She makes herself invisible, allowing the other woman and her comrades to speak. This personal connection is quickly subsumed in a fictional dramatisation of Ruth's experiences in which the author has virtually no presence at all. Their story is intensely dramatic: Funder came to it through her friendship with the group's one surviving member, Ruth Blatt, who spent the last decades of her life in Funder's home town of Sydney. The book concerns a group of German dissidents during the years of Hitler's rise to power, whose activities lead eventually to their flight from Germany and their re-establishment as refugees in London. Funder's admirers will have hoped that her aim in writing a novel was to transform some of its conventions, as she did so strikingly in her non-fiction and indeed, one of the difficulties of All That I Am lies in its claim to be a novel at all, as though Funder were hoping that mere rule-breaking might translate as originality and innovation. The daring sense of form and the complex grasp of the politics of voice that distinguished Stasiland are absent. Funder's femininity, in Stasiland, is both what politicises her and what makes her vulnerable: when she observes historical oppression, she does so as one aware that her own freedoms are neither historied nor entirely secure.Īll That I Am retains an interest in many of these themes, but it is a more conventional work than its predecessor. Hers was a female voice issuing from a western world of education, privilege and equality, whose solitude and curiosity and occasional recklessness suggested nonetheless a distinct lack of complacency. The problems of reportage – who is the observer and where does their right to observe come from? – were resolved at a stroke by Funder's narrative persona. In something of the manner of WG Sebald, she took a role in her own narration: she personalised it, and by personalising it gave it an irrevocable moral character. This is a compelling subject, but it was Funder's approach to it that drew admiration.
An account of life in the former German Democratic Republic, it sought to delineate individual and national states of being in the wake of the trauma of totalitarianism, and particularly to inquire into the mental state of a society that has suffered an absolute loss of faith in personal morality. A nna Funder's first book, Stasiland, was a work of great originality and interest.
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