The Song Before it is Sung [Paperback]

Justin Cartwright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2008

On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassin's bomb. Axel von Gottberg and his conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and the executions filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of papers by von Gottberg's close friend, the legendary Oxford professor Elya Mendel, and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and finding the brutal film. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Based on the lives of Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin, Cartwright's unsttling 12th novel follows Axel von Gottberg, a German, and his friend Elya Mendel, a British Jew, both Rhodes scholars at idyllic 1930s Oxford. Gottberg returns to Germany in 1934, ostensibly to rally opposition to Hitler, but Mendel publicly denounces him as a Nazi. Sixty years after Gottberg was executed for his role in the failed German coup of 1944, a dying Mendel entrusts his papers to a former student, Conrad Senior, and bids him to discover whether he had unjustly condemned his late friend. Senior, an insouciant writer whose life is a shambles, is transfixed by Gottberg, a man of courage and action, a womanizer with an operatic flair and a love for Hegel. Cartwright's treatment of the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life in 1944 is gripping. Conrad fails to see what an ambiguous figure Gottberg was—diffident about the fate of the Jews and finally concerned less about his country than his own achievements. The prose can be surprisingly hackneyed, while the characters rarely rise above caricature. It is difficult to discern whether the novel's sophistry, soap opera dialogue and lionizing of the ineffective German resistance are ironic. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In July 1944, a serious attempt was made on Adolf Hitler's life. That actual event serves as the basis for a darkly effective fictionalized depiction of one man's participation in the conspiracy, by a prizewinning South African-born novelist. The group members who attempted to take the fuhrer's life were tried and executed in a horrible fashion, among them a young Prussian count, called here Axel von Gottberg, who had been educated at Oxford in the 1930s and there became the close friend of Elya Mendel, an English Jew who eventually became a distinguished professor. In the present day, Mendel has left his collection of letters from Axel to a student, Conrad Senior, whose charge is to organize the papers. Consequently, he is faced with sorting out the dimensions of their relationship. The count caused a rift between himself and Mendel when he returned to Germany in 1934 and published a letter in an English newspaper that made him appear to be a Nazi sympathizer. The twin themes upon which this novel is constructed--personal betrayal and vicarious living (Senior finds himself "living more fully" through Mendel's and the count's lives)--greatly entice readers' interest on political, historical, and intellectual levels. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Open market ed edition (February 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747593868
• ISBN-13: 978-0747593867
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An unhistorical historical novel, July 11, 2007

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Song Before It Is Sung: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book has the most off-putting first page I think I have ever read. Never mind: it quickly gripped my attention. It is quite avowedly about the relationship between Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish Oxford philosopher, and Adam von Trott, the German aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and, while there, had been a close friend of Berlin's. Von Trott was a patriot for the "real" Germany, abhorring the Nazis, but feeling deeply the humiliating loss of German territories at Versailles. Back in his own country, he worked first as a lawyer, joined the Nazi Party because he had to, and then joined the German Foreign Office. Hoping to avoid war, he had secret contacts with the British ministers encouraging them to stand firm against Hitler. When war came and the Nazi regime unleashed its full brutality, he took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged.

It escapes me why Cartwright indulges in the nonsense of calling the protagonists Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, and I do not intend to follow his example. He gives different names to several other historical characters: to Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham (here called Lionel Wray and made the Warden of All Souls); to the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (here called Michael Hamburger); to the Socialist Hans Leber (here called Franz Liebherr); possibly to Pastor Schönfeld (Pastor Schönborn); and to von Trott's wife. So one wonders which of the other people in the book are hidden behind false names and which are simply Cartwright's inventions. It was Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld, not von Trott, who contacted Bishop Bell of Chichester in Stockholm in 1942. There are evocative descriptions of the von Trott family estate in Mecklenburg, but in fact the von Trott's family estate was in Hessen, and Cartwright says in his acknowledgments that the Mecklenburg estates he visited in researching the book belonged to the family of Count von der Schulenburg, another of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. And Henry Hardy, who has spent a life-time working on Berlin's papers, writes that von Trott's execution was not filmed, although the recovery of this film is one of the climaxes of the book. Several reviews have criticized the liberties taken by this fictional account not only of such details but also of the relationship between the two men, liberties some of which go beyond the imaginative reconstructions that we find in many excellent historical novels. I think the reader should know all this. He can then perhaps put that knowledge behind him, and read the book as a work of fiction inspired by but not reliably based on historical facts. This will be difficult if he knows the material well.

