Munich: Countdown to catastrophe

Robert, I thought I'd start by asking you a little about your own personal history. Well, this is as much as an introduction to say that Robert was born in Nottingham and went to Cambridge, where he became university editor and president. of the Union, I'm not sure anyone has managed to do that, plus he went into television and then print journalism, he became political editor of The Observer at just 30 and while doing this he wrote several non-fiction books of political history until In the early 90s, when Robert wrote his first novel Homeland or What If a historical novel, assuming that Germany had won World War II and was a huge international success, it sold millions of copies and was translated dozens of languages, but it was the only one. the beginning of what has been the career that he has given us, which is why many of us feel so much pleasure when reading his books.

How did you decide to write a novel? Well, I didn't, not a book called selling Hitler on the hip assassin thing and in the course of that I read Hitler's talk, I hadn't really realized the extent to which there was so much planning about how it would be the world. There was a lot of table talk in 1941 and '42 when Hitler thought he was going to win the war to entertain everyone by exposing his vision of the future and I thought it would be an interesting book about what the world would have been like if Hitler had won because there were thousands of officials in Berlin working on the job. -German war planning and then I decided to put together a kind of Baedeker guide to a world that never existed and I thought about putting up the plans and photographs of the models and all those architectural models and but after a few months I realized. there were no people in this world, so it was a completely sterile environment, so I started making up people and stepped through the looking glass, so to speak, over everything.

I guess I wanted to answer the question of what it would have been like to live in a victorious Third Reich and how the world would have handled the Holocaust, the crime of disappearance as it would have been then of the Jews in Europe and that just lent itself to a sort of really a mystery novel and that's how it is. I ended up writing fiction and I've never stopped since because I found it so much more fun. It seemed natural to me to do it and I continued and I think the thing is that 25 years ago Homeland came out and This is the first time I returned with this book to Nazi Germany and how did you find an agent?

Did you write the entire book in advance? Did you make a proposal? How did you do that part? Oh, these were the good old days and an editor. I heard what he had in mind: he had published some books by journalist Tim Sebastian, the BBC's correspondent in Poland, he wrote a fairly successful spy thriller and he was looking for a journalist with an idea for a novel, so he said: I heard that I had an idea and told her about it and she bought it during lunch. I didn't even have to write an outline, as I say, these were the days when I pocketed the first check, you know, checks come in three parts, the first is in the signing of the contract and then I realized that I had I had to write the book and I was convinced that I would never actually do it and I started writing on a Saturday afternoon.

I remember the scene where the bodies were discovered in Lake Berlin and I went on for about four or five pages over the next week and I had all my characters in a room, but they didn't know why they were in the room and I didn't know. why they were in the room and everything stopped and I really let go of it. for about a year and then I realized that if you're going to write a novel you really have to know what's going to happen at the end, you have to have the whole structure of the book in mind and once I have that then I go back to that and then, To my amazement, there was an auction in New York that bought it back when 1/3 of it was written and if everything changed in my life at that moment, then you stopped. work on a server and start being a full-time writer.

I did, yes, I gave up in '97. I followed Tony Blair during the election campaign and he won, you may remember, and then he said, well, I'll see you next month. or whatever I said, no you won't. I have a book about to be published and I will be. You know I'll be busy with that, so you know, I never went back to journalism a little bit, but from time to time. only when I couldn't get an idea for a novel and you used a lot when you ghostwrote, which of course is a veil, okay, it's when you ghostwrote, which is about a prime minister who has his biography written of him.

Do you think you drew a lot on those particular months with Tony Blair? Yes, I do. I realized that I was a little wrong in the chronology because, father, I came out in '92. It was my third novel, Arcángel, when I really left political journalism. I got a lot out of it because you know that seeing a politician on the verge of gaining power, seeing the way he prepared himself before going out to give a big speech, seeing the way people reacted to him, I got a vision of politics in The best are not many journalists, they certainly receive very few novelists and that has seen and done me a lot of good since Cicero's Roman novels.

