would be possible if I were painting a portrait with the aim of being true to life, rather than true to the work I was making.
2. Was there a lingering link that you wanted to explore from Stasiland? If so, what exactly?
I didn't consciously set out to explore anything that followed on from Stasiland. I actually didn't even want to write about Germany (so much for being in control of your material!) Early on, I was making Ruth into a character in a novel. She was the inspiration for the grandmother of a sprawling, dysfunctional Sydney family. But when I found out – through researching Ruth's activities in the resistance – about Dora- I was gone for all money. I dropped that novel, and wrote ALL THAT I AM instead. I wanted to find a more credible story for Dora than the one that passes for history, this ridiculous verdict of 'romantic suicide.' I made a new plot, one which seemed more credible to me, but I used the real evidence that was available at the time. It's a novelist rewriting history, or the solving, in fiction, of a 75 year old cold case. It was a complex piece of plotting, because it's a detective story made with real evidence.
That said, I think that there are many similarities in both of my books. I seem to be very interested in resistance to illegitimate government, or tyranny of any kind. I think that to swim against the stream of popular opinion with only conscience as your guide is risky and brave beyond belief. I think there is something innate in human beings that makes certain people do this – often journalists or writers or political figures, but also (as in Stasiland) so-called ordinary people. It is about people who will step in, at mortal risk to themselves, to protect their group from an exercise of power that can twist their humanity out of shape. It's extraordinary, and, in a way, almost Darwinian, how some will step up for the 'survival of the group'. I explored this in an essay called 'Courage' for PEN.
3. The idea of refuge and exile figures in nuanced ways in your latest work, how do you feel in general towards Australia's stance with its treatment of refugees in their latest waves?
I was deeply depressed and bewildered by our treatment of refugees earlier this decade – and not only refugees. The careless exile of Vivian Solon, the reckless imprisonment of Cornelia Rau, who was mentally ill. It shames me that my country allowed refugees seeking asylum here from terrible situations to be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. It made me think very differently about what it was to be Australian. I felt that horrors were happening – suicides, hunger strikes, the permanent psychological maiming of children in suburbs not far from where I lived. I think to some extent it's still going on.
4. The gender controversy surrounding Miles Franklin has subsided this year with seven women including yourself being nominated for the prize, how do you feel about the whole debate?
I think that the statistics speak for themselves – too few great women writers are recognized in prizes, review space and reviewing. After that, it gets more complicated – a lot more complicated. Writing really well, independently and for the long haul takes vast repositories of self-confidence, a kind of self-belief that can be hard for sane, well-socialised women to sustain. But it can be done. And, of course, great works come also from the mad and anti-social among us too.
If two eminent male anti-Hitler activists, one a member of parliament in his 60s and one a young firebrand, had been found poisoned in the locked room of their Bloomsbury flat no inquest could have returned a verdict of 'suicide by reason of unsound mind due to romantic disappointment.' Being a woman changes how your work and your life are perceived, no matter how brilliant or brave you are. I remember the flurry of press interviews the night after STASILAND won the Samuel Johnson Prize – at that time the world's biggest prize for non-fiction – from a field that included a Pulitzer winner and Bill Bryson (I give these examples only to say that it was a serious prize, and that my book was in wonderful company). I was constantly asked by journalists how 'lucky' I felt. One of them, perhaps taking the cue from that word actually compared me to Kylie Minogue in an article. This would not have happened to a man. A man would have been given the respect of having earnt a prize. But a woman is 'lucky, lucky, lucky' to use Kylie's words, and then has to be 'grateful, grateful, grateful.' Like I said, it's complicated.
5. What are upcoming projects, if any, that you'd like to explore?
I'm working on two novels in parallel, or rather seeing which of them takes off fastest first. One of them I've had on the backburner for a few years, and the other is a newer - so more seductive - idea that I'm not sure whether to entirely trust. I'm also doing some long-form non-fiction, which I love, for various magazines.
6. Lastly, who were you writing this for? Yourself, Ruth or your readership in general?
That's a great question. The answer is: all of the above, and more. I'm writing to rewrite a wrong, I'm writing to bring them back to life, and I'm writing about what it feels like, now, to be alive. I have this need to get it down, to trap what it is to be alive at this moment, and to write against ephemerality. And I was writing to see what a novel can do, and push it.
