Munich

Although fictional characters are used in this account of the negotiations between Hitler and Chamberlain, this novel has an authentic and sinister feel . Harris’s wonderful prose, his attention to detail and believable descriptions make the reader feel they are witnessing a moment in history. Not his best, but up there.

We all know how the story ended, but Harris' genius is to get inside the history and focus on the lives (and personal dramas) of the people who made it. In this way he makes the history come alive in a way that a textbook never could.in

An intimate accountil of the Munich conference and the sham of Chamberlains peace negotiations with Hitler. The British cabinet members are exposed warts and all. Sadly only caricatures of Hitler and his minions.

The description of Chamberlain and Hiler at the meeting as well as the two colleagues who went to Oxford as classmates and now are involved on the team assisting Chamberlain and the team assisting Hiler

The premise of the book is great, as two colleagues living parallel lives come together to fight an inevitable war as individuals, in a larger game of state craft. However it lacks the tension and subtlety of the Master of this Genre, John Le Carre.

Compelling mystery. I enjoyed the historical setting. The language is a bit stilted, at times. It is obvious this was originally composed in German. The changes made for the the store series are significant. I preferred the book to the series.

Despite the carelessness of the main collaborators that had me screaming at them the, book was entertaining gripping and well written and had me staying up late at night to finish it. Quite an accolade from me.

First rate research as always from Robert Harris and wonderful writing. The dramatic detail brings the story to life and makes it totally believable. Anyone interested in the Second World War will not be able to put the book down.

Author Robert Harris has given us a well-researched fast paced novel on the 1938 Munich Conference where Britain and France surrendered the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany to avoid a war that was surely coming. His two protagonists Hugh Legat, a junior secretary at 10 Downing Street, and Paul von Hartmann, an official in the German Foreign Office, act as flies on the wall as Hitler and Chamberlain meet at the Regina Palast Hotel in Munich to settle the crisis. Legat and von Hartmann are linked by their past connections at Oxford.

The book opens with Hitler’s September 27th ultimatum to Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland or face an invasion. It is here where Legat and von Hartmann watch as events transpire and we hear conversations of the very real historical figures on both sides. We see Chamberlain scrambling to get Mussolini to act as a mediator which quickly brings about the conference. Both Legat and von Hartman end up at the conference as interpreters through the manipulation of the intelligence services of both countries. In von Hartmann’s case, he is a member of the Oster conspiracy to bring Hitler down. It failed in 1938 and failed spectacularly in 1944. Von Hartmann is bringing to Munich the minutes of a 1937 meeting which Hitler announced his plans for a general European war to his senior military and foreign policy officials. Von Hartmann naively believes that if Chamberlain had that information he wouldn’t yield to Hitler forcing a war that the German military would rebel against Hitler.

Through the very anti-Nazi Legat Harris paints a sympathetic picture of Chamberlain trying to avoid the second Great War in 20 years. He has Chamberlain understanding that Britain was both militarily and psychologically unprepared for war and his appeasement policy was buying time to strengthen the country. However he avoids bringing up the facts that it was the Baldwin-Chamberlain policies that put Britain in the position of weakness.

Along the way we get a sense of what life was like in 10 Downing Street, the precariousness of air travel and the general yearning for peace in both Britain and Germany. Chamberlain was hailed as a hero in both countries, much to the chagrin of Hitler. I found the book to be a great read and it was hard to put down.

The book is about the Munich Crisis. It begins on 27 September 1938. On the previous day Hitler had delivered an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia that it should surrender the Sudetenland by the 28th September. It ends four days later, the day Chamberlain returned from Munich to London. It is told from the point of view of two men: Hugh Legat, a junior member of the Diplomatic Service and a member of Chamberlain’s Private Office, and Paul von Hartmann, an official in the German Foreign Office.

There is a detailed account of how the British government felt on that first day, when it seemed that war was now inevitable, badly though it was prepared for it. The politicians, service chiefs and most of the Foreign Office staff are real historical figures, although one of the latter, Hugh Legat, is an invention. On the German side also, almost all political figures are real, though Paul von Hartmann Foreign Office, is not. What is also brought out is that some of the people in the German Foreign Office were opposed to Hitler’s gamble over the ultimatum, and that there was already a conspiracy among some of them to overthrow Hitler. Von Hartmann is in touch with these men. This conspiracy, known as the Oster conspiracy, is also a historical fact.