All of that is that I think the pursuit of power and the tricks to gain power of oratory promise treason and all the rest hasn't changed much during the year 2000, yeah, um, and that's one of the current contemporary politics, it's one of the topics that you have discussed but about which you have written, but and all your novels have been about them. sort of high politics and historical turning points or controversies, but two themes in particular that you've returned to several times and one is ancient Rome with Pompeii and your Cicero novels and the other is the second world war with the enigma of the homeland, although that wasn't about Nazis, yes, the United Kingdom and now Munich, do you see any parallels between the two periods?

Yes, I really believe that. I think they are both the 25 years of the end of the Roman Republic and the years of well, I guess really 1914. until 1945 are the great eras that seem to me to be the most tumultuous in human history in some way the world broke and remade itself old societies and institutions crumble were epic figures difference and total dispute over how society should be organized based on them So I think they are both places in times when the world was completely shaken, so there is that similarity and I think I certainly went to the Roman era with the deliberate intention of using it as an allegory for our own time.

Pompeii was originally going. to be a book about the United States, but and the Walt Disney Company, can you believe it? I had a dystopian vision of the Walt Disney Company taking over the world and I thought I'd try to write some kind of homeland, what if about that? Then I checked into the Grand Floridian hotel and Walt Disney World and a couple passed each other in the lobby, one in his black silk tuxedo with Mickey Mouse ears and a bride in a white silk Mickey Mouse ears wedding dress and I told the receptionist. Where are they going and she said they were getting married on the platform overlooking Sleeping Beauty Castle?

So I said, does this happen all the time? and she looked at me with pity and said every 30 minutes and at that moment I realized that I could I don't satirize well, let's keep any weak invention I could think of would be nothing compared to the original, so I flew home heartbroken and then I saw that there was a new investigation into the destruction of Pompeii, so I thought Make Pompeii my celebration Florida, you know Walt Disney's city and I will make Rome my Washington and I like that world so much that when I finished writing Pompeii, as you said, He was a political editor.

I always wanted to write a novel about politics, but I didn't think I could improve on the strange nature of the original political characters, you know, in fiction, forgive me for saying that, I mean, that was then, before we got to Trump. and the rest so I thought well: I will write a novel about politics and I will universalize it by placing it in the ancient world and in all those figures who knew each other and who were sometimes even in the same room like Caesar Pompey Crassus Cato Cicero I I just thought that the would turn into an extraordinary epic novel or three novels, as it turned out, so you've briefly touched on the complexity of political figures.

There is something? Because your novels focus on great physical political figures. Is there anything like that? Beyond that particular thing that attracts you to them or makes you want to fictionalize them. I was always interested all my life in politics. The first essay I wrote at the age of six. My parents went to parents night at school and everyone else had written you know what I did on my holidays and so on and I had written why my father and I don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home, this apart from the improvement in the grammar that I have. about writing the same thing since then and actually in this novel I have Alec Douglas, um, so I really achieved my dream, yeah, and you never tried to go into politics, no, well, maybe when I was much younger when I was student. possibly but the moment I saw it up close I knew it wasn't for me and I'm very glad I think it's quite important in life to realize what you shouldn't do as much as what you should do and I'm for this novel I went and sat down.

I was very kindly taken through Downing Street after six and up to the Prime Minister's room in the House of Commons and the Foreign Office etc., and I found that I was so glad I had never followed that career path. and there was something about her that I would rather observe and I always have, which is why I write about politics. I hope with some sympathy, I mean, I had portraits of people like Cicero and Chamberlain. I don't like the determination to turn them all into villains. all politicians I admire politicians for what they do and for the inevitable failure and tragedy of politics.

I find it quite moving and that's why I've always tried to write about it from within. I think novels are best written from within. I wrote a novel last time. year about the Catholic Church, but the election of a Pope and I didn't want to do it from the outside but from the inside with a certain sympathy and these questions of power, whether in the Catholic Church or in ancient Rome or in Great Britain, and there is a kind of people seeking power and what it does to you and its destructive qualities, that's my theme, you know, others write about that love and sensible things, but I'm drawn to this, you know and you know you approach it very well, etc.

