1. All That I Am
Anna Funder
New York: HarperCollins, 2011

2. Ruth
• The little button, innocuous as an electric-blanket button, delivers
the pethidine to me whenever I want it. They don’t bother
rationing someone as old as I am. Après moi, le dèluge! as the
French say. The stuff sends me in and out of parts of my life as if
they were now, more real to me than this room. From what Bev
has told me, an addict can lose ten years of their life in a quest for
exactly this: the constant present tense. Afterwards, those who do
not die wake to a world that has moved on without them: it is as if
nothing happened to the fiend in those years, they did not age or
grow and they must now pick up – with school, or people they
loved – only time has shunted everyone on, elsewhere.
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3. Ruth
• ‘Any pain?’ He looks at me, pen poised, like a doctor on daytime
TV, an underage actor cast to suspend disbelief. Next they’ll require
me to believe in my own recovery, walk out of here as the credits
roll for the century just passed, ready to combat the return season
of terror in a world that never learns.
‘None that I can’t account for,’
‘Pardon?’ He hangs the chart back.
‘I’m fine. Vivid dreams. That’s all.’
‘Let me see.’ The hairy infant picks up the chart again .
‘Sometimes with more…senior patients, we recommend a mild
antipsychotic along with the pain relief.’
‘I am not hallucinating.’
‘No. No, well. It’s entirely up to you.’
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4. Ruth
• But that’s the thing, boyo, it’s not. This vast life – the real,
interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the
dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) – this
vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and
everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether
we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see
and whose effects we cannot know. One slub here, a dropped
stitch there, a bump encounter in that place, and the whole fabric
will be different once it is woven.
I look into his clear caramel eyes. Who knows what trace I might
leave inside of you, boy?
‘They are all so real to me,’ is all I say. I still have a modicum of
control.
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5. Toller
• “There comes to man sometimes a sickness, psychic or spiritual,
which robs him of all will and purpose and sets him aimlessly adrift
in a longing for death, a longing which lures him irresistibly to
destruction, to a mad plunge into chaos.”
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6. Rudi
• A male voice was saying, ‘How can we allow this pudgy, cake-
scoffing homosexual, this flatulent nailbiter, to represent Germany?
But seriously, they say that the Leader is a teetotaler, a bachelor, a
non-smoking vegetarian, as if he were a man removed from our
normal, base desires, uninterested in satisfying himself. Concerned
with only the wellbeing of the German nation. But we say he fulfils
his bloodlust in other ways. You do not have to read Dr Freud to
know that desire denied does not go away of its own accord. It
warps and moves like a river denied its course, it flows on to drown
other things. And in the case of Adolf Hitler, those things are us.’
Hans listened intently. Ten minutes later the voice said, ‘And I
leave you, friends, till 18:00 GMT or 19:00 Berlin time tomorrow.’
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7. Characters
• Dora Fabian (Walter)
• Ruth Becker Wesemann
• (Ernst) Toller - Christiane
• Hans Wesemann
• Mathilde Wurm
• Bertie (Berthold Jacob)
• Helmut
• Lessing
• Rudi
• Jaeger
• Hermann Göring
• Paul Joseph Goebbels
• Ernst Röhm
• Wolfram Wolf
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8. Ruth
• His book opens in my hands to this: ‘Most people have no
imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they
would not make them suffer so.’
This is what we all believed. It is what he believed, I suppose, till
he could no longer.
Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as
any. We drafted the leaflets, cyclostyled the truth. We told the
stories on butter paper, in cigar canisters, smuggled them back into
Germany. We risked our lives to help our fellows – there and in
London – imagine. They did not imagine it. But Toller, great as he
was, is not right. It is not that people lack an imagination. It is that
they stop themselves using it. Because once you have imagined
such suffering, how can you still do nothing?
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9. 8/30/2013 jgillis767@aol.com 9
veritas