In 1934, back in Germany, von Trott had written a letter to the Manchester Guardian protesting that he could see no discrimination against the Jews; and of course this letter had deeply upset Berlin. It did not totally destroy his friendship for von Trott, but he could never trust the latter's protestations that he was not a Nazi - not least perhaps because von Trott advocated that the best way of helping the Germans to get rid of Hitler was for the Western Powers to restore to Germany the German lands that had been taken from her at Versailles. So he was sceptical when von Trott urged the Americans to help the German opposition and warned Frankfurter that von Trott could not be trusted. (For what actually happened, see Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin, p.76). The Allies never did trust or help the German opposition, and the plot against Hitler went ahead without them. When it failed, von Trott (in this version) could have escaped abroad, but felt `a sacrifice is due to Germany' (p.209). He awaited arrest and paid the horrible price.

The story of Berlin and von Trott (with much more emphasis on von Trott than on Berlin) is intercut with the story, in 2002, of the wholly invented character, Conrad Senior. He is a former pupil of Berlin who had died seven years earlier, and he has been entrusted by his guilt-ridden former tutor with his papers, with the implicit task of disproving the rumour that, by rousing suspicions about von Trott with the Allies, he bore some responsibility for von Trott's death. But Berlin (in this version) would also like to have it cleared up whether von Trott had `died a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people. For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten.' (p.207).

Half of Conrad's mind is on these tasks, while the other half is on the fraught nature of his marriage: his wife despises Conrad's undisciplined musings, the fact that he dwells so much in the world of ideas, and in particular his preoccupation with a dead philosopher in whom, according to her, nobody is now much interested. I can't say I found Conrad's disconnected musings about life either particularly interesting or his stream-of-consciousness associations between his quest and the events in his personal life as significant as I think Cartwright intended them to be. There are the obligatory sex scenes (also one invented for Isaiah Berlin) without which no novel these days seems to be complete.

There are several references to the contrast between Berlin as a man of thought and von Trott as a man of action. Near the end of the book, when Conrad has seen the film of von Trott's trial and of his sickening execution, he indulges in an extraordinary tirade against Berlin, when just a few pages back he had `loved him like a father'.

For the craft of story-telling and for the examination of the moral questions involved, I would give this book four stars; as a historical novel, however, two at best.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully reviewed, gripping, nove., September 25, 2007

By 

M. Carlson "Bumpbooks" (Haslemere, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Song Before It Is Sung: A Novel (Hardcover)

Wonderful book, justly praised as a masterpiece by LA Times and amazing
by National Post. Do read this. It's about the War and two friends, one German one English. Utterly moving and convincing, on love, patriotism,
the war, and about obsession. How can anyone write a novel this good and
not be totally famous? Please, please give yourself a treat, as the Wall St Journal said.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully imagined historical fiction, March 10, 2008

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Song Before It Is Sung: A Novel (Hardcover)

The novel is, at its core , a beautifully imagined take on the life of Adam von Trott, one of the July 20th plotters against Hitler. Von Trott exemplifies personal bravery, patriotism and commitment. While von Trott's patriotism and mystical inclination leads to a certain amount of self delusion, his involvement in the plot makes complete sense, even if he may have fooled himself into overstating the likely benefits of success. The novel is also an account of von Trott's friendship with Isaiah Berlin, but this is far less successful, principally because the Berlin of the novel is such an ordinary person, regardless of his intellectual attainments.

The account is supposedly written by a former student of Berlin, Conrad Senior, to whom Berlin leaves his papers relating to von Trott and their friendship. At various times in the novel Senior asks himself what Berlin hopes he will accomplish with this material, and comes up with various answers, but I believe the true answer is obvious: Berlin hopes that von Trott will receive his due.

The writing is quite good, and I also enjoyed the relationship between Conrad and his wife. The wife is most definitely sympathetic even as she ends their marriage.