Do you think what's interesting about writing is the fact that you choose to write them as fiction rather than non-fiction? I was thinking in terms of Cicero Munich, all three suffer and what do you think it allows you to do. I mean, why, why? You know, you could have easily written these nonfiction books. Think it is so. I feel like a kind of traveler in the eras or periods I write about. I would like to have an absolute idea of ​​what it would be like. The weather was like where you sat, what you ate, who you saw and live it almost in virtual reality and I think that means turning on your imagination and empathy with the characters, creating characters, people care about inserting them into these worlds and for me, it's much more exciting.

I mean, when I stopped writing nonfiction and started writing the first pages of Homeland, it was like getting off a bicycle and getting on a helicopter. I mean, there was so much more you could do and deviate from. I was wandering around and making things up and things would appear, it was really spooky and I was completely sober, but I enjoyed it, it was intoxicating and I don't think I'll ever write non-fiction again. Now people say, "Oh, you don't miss journalism, but I do." And so, let's move on to Munich, which is his latest book and, as I'm sure you'll all discover shortly, grabbing his books, of course, it's unbeatable and it fascinates me because it comes to life from this inner point.

From his point of view, a historical event that still resonates today and we cannot forget about Munich even decades later and what he needs are two main historical figures in his book, of course, Chamberlain and Hitler. Can you tell us a little about the decisions you made in construction? Well, it was relatively easy to write about your portrait of Chamberlain because, as far as I know, maybe someone here can correct me, but I don't think any novel has ever had Chamberlain in it, he's a character he certainly is. I didn't see him up close and I felt like I was entering virgin territory and it was quite exciting because despite all of his flaws (and he certainly had many) and despite the ultimate failure of his career, he is quite different from what people imagine. .

I mean he was a much tougher, more calculating character, not at all the kind of weak, deluded old man that most people seem to think of him as, so he was interesting to write about and I felt like he had something new to say. Hitler is a nightmare to write about, like when he gives an interview in any movie other than The Fall. I don't think I've ever seen a convincing portrait of him because the figure is so iconic and in our heads that any attempt to put him on celluloid or, you know, in a book is almost doomed to failure and I knew this would be the big problem with Munich, which could notwrite a novel about the Munich Agreement and not include it in it, but how did I manage it and In fact, I had a real crisis the first time I had my German figure.

It is said in the book. Maybe I should explain it through the eyes of two characters. One is one who was both. At Oxford in the 1919s, one is called Hugh Leggett, he was a very intelligent Bailey student who then took the Foreign Office exam and ended up in Downing Street as a junior private secretary in 1938 and the another is an interesting character similar to Adam von Trotta. one should be here because Adam von Schaack came here very often, he was a great friend of the Astor family when he was young and this figure enters the German Foreign Ministry and ends up on Hitler's train traveling to Munich, just when my British character is still flying Chamberlain's plane and his legs, the Englishman sees Chamberlain first hand and my German had to see Hitler up close, but when I got to Hitler's first entry, so to speak, I had to stop writing and calling my editor in alarm and saying, I can't go on with this, it just sounded ridiculous, you know, walking into a room and there's a figure of Hitler there and she took the next train and showed me how to get off the ledge, I gave a large glass of Pinot Grigio and I came back and solved the problem by not having naturally met Hitler by standing outside the door, always incredibly effective in fiction is if the door slams shut in your face and you didn't see it and then , the next time Hitler appears, he is simply stepping off a platform. station platform and all you see is a photographer running back and they owed him a shot passing by the window where my character is waiting on the train and finally I had to bring Hitler and it is something unexpected because my character is summoned to I simply presented him with a document and it was hard.

I mean, I went and saw his apartment in Munich, which very few people see because it is now a police Presidium building and it was surprising how little it had changed and you could really feel his ghost in it, I hope the depiction is quite accurate and I hope it's a little different maybe than the way it's normally shown, but it was difficult, I mean, in the homeland it was very never seeing Hitler, never seeing any prominent Nazis. but in this book I couldn't help it, no, and you know you do it very well, you incorporate the gestures and details that absolutely make this evil dictator jump off the pages.