(The plot depended on the support of Britain and was called off when Chamberlain went to Munich instead. It was not discovered at the time – though some of the conspirators were also involved in the July 1944 plot against Hitler and paid with their lives. The Oster Conspiracy was little known until after the end of the war. It seems that first book written about it did not appear until 2003.)

Late on 27th September Chamberlain appealed to Mussolini to mediate; Mussolini agreed on the 28th, and Hitler (perhaps worried by the opposition expressed by some of his generals) accepted that the question should be settled by a conference at Munich two days later.

Up to this point, just after a third of the way through, the book is little more than a fictionalized account of events as they really happened; but at this point the inventions really take off. When the plotters hear that the Munich Conference is about to take place, they fear that, if Hitler has his way there, he would be so popular with the German people and with the army that his overthrow would be impossible. They think that the only chance for their plot to succeed would be if they could stop an agreement being signed in Munich: the generals would then again be faced with having to fight a war which they thought too risky. There is a faint chance that the Munich conference might be made to break down if the two invented characters, von Hartmann and Legat, could be included in their respective country’s delegations; for it turns out that the two men had been contemporaries and friends at Oxford, and von Hartmann could then pass to Legat documents he had obtained that would show Britain that negotiations with Hitler would be pointless. It will turn out to be the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937, the minutes of a meeting in which Hitler had described his annexationist policies and had foreseen and accepted the risk of war with Britain and France.

But then most of the next third of the book is still taken up with a fictionalized account of what really happened. Legat and von Hartmann do figure, but they have not in any way been able to change – or even try to change – the course of events: they have not even met, since their superiors had given them jobs that took them away from where the main action was. That second third of the book also has a lot of padding – describing in detail the flight of Chamberlain from Heston airport to Munich, including who sat next to whom and what food there was on board; and then the same kind of detail for the train that Hitler south from Berlin. We have a detailed description of the accommodation of the various delegations in Munich and of the layout of the hotels. It all shows that Harris is good at painting atmosphere and that he is as familiar with the geography of and locations in Munich as he is with those in London and Berlin, but it hardly advances the action.

At last the two men did meet. Von Hartmann handed over the papers to Legat, who promised to do his best to let Chamberlain read them before the conference wound up. One of the Nazi officials had already been suspicious of von Hartmann: will he be discovered? It would be a spoiler to say what happened next. Suffice it to say that, of course, nothing that happened deflected the course of history, though perhaps we might speculate what might have happened if … But the imagined story strikes me as being built on the idea that the revelation of the Hossbach Memorandum to the British team would have made the slightest difference. As Chamberlain said in the book, “[Hitler] has been making these threats ever since Mein Kampf.”

I have greatly admired some of Harris’ earlier books, but this is not one of his best. Four stars for people who know little about the history around the Munich Conference; three stars for those to whom the basic story is familiar.

According to the store, four stars means "I like it". And I did. In fact, I find it difficult not to like any book by Robert Harris -- and if I haven't read them all, I've come very close. However, as other reviewers have noted, this is not his best. As always, Harris grabs you by the throat within the first few pages -- no waiting to see if you can get into it in a Harris book. And, for the most part, he doesn't let go; I finished this book in a couple of days because it's easy to read compulsively.

However, it's a bit fuzzy, particularly around the edges. He introduces a big cast of characters on both the English and German sides, but most of them are stick figures (except that they don't stick in your mind; only the main characters and Chamberlain (and, to a lesser extent, Hitler) seem to have any personalities. And there is some peripheral action that is silly, such as the visit to a sanitarium near Dachau (a suburb of Munich) to visit an old flame/Communist/Jew to demonstrate the extent of Nazi brutality. And the rockiness of one character's marriage is another red herring.

That said, Harris knows how to spin a good yarn, and spin he does. So while I can't say I loved it, "I like it" seems just fine, thank you.

Harris expertly captures the history and the setting of the Munich conference. You really do feel like you’re there. But he inserts an almost juvenile interplay between two young men conveniently placed on the delegations—one English and one German —as they seek to scuttle the agreement—including a side trip to Dachau and a totally improbable confrontation with Chamberlain. Harris would have been better advised instead to layer in the treachery endured by the Czechs with a serious nod to the very real prospect that had they resisted, they might have so bloodied the German army as to have caused Hitler to be overthrown.