![]() Among the pacifists and socialists working to gain his release is Ruth’s older cousin Dora. While visiting Dora, 18-year-old Ruth falls deeply in love with journalist Hans Wesemann, whose courageous satirical articles make vicious fun of Hitler and his cronies. Toller, a decorated soldier during World War I, has been imprisoned for his pacifist activism. Ruth and Ernst’s paths cross in the 1920s. ![]() Both narrators are historical figures, as are almost all the “characters” in the book, despite a few name changes. In 1939 Manhattan, Ernst Toller, a world-renowned playwright and human-rights activist, holes up at the Mayflower Hotel where he dictates to his secretary the events that happened six years earlier. In 2001 Australia, as her short-term memory fails along with her health, Ruth Becker remembers back 70 years to her early adulthood in Germany and England. ![]() The author uses an unnecessary framing device, having two of the dissidents tell their sometimes-overlapping versions of events. ![]() Funder follows her critically acclaimed nonfiction debut ( Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, 2003) with the novelized account of German activists who opposed Hitler before World War II. ![]()
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