Munich: A novel

Mention Neville Chamberlain and Munich in the same breath today, and you're likely to elicit a grimace. The agreement in 1938 between the British Prime Minister and Adolf Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia is regarded as one of the most shameful and tragic events of the 20th century. But is it fair to condemn Chamberlain without understanding his motivation or the context of the times? The British thriller author Robert Harris has been exploring that question for thirty years. The result is his new novel, Munich. The book is not an alternative history like his popular novel, Fatherland. It's fact-based historical fiction.Why did Neville Chamberlain go to Munich?As Harris paints the picture, Chamberlain's actions in 1938 were not just understandable but possibly admirable. He was not naive about Hitler's intentions. His rush to sign the pact with Nazi Germany responded to almost universal desire to avoid war, the difficulty of refuting Hitler's logic about absorbing the Sudetenland Germans into the Reich, and Chamberlain's passionate desire to avoid repeating the slaughter of World War I. (He had been too old to serve in the military then.)Harris based his novel on extensive reading about the Munich conference and the principal characters involved in it, which he details in a long bibliography in his Acknowledgements. Moreover, recent research suggests that if Britain and France had gone to war against Germany in 1938, the result would have been devastating. It's true that the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940 and the Battle of Britain that followed were disastrous for the Allies. However, the nearly two-year delay Chamberlain achieved at Munich allowed Britain to equip and staff the Royal Air Force just enough to stave off a German invasion of the island in September 1940. Harris implies that Chamberlain was fully conscious that war would come. He sought only to gain time.An historical novel wrapped in a thrillerHarris builds his story around two central characters, one English, the other German. Hugh Legat is the most junior of Neville Chamberlain's three Private Secretaries; he serves essentially as a gofer but is pressed into service at times as an interpreter and, even more rarely, as a wordsmith. Paul von Hartmann holds a similarly junior post in the German Foreign Ministry; he despises the Nazis and has joined a conspiracy to depose Hitler. The two young men had been classmates and friends at Oxford. They'd last seen each other in 1932 on a vacation in Germany.Von Hartmann has secured a document that proves Hitler's intention to expand Germany's borders through war regardless of any international agreements. With the help of his collaborators in the anti-Nazi conspiracy, he travels from Berlin to Munich in hopes of delivering the document directly to Neville Chamberlain. Through their connections in London, the conspirators have contrived to arrange for Legat to be assigned to attend the conference, too. Von Hartmann expected Legat to help him get to Chamberlain. Harris builds a suspenseful story around the effort to arrange that.Historical figures in a fictional settingLegat and von Hartmann are both fictional characters. However, many of the other figures portrayed in Munich are based on real men. Prominent among them are British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, as well as Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and French Premier Daladier. The author's portrayal of these historical figures is solidly grounded in his research.About the authorRobert Harris is one of the most successful writers in the world today. Most of his work is historical fiction about World War II and Ancient Rome. Beginning with Fatherland in 1992, his novels also include The Ghost (adapted to film as The Ghost Writer) and the three novels in the Cicero trilogy.

There are few authors as adept as Robert Harris in writing excellent historical fiction. This is true whether he is writing about ancient Rome, the contemporary Vatican, or as here, Hitler's Germany. In large measure this is true for two reasons: first, he does extensive research so that every page sparkles with authenticity; second, he is just a remarkable storyteller. His great talents are well on display in this novel set during the 1938 Munich big four talks where Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is remembered for declaring "peace in our time" had emerged.Harris faces particular challenges in setting his story with the Munich conference as the background. Munich has been studied and dissected by so many historians, that it is very well known in its most minute details. Harris is so able to fit his fictional story into this framework that it is often difficult to know what is history and what is fictional--one mark of superior historical fiction. The key characters, one a young British diplomat (Hugh Legat), the other his German counterpart, were friends years before while at Oxford. Each is fluent in both English and German. Harris takes us into his reconstruction of meetings within Chamberlain's advisers as war appears likely, as he does for strategy sessions within Hitler's inner circle. The German,Paul von Hartmann, apparently is a member of the dissident group that will eventually try to kill Hitler in 1944. He has sent a highly incriminating document of Hitler's plans for Europe to Legat, so he may show it to the PM before any decisions are made at the conference.Legat is too junior to justify a meeting with the PM; but he is added to the team going to Munich. Hartmann himself set to attend the conference plans to hook up with Legat and get the document to Chamberlain. Their efforts to accomplish this goal right in the middle on tight German security adds a note of suspense and tension. Harris keeps all the events going on well structured so the reader does not get lost in the flurry. I will not spoil the story by recounting what the PM does when he finally reads the document.Harris creates a last-minute private meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain just before the PM flies back to London. I don't know if such a meeting in fact did occur. But in the novel, Hitler and the PM sigh off on the famous document that Chamberlain displays on his return that he asserts creates "peace in our time," which of course soon became obvious that it did nothing of the kind, leading to Chamberlain's fall and the installation of Churchill as PM. One interesting aspect of the novel is that Harris treats Chamberlain with kid gloves--he is always polite and a more skillful writer than history suggests. While the book is no "page turner" which the reader cannot stop reading until the conclusion, it is pretty suspenseful at points and holds the reader's interest throughout its 303 pages.Frequently, historical fiction writers have "afterwords" where they explain what was true and what is part of their story. That is not the case here and I think it would have been helpful. Harris in his acknowledgements lists the books he relied upon, which attest to his extensive research. He also wrote a non-fiction book about Hitler and worked on a 1988 documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of Munich. So he is well versed in this topic and it shows. A fine novel that also allows the reader to learn a bit of history about one of the most important developments in the 20th century.

