Justin Cartwright is a British novelist whose birth in apartheid South Africa would have familiarised him with the ethical dilemma posed when an individual conscience clashes with loyalty to one's country and its government's policies. This is the theme of his latest novel, The Song Before it is Sung.
In 2004, a young Oxford scholar, Conrad Senior, inherits the personal papers of his mentor, Professor E.A. Mendel. These documents include Mendel's correspondence during the 1930s with a German lawyer and diplomat, Axel von Gottberg. Mendel is a Jewish refugee, so his friendship with von Gottberg is increasingly strained as von Gottberg refuses to repudiate his country as Germany sinks into Nazi dictatorship. Instead, von Gottberg seems to accommodate himself to its Nazi Regime.
In the central event of the novel, von Gottberg takes part in a plot on 20 July, 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Upon its failure, he is arrested and hanged.
Cartwright depicts von Gottberg as a man influenced by Christian values but personally adrift from them. He lives a womanising lifestyle, and is so passionately committed to Germany, that he will not disassociate himself from its government.
Painfully, his friendship with Mendel is wounded when he writes to a British newspaper defending the treatment of Jews by the Nazis' legal system. "Has von Gottberg become a Nazi?' his friends ask. Only von Gottberg's execution upon Hitler's orders answers the question.
Cartwright's novel is based on the true friendship between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the German diplomat Adam von Trott. Von Trott was one of the Kreisau circle of soldiers, public servants and most famously the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These men conspired to assassinate Adolf Hitler. When the plot failed (a heavy wooden table protected the Fuhrer from a suitcase bomb), von Trott, Bonhoeffer and others were arrested and put to death.
Historically, the July 20 plotters are known to have included many Christians such as Pastor Bonhoeffer, as well as Roman Catholics such as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, whose last words "Long Live Holy Germany" expressed their fusion of faith and nationalism.
But nobody in Cartwright's novel is a confessing Christian. The conspirators' attachment to Christian values, but disassociation from Christ himself, is represented simply as a fact of life and is not examined.
Cartwright invites us to conclude that von Gottberg's devotion to his country, at the apparent expense of his conscience, destroyed his friendships and hindered him from committing to intimate relationships. His life was only redeemed by his death for an honourable cause " to show the world that there still lived a "true Germany' suppressed, but not crushed, by Hitler's tyranny.
"The song is not finished until it has been sung.' A life cannot be judged until it is over; and in the case of von Gottberg, the debris left by his broken friendships and promiscuous affairs is erased by his noble death.
Von Gottberg gives up his life. Not for Jesus Christ, but rather for an idealised and intensely spiritual view of his country's true nature, which his English friends find unconvincing. Yet in passing over many opportunities to flee the regime, von Gottberg unconsciously follows the example of Christ, who gave himself into the hands of his murderers.
Nazism remains a popular topic for books and films, at least in part because, unlike the closely related atheistic ideology of Communism, it is universally reviled and nobody considers it is excused in any way by "good intentions'. Hence, artistic works about the Nazi era can satisfy humanity's urge to see good and evil clearly distinguished, in a way which would tend to attract post-modernist derision if set in any other context.
Although not all the July 20 conspirators were Christians, they were collectively motivated by a vision of their country returned to its Christian roots. It is a shame that Cartwright, perhaps with a broad secular readership in mind, never examines this vision closely. He never asks whether it makes sense to strive for Christian values, however passionately, without being committed to Christ himself.
Nonetheless, Christians who read this fictionalised account of the German resistance to Nazism will be provoked to consider the unavoidable choices anyone may at times face when his individual conscience clashes with a duty to another person or institution.
To seek reform from within, or to resign, or to rebel, and if so, when, are not easy choices. It is a matter for prayerful judgment to discern what is required of him who would be faithful unto death to Him who said, "who ever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."