What was it about? Is his name the Führer? That made you feel so much that Hitler was that good, the fear of the ghin. It is an irony that Munich, the cradle of Nazism, of all the major German cities, is the least affected by the swing and anyone who has been to Munich will know that many of the Nazi buildings are still home to German art, for For example, and the Führer Arch, which was a kind of Hitler's cultural palace, I don't know what war I would call it, its art collection was very gathered and it is a bit like a kind of National Theater in a way with a fire and big curved stairs of red marble and everything is intact and I sat in Hitler's study in front of the fireplace where Chamberlain Hitler of the Dao Mussolini sat and the wooden panels that line the floor of the fireplace are Everything is still there, it is used like the Faculty of Music of the University of Munich, but you really feel the ghosts and I went down to where the kitchens were, these huge dining rooms, their smoking rooms, curiously no Hitler hated smoking, perhaps these rooms were especially satisfied, so no they did it.

I don't have to see anyone doing it and you know, you can easily imagine him walking around. The most chilling thing I think was in the apartment was seeing the proximity of his bedroom to his nieces, which would only be joined by connecting the bathroom and the bathroom. The staff lived just at the other end of this apartment and I had no doubt when I saw it and when Chamberlain went to Hitler's apartment, the bedroom in which the niece had committed suicide in 1931 was still a shrine, if only they had left it intact With all his clothes laid out and his perfume bottles still around and his letters still on the desk, I mean, it's really extraordinary to think of Chamberlain walking into that apartment accompanied only by Alec Douglas (at home, no other officials) and sitting a few feet away. meters from this scene. with Hitler I challenge anyone to go see that and not feel some electrical charge from the past and that they can tell us a little about the history of Hitler and his niece well if I can tell you the little we know is that they were together he he It's the uncle she's the niece but there are quite a few entourage members who made salty jokes about oh I wish I had a nice relationship like that and the relationship was obviously good, having seen it I think It must have been sexual but if it wasn't sexual it certainly was It was unsanitary and suffocating and, in due course, she shot herself.

There were many rumors that she might have been murdered or something, but she probably committed suicide and it was a big scandal. threatened her career and said it changed his personality, that he was done, if you can imagine, he had a slightly happier disposition before she committed suicide and afterwards he was a much more remote, distant and difficult figure who changed almost immediately to a double of the gala rabble. in Ava Brown, who served the same kind of function as a sort of not exactly dumb blonde, but more of a sort of petite woman rather than an equal companion, nor is Brown not in the novel, I'm afraid I'm afraid not.

It is, so one of the challenges of historical fiction is, of course, marrying the facts with the animation and how you take the real story and what you add on top of this and I mean, this is particularly Obviously, this is a challenge. , especially in Munich, since, as I said, it is still a very sensitive topic. I'm wondering if a good way to approach this might be for you too. Read the message now from the eunuch. Remember page 93 93. Thank God, thank God, you remember. Yes ok. This is just a small example of just walking into Downing Street and being with Chamberlain.

This is the novel that takes place over four days, the first day, Tuesday, is the day the talks collapsed in Berlin and Hitler said he would move to Czechoslovakia, he mobilized the army on Wednesday, I think, and that night the novel begins. with my character Huw Legged having lunch with his wife at the Ritz and in Green Park they were digging trenches and gas masks were being distributed all over the country and Chamberlain. that night they broadcast the famous faraway characters we know nothing about and my figure is that Leggett is a junior private secretary who had to stay up late into the night helping Chamberlain make his plans for his Commons speech that day next, who had been recalled for the occasion to hear the seriousness of the international crisis, so the secretaries on duty then and I believe still now stay the night in Downing Street, so Leggett sleeps in the attic and the next morning he comes down the stairs and private secretaries were very devoted to Chamberlain, but he could be Certainly rigid to begin with and I don't know anyone's name, he will be too shy to use it and my figure hasn't been working with Chamberlain for long and this is almost the first type of proper interaction between them, so there are about nine of them. in the morning and Leggett descends the narrow stairs that led to a dining room outside the Prime Minister's apartment and from there to the anteroom of Chamberland's study.