The author is one of the only ones whose work I will automatically read all of.This was an enjoyable book if you like the topic or really like historical fiction or Harris. I'd instead recommend the Cicero books (especially first one--Imperium in some markets but title varies by market) to someone who hadn't read his work before.

I only got through Munich by a combination of dogged determination and a lifelong dislike of not finishing a book. By the time my Kindle was showing 60% read I was bored and had lost interest in the characters and the story, such as it is. Everybody with a passing interest in 20th century history knows what happened at Munich and how things eventually panned out. Faction is a perfectly respectable literary form but an author of Robert Harris's standing should know better than to graft an inherently implausible "espionage" story about two university pals (one English, one, inevitably, German) on to piles of minutiae about diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing and how Hitler perked up when bread soup was served. Robert Harris's early work was exceptional but I don't seem to be the only reader who has noticed a falling off in his more recent books. I found Munich a big disappointment and I am baffled by the number of five star reviews and the press acclaim it has received.

By Robert Harris' high standards this is a very poor effort. I've read all of his books and this is the worst of the lot. The characters are two dimensional. Plot devices are feeble and contrived. Tension levels are very low. It feels rushed and under-written. Disappointed. I used to really look forward to a new Harris novel being published. Dictator was weaker than its predecessors. Conclave was not great. Munich worst of all. A real shame.

As a fan of Robert Harris, I found this novel less good than I'd hoped and below his usual standard. Usually Harris has a talent for making even dry subjects into heart-thumping, intelligent thrillers. He had good subject matter here - the setting is the Munich peace accords of 1938, where Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler by agreeing he should take over the Sudetenland. But despite that, the story never seems to ignite.The novel focusses on two mid-ranking diplomats, one on the German side and one British, and is set over just a few days. This gives insight into the happenings on both sides. Both characters are unobjectionable, but neither is really loveable. I didn't feel a strong connection to either and both seemed quite bland. The supporting characters, both real and imagined, aren't any better. The character I found most interesting was Chamberlain, who gets a sympathetic portrayal. History has often portrayed him as a moral coward, but in this day and age I'm pretty sure we'd be applauding his efforts to avoid a war.One of the difficulties faced by Harris is that readers know the outcome in advance. You don't need to know much about history (and I know very little myself) to know World War II started in 1939. So there's never any doubt for the reader that war will be averted. This takes away a lot of the possible tension. I'd expected more peril for the characters, but there's not even that. For a spy novel, there's little spying, and for a thriller, there are few thrills. You never get the sense of the characters being in real, immediate danger. There's no heart stopping tension or compulsion to read all night.Overall, it's a decent historical novel which I found interesting as it covers a piece of history that is often overlooked by the casual person (like me, who gave up history aged 13). Unlike most of Harris' novels, it doesn't function well as a thriller (political or otherwise) and lacks the tension that most of his novels have in spades. Read it if you're interested in the period and want to know more, but otherwise it's probably not worth it.

The story centres around 2 young men - one German within Hitler's government, and the other a British private secretary. Both of these young men, who were at Oxford together, are totally fictional but have been merged into the well-known and true background of the 1938 appeasement agreement in Munich after which Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler waving his famous piece of paper which apparently "guaranteed" peace. It took me quite a while to wade through the political skirmishings that form a good deal of the first part of the book although you are, at the same time, drawn further into the background of Paul, the German, and Hugh. The tension builds as they all arrive in Munich, with different agendas, and you learn more of their ideals and their past. The author, Robert Harris, is clearly extremely informed and interested in the Munich agreement and all the background details are precise and factual although some names are slightly disguised. I am never entirely happy with conversations being put into the mouths of historical figures but the author has succeeded in making this hypothetical sideline to history believable and achieves a good read.

Munich is an interesting retelling by Robert Harris of the period before the start of the Second World War.It looks at the Munich Agreement of September 1938 which allowed the Germans to annexe the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.There are two main characters in the story and they are Hugh Legat, who is Neville Chamberlain’s private secretary, and Paul Hartmann, who is not in favour of Hitler and is a junior diplomat in the German Foreign Ministry. Legat and Hartmann both went to Balliol College, at Oxford University at the same time.The Munich Agreement was signed by the British and French with the aim of averting war with Germany. It was thought after this that Hitler would have no more territorial demands. However, in the book Hartmann has documents showing how Hitler wanted to dominate large sections of Europe. Through Legat, Hartmann is able to show these to Chamberlain at Munich.The best bits of the book are those that portray the lengths Hartmann and Legat go to set up the meeting with Chamberlain. Hartmann has to deal with an SS man called Sauer who is extremely suspicious of him. There is also a real sense of foreboding in Munich. I also liked the way the book is split into different days before and after the Agreement.Chamberlain, who is seen at the time as a hero in Munich and in London, ignores the information from Hartmann and signs the agreement. He is very keen to prevent war at any cost. Chamberlain also goes on to sign a Anglo-German Agreement never to go to war.It took Hitler only six months to break his word.