Berlin still calls 60 years on

Alan Judd's Dancing with Eva uses Hitler's last days as the background to an uncomfortable conversation, says Adam Mars-Jones
Dancing with Eva by Alan Judd
Buy Dancing with Eva at the Guardian bookshop

Dancing With Eva

by Alan Judd

Simon & Schuster £9.99, pp214

Alan Judd's new novel is an expertly controlled piece of work. Dancing With Eva could so easily tip over into a philosophical conversation piece, analysing the workings of memory and conscience. It could also tip over into novelette, which is rather the direction in which the publishers have tried to nudge it, by commissioning a cover photograph of a handsome Nazi dancing with a woman in a red dress and providing a tag line that might have been borrowed from that Third Reich kitschfest The Night Porter, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling: 'He wanted her to relive the past. She preferred to live.'

It would also be frighteningly easy to turn the material into a West End play of a certain sort. The action obeys the unities, being set in a single location, a large old house on the South Downs and taking place over a single day. There would be a pair of juicy parts for elderly thesps to play, in the shape of widowed Edith Ashburnham, who has become more English than the English, and Hans Beck, the visitor who has come to waken memories six decades old. Is he a penitent needing to confess his sins or an inquisitor determined to rake over the ashes of the past? Edith feels no emotional connection with her visitor, though still worries that her elderly throat makes unattractive movements when it swallows a mouthful of food.

There's a leaner part for another veteran in the shape of housekeeper Mrs Hoath. In the theatre, there might even be an argument for cutting her out, to keep costs down, since she is largely a sort of stage manager herself, responsible for the bed being made up in the spare room and an exemplary shepherd's pie in the oven. On stage, it would take a miracle to avoid the pitfalls of abstract discussion: 'Can you really regret something you did wholeheartedly, believing at the time that it was right? Or even something you did half-heartedly, sensing it was wrong?' On the page, Alan Judd skilfully avoids the gulfs and the shallows.

In effect, Edith has had two lives. Mrs Hoath makes an indispensable point by her easy dealings with her employer, that Edith has put down deep roots in her adopted country. Yet this retired householder, who worries that the annual flower show provides the perfect opportunity for thieves to size up attractive properties, also saw the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun after their suicide. Yes, the title refers to that Eva. Edith was nominally her 'secretary', but really more of a companion, someone with a similar background, another Munich girl hired to keep boredom at bay.

Fiction in English seems to be having an orgy of reckoning with Nazism at the moment. Already this year there have been Justin Cartwright's rather queasy The Song Before it Is Sung and Norman Mailer's vast and perverse reconstruction of Hitler's early years, The Castle in the Forest. In Germany, the taboo on the representation of Hitler was broken by the recent film Downfall, based on the account of an insider, Traudl Junge, whose book is also an important source for Dancing With Eva (though Eva Braun did not, in fact, have a secretary).

In the postwar years, the truest emblem of Nazism was Anne Frank, the ordinary victim whose name the whole world knew. Then over time it became important to locate a good German, someone who did more than simply suffer. Thomas Keneally uncovered the inspirational story of someone who offered no direct opposition to the Reich, but corrupted its workings from within. Part of the attraction of Oskar Schindler's story for Steven Spielberg may have been that it fitted so well with Jewish ethics, which value modest achievement over futile martyrdom.

Now, it seems as if Hitler is coming to represent Nazism all over again. In a celebrity-driven culture, he necessarily outranks his victims and Anne Frank can't compete in terms of glamour with the man who exterminated her.

By this argument, Dancing With Eva, with its examination of Hitler's inner circle, should be a symptom of the same cultural disorder. That the book holds its own shows how carefully it is constructed and how alertly it scrutinises itself. Edith is all for leaving the past alone, saying to herself: 'True, it was not good to pretend things had never happened, but neither was it good to go on serving them up for dinner. That suggested an unhealthy appetite.'

When she engages with Hans in a conversation on an unwelcome subject, it feels as if she is lifting a very heavy blanket. She refuses to be determined by her history, but perhaps it is her refusal to deal with it that gives it its power. She also knows that if she wrings an apology out of Hans for betrayals long ago, she has lost the battle, since she will have betrayed her creed that the past doesn't matter.

Hans is sceptical about the reality of remorse. What would it mean if Hitler had shown remorse before he died? Only that he was not the same Hitler who had imposed his fantasies on the world.

The storytelling keeps the story taut right to the end. In this game of cat and mouse, it isn't clear which is which, as the secrets emerge from their hiding places. Hans doesn't have the last word, but he comes up with what may be the most memorable observation - that when we say the past is water under the bridge, we neglect to mention that we're in the water.

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