All That I Am

All That I Am is the first work of fiction by the Australian writer Anna Funder, published in 2011. It follows people whose lives were changed by the Nazi regime in Germany before the war and in Britain afterwards.

Ruth Becker is visiting her cousin Dora in Munich in 1923 when she meets Hans Wesemann, a leading journalist, and marries him. The three of them are involved in left-wing politics, and ten years later, as Hitler becomes Chancellor, Ruth and Hans, Dora and her lover the playwright Ernst Toller, have to leave Germany for London.

In exile they are always at risk of deportation by the British government, and they spend their time trying to make other people understand how dangerous Hitler is. The story is told partly by Toller shortly before his suicide in New York in 1939 and partly by Ruth, the only one of them still alive, in Sydney in 2001. All of the central characters were real people, and Funder notes that she has made connections and suppositions where the record does not settle the question.