KEY POINTS:
You can almost smell Hitler's halitosis in this portrayal from the last days of Berlin's Fuhrerbunker in 1945. It "gusted from him", a "hunched, shaking, almost voiceless husk of a man".
Edith from Munich was the (fictitious) private secretary of Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress and, at the end,
wife. Edith escaped from the bunker as the Russians moved in, later swapping the surname Mecklenburg for Ashburnham when she married her interrogator. Now she is more English than the English and has grown old in the comfort of a crumbling Sussex manor house. A widow, she ponders when to hand the home over to her adored only son and his young family.
A letter arrives from Hans Beck, also from Munich, an SS guard who was also frequently in the bunker. He wants just to talk, he says. But Edith is afraid of his motives.
The talking takes place over tea, which stretches to supper and an overnight stay as Hans probes for all of Edith's recollections, impressions and judgments. He has made it his mission to track down the rest of the survivors and has questioned them but Edith is the last alive.
Their discussions - another interrogation are an intense tussle. She contends that nothing can be gained from delving into the past. The opening lines of The Go-Between are quoted several times: "The past is a different country ..." but Hans wants to talk about guilt, regret, redemption. Edith counters that those in Hitler's inner circle did not have minds of their own - his eyes "very blue, so filled with emotion and conviction that your own arguments, if you had any, were not so much overthrown, but not even formulated in his presence."
She feels it was one thing for Hitler not to regret murdering 6 million Jews he did not know; another for the obsessed Magda Goebbels not to regret murdering her six children - whose names all started with H - so they did not have to wake up to a world without National Socialism.
Edith can see no good reason for Hans' obsession, his need to know every detail of her memories. It's pornographic, she says.
In the last chapters, Alan Judd give free rein to his thriller-writing skills. As Hans' own guilt is revealed, along with his self-justification, Edith's fear increases, not only for her own life, but for her family's future.
In the afterword, Judd refers readers wanting actual accounts to Hugh Trevor-Ropers The Last Days of Hitler, and Until the Final Hour, by Traudl Junge, Hitler's last secretary, but the way he finally deals here with guilt or regret for inaction is masterly.
* Maureen Marriner is the Canvas sub-editor.
- HarperCollins, $27