The studio's legacy was intended to sneak to Lyons Corner House, near Trafalgar Square. He would be there and back in 30 minutes, but before he could reach the main staircase he heard a door open behind him and a woman's voice called out to Mr. Leggett, good morning, he stopped and turned to look at her, good days, ma'am. Chamberlain his costume was funereal charcoal gray and black with a necklace of large jet beads he said if you managed to get some sleep yes thank you come and have breakfast oh I was about to go out don't be stupid we always give the secretary on duty at breakfast she looked at him myopic it is Hugh, isn't it?

It's true, but it's really nonsense, there is so much crowd gathered outside it will be much easier for you to eat here, she took his arm and gently pulled him after her, they passed through the state rooms watched by several Whig and Tory statesmen looking at them. with disdain from heavy gilt frames, to his surprise she continued to cling to him, they could have been fellow guests on a weekend at a country house going to dinner together. I am so grateful for everything you young people do for my husband, her tone was confident, you have no idea how much you would lighten his load and don't say you are just doing your job, I know the personal cost of the public service she opened. the dining room door was not the big official door but the more intimate room with wood paneling and a table for twelve at the other end reading the Times it was the prime minister, he looked at his wife and smiled good morning, dear, he nodded At Leggett , Good morning, continued reading Mrs.

Chamberlain pointed to a side table where half a dozen plates with silver lids were kept warm on a hot plate. Please help yourself to coffee. Thank you. She handed him a cup and went to sit next to Prime Minister Leggett. The list was raised and there is a cover. The greasy, sweet smell of bacon reminded her of how hungry she was. She walked around the table filling her plate with scrambled eggs, mushrooms, sausages, black pudding, when the lady sat down. Chamberlain smiled at the size of her breakfast. Are you married to Hugh? Yes ma'am. Chamberlain, all the children, a boy and a girl, exactly like ours, how old they are three and two, oh how wonderful ours are, so much older.

Dorothy is 27, recently married, Frank is 24, do you like this coffee? Leggett took a sip, it was disgusting. It's very good, thank you. I make it with chicory. The Prime Minister rustled his paper slightly and the lady grunted. Chamberlain remained silent and poured himself some tea. Leggett continued eating for several minutes. There was silence. Wow, this is interesting. The Prime Minister suddenly lifted the newspaper from him and folded it onto the page he had been reading. Could you make a note of this Leggett quickly? He put down the knife and fork and took out the notebook from him.

The Prime Minister brought this print close to his eyes. I will have to write a letter to Mr ji Jace Kohli of 38 Dysart Avenue Kingston upon Thames Yes Prime Minister as if bewildered has a letter to the editor printed in the spring of this year I was observing a black bird with a nest of eggs in a steep bench as I approached each One day the sitting bird allowed me to observe the pain a few meters away and then one morning its familiar figure disappeared. I'm looking over the shore. I found her four chicks cold and lifeless in the nest.

A fine trail of blackish feathers on the chest. He led me down the bank to a small bush under which I discovered the mangled remains of my old black bird and interspersed in that trail of blackbird feathers were some others that could only have come from the chest and flanks of an owlet. The Prime Minister struck the paper with your finger. I have observed exactly the same behavior of owlets in ladies. Chamberlain said just about everyone really like you don't have enough to do Leggett said actually I think it was my grandfather on my mother's side who helped introduce the little owl to the British Isles did you really for the first time look at the Prime Minister? looking at it with genuine interest yes, he brought several pairs from India what year would it have been?

I should think about 1880, so in just over fifty years this little bird has spread throughout the south of England, that's something to celebrate, not if you're a blackbird apparently, said the lady. Chamberlain, do you have time for a walk? Nevel looked at Leggett across the table we always take a walk after breakfast the prime minister left this newspaper yes I need some air but not the park I'm afraid there are too many people today it will have to be the garden, why Aren't you coming with us? Hugh and I mean simply the fact that that letter was in The Times that morning, the morning of the great crisis, and Chamberlain had written to the editor of The Times as Prime Minister observing his various birds in James's Park and Mrs.

Chamberlain served a disgusting coffee made with chicory, so you know you can take some data and then turn it into a scene which is a pleasure, I think it is denied to a serious and proper scholar, you couldn't do that, but a The novelist has the reins to do that and, of course, one of the best things you can do in a historical novel that you can't do in a nonfiction novel is dialogue. Is there any secret you can share about how to create such a good dialogue. Well, have a real conversation. it needs to multitask, it needs to move the story forward, it needs to be interesting in itself, and if it reveals something about the character, you know you need to try to get at least three things that work with the dialogue if you can, if you can.

I can do it. I think dialogue is, in some ways, the easiest thing to write and yet at the same time, it's in this way that you can easily become very limp, you know, you can write pages and pages and it becomes very boring.I always try to make my books not boring, it's like Lori. I don't like boring things in books and I don't like guessing what's coming, so it's like a constant parlor game with the reader, trying to do things to keep people interested as much as anything else. I'm interested and if I'm interested and I hope the reader is and which ones in fact we are and then what do you think?

Do you think the fact that Chamberlain was preoccupied with hours and blackbirds on the morning of the crisis reveals that? well Chamberlain, I really wanted to contrast Chamberlain and Hitler, no, I guess in some ways they don't need to contrast Chamberlain much. By the way, I hadn't missed any tricks and that passage will be altered in future editions because, in fact, Chamberlain's first granddaughter had been born. Ten days before she wrote to me about the book and she said yes because she felt that her grandfather had been mistreated and she had suffered pejorative references to him all her life and she said that in the family they always knew me as the baby from Munich and which is interesting in himself, but even more interesting when you consider that when Chamberlain met Hitler on Friday morning in his apartment, the first thing he started talking about was the spectacle of babies in respirators and, again, I don't think That connection had never been made, but it must have been on his mind, of course, Hitler stared at him. without understanding, but in those small details of love for birds and family one can find something about a character in other aspects: he was strangely quite like Hitler, he was messianic and he played his cards very close to his chest and no one really knew what that was in his mind, he was vain both in terms of his dominance over his colleagues and in small physical ways, for example, not liking to wear glasses in public and so when he gave the famous speech at Heston's airfield reading the article. of paper, if you see it, he waves it and then he has to read it like that, flapping in the rain, it's interesting, but I think it's an interesting figure, and what other kind of research elements from Munich that you found particularly surprising. both big geopolitical things that I hadn't been aware of and smaller things, smaller things, the Lockheed plane, for example, the Chamberlain one that flew unpressurized bouncing at 7,000 feet, a very uncomfortable way to travel, especially in late September , and if you see pictures of It's like this at rest, you know, it's not like a modern airplane where you get on and walk down the aisle.

To get on one of these planes, you had to get up to sit in the front and there were only 14 passengers on it. and I found it was a great pleasure to find out who had been on the plane and what that little group of Foreign Office officials were like, with so many little details and they had a Savoy basket full of smoked salmon sandwiches and grouse sandwiches. I must say that if I were to meet Hitler I wouldn't want to start with a grouse sandwich and bottles of claret at like nine in the morning and then more important things that historians might know, but I didn't.

Not that, for example, the British and the French had said at the checkpoints, even before Munich, that if there was a war they would not restore Czechoslovakia to its old borders, that the Sudeten Germans could no longer be inside Czechoslovakia and that was kept silent in The time had come and you could see why, because it would be very strange to go to war and throw the entire British Empire into a war less than 20 years after the last

catastrophe

over an issue in the that does not propose to solve it. Even when you come out on top, little things like that, diplomatic things, I'm sorry, they seem small, but actually, obviously, they were huge at the time and I really wanted to do it.

I mean, Munich failed, an appeasement failed, but the epigraph I put at the beginning of F.W. Maitland's book, the historian, you have to remember that things now in the past were once in the future if you can go back and imagine what the world would be like. behind the desk of a British Prime Minister in 1938 without all the hindsight we have now. of the doomed nature of appeasement and the Holocaust and the real nature of what was to come in the Nazi regime and if you can try to engage with it sympathetically, then I think it's something worth doing because, as you say, Munich and appeasement still I have a huge hangover in the modern world and every time there is an international crisis Saddam says General Galtieri Assad Gadhafi it is always Munich and appeasement and dealing with dictators and it is not necessarily a useful analogy to compare the problems faced by the British and the French. in 1938, with those we face today we faced a much smaller number, so the majority mood before Munich in Britain was in favor of appeasement.

Well, I think most people just got on with their lives, you know, like they did, like they always have and I always think it was obviously a big dislike for the Nazi regime, but I live in a small town in Berkshire and There is a War Memorial there, which I pass every day, with about 50 names written on it, many of them from the same family, I take into account. That had happened less than 20 years earlier, that is, the equivalent of when Princess Diana was killed; now imagine it and imagine when out of nowhere the Czech crisis really broke out, because that really happened in the space of about a fortnight and this sudden realization that the leaflet was distributed in every home about building an air raid shelter in your house and a gas protection on the windows and respirators issued and that all the children would be evacuated from London because they thought it would be like we thought a nuclear war would be. that London would be in ruins within a week or two, so when Chamberlain was able to say "I'm going to see Hitler and I think we can stop this", relief came over me, I think you had to have been there to believe it, Stefan.

Zweig wrote brilliantly about this and said you don't really understand what it must be like and what it was like and the crowds when Chamberlain took off from Heston Narrows airfield and, by the way, it was an airfield, just a grass runway that jumped and flew and took off. . in all the gardens of those houses there at Heston service station everyone was in their gardens waving and traffic stopped for a mile in any direction, motorists looked up and when it landed there were thousands and it took an hour and I went back to central London and the king and queen took it to the balcony of Buckingham Palace and it was like a royal wedding, the shopping center was packed with people, so you know, that's how people felt at that moment. overwhelming feeling of relief and How long did it take before it changed?

Oh, not much. I think well, first of all, Chamberlain knew that moment when he said peace for our time. Alec Douglas-Home told me the moment he stuck his head out of the window and Downing Street said. to the crowd outside he said: "I shouldn't have done that" and actually apologized in the House of Commons the following week for the words he said: "no, please, no, please don't read too much into the words that were said". in the heat of the moment, having driven through thousands of cheering people and within two or three weeks, Hitler was giving a very bellicose speech and then he could and after a crystal discovered in November, I think it was designed to show that The regime was not going soft on the country, it was going to get tougher.

The other side of all this is that Hitler. I think it's hard to disagree with scholars who now see that Hitler regarded Munich as a setback. I mean he wanted war and he didn't like this. The old potpourri, the old our soul, as he called Chamberlain, came in and stood in the way and really effectively fulfilled all of this, what were the demands that he had made, that were his pretext for war and he had never committed the mistake of giving everything. His demands were again kept vague so that they could not be met and he became enraged by Chamberlain's reception in Munich.

It was the climax of the Oktoberfest and the city was filled with people dressed in dirndl costumes and then with hoses and there was a band. of oompah outside Chamberlain's hotel room and the crowd ate 10 or 12 people and all the newspaper reports agree that he received much louder applause than Hitler and in some ways he was, six years into the Nazi regime, a kind demonstration for peace, obviously, who could? He would not demonstrate against Hitler, but he could make an even louder demonstration for the British Prime Minister, make clear what he thought about the idea of ​​war, and Hitler was in a bad mood for two weeks after Munich, according to Albert Speer, and then there was a dinner where he finally broke loose and said that the German people had been deceived and beaten by Chamberlain of all people.

I always wanted to write the novel. I had always seen this English character with Chamberlain thirty years ago and I started working on this. I saw that the black figure could never see the German figure, but when I read it, the Signore confessed the work diary with Speer because he wrote memoirs of bears within the Third Reich. When I read that, I saw that of course I must have a counterpart German figure who can tell the other half of the story, so Chamberlain with Leggett and Hitler with Hartman, who meets him quite frequently. um interesting, if you were still a political editor, how would you write to these two assistants, Leggett and Hartmann?

Well, you know, political journalists don't do that. I write about these public officials very often, that's what's interesting, they are the hidden drivers. I mean, whatever is happening on Brexit, a lot of it is being done by people whose names we haven't even heard of and who they will be meeting with. together and you know it would be fascinating to write about one of those figures who are often more interesting than ministers. I hope to God they're more interesting then, so that's exactly what you can do with fiction. Yes, you can take. Minor figures, that's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's kind of idea.

You meet people outside the events sectors. agents for a novelist to write over and over again something that is very difficult for scholars because many of these figures did not leave many papers. Sessile shires was the private secretary who actually flew on the plane with Chamberlain. I haven't said goodbye, literally or figuratively. I mean, instead I take my man to the plane, but sigh. I don't think he left any paper or any details in the memoir of flying with Chamberlain and we know that Alec Domus Hume entered Hitler's apartment, but he was very laconic. I mean he wrote very little what he said was fascinating in particular he said Chamberlain said one thing he didn't know to answer early a question should just your question about what he didn't know he didn't know that the famous piece of paper was actually in his mostly Hitler's own words in a speech earlier in the week saying that he only wanted peace between Britain and Germany and that he had signed the Anglo-German naval agreement and you know he hoped that would be the way forward and Chamberlain actually got him to sign his own words and he told Alec Douglas-Home that he thought he would keep it but if he didn't it would unite the people, the British people, and it might attract the Americans and he said, therefore, I propose make a big deal out of it when he gets back to London, and boy, you made a big deal out of it, and of course with disastrous consequences for your reputation, but you see, it's a more subtle and interesting thing if he gets Hitler to sign his own words and then wave them around. consciously in front of the news cameras so that it would be an indelible image for people and that was important in 1940 because people would see that we had tried everything possible and he broke his word and therefore there was no point in hearing the terms of peace, it would be useless and Chamberlain supported Churchill by not even listening to what Hitler's peace terms would be and I think his own experience in Munich was crucial in that sense, crucial within the government, but also crucial for everyone to feel that they had to to fight against this and the argument for Munich is that I don't think there would have been that feeling if we had gone to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, I mean, it was necessary.

We probably had to pass to stay together and eventually win. Well, thanks Robert, now we have time for some questions. I know, yes, of course, very happy with whoever, what historical analogy and what would you use to describe the rise of Trump, well, Emperor Nero comes to mind, and maybe if he maybe is playing the violin, Well, we all get burned, the problem is that this year with Trump is a nightmare not to, oh, and I particularly protect political novelists because you can't. improve reality and you really can't, there's nothing you can invent that's stranger and often this is one of the reasons I like to write historical fiction and weave together fact and fiction, and alwaysthat there is something in one of my novels that is extravagant. and incredible and strange, then that's real and whenever it's boring and prosaic and then, just as you'd expect, that's what I've made up and that's almost always the case, but how I'd put Trump in a novel, I don't know.

I just hope to be around so I can try it in a forest. How deeply do you research before you start writing? Robert. It depends on Cicero's books. I also did two years of nothing but research, but that was research that had to cover a trilogy which was a very nice period for this novel. I had been interested. I made a documentary for the BBC thirty years ago for the 50th anniversary of Munich, so I had a lot on my mind. Overall, I should say about six months ago. The first dry book was a six-month investigation, so was the Conclave and, obviously, the ghost, much less so.

I went to Martha's Vineyard and that was it, the rest was in my head, so to speak. Hi, obviously a lot of your work has been done well. At least two of your goatee have been made into films that I know of, and I'm really looking forward to having your Cicero novels produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was wondering to what extent you get involved in the process of those adaptations and if you're generally happy with the end result, well, Kingsley Amis said take the money and run, it was his advice to anyone selling work and you can't complain about it.

Whats Next. My brother-in-law is also a novelist. He says that he is complaining about what has happened. done to your job is a bit like selling your house and coming back six months later and complaining that the kitchens were torn down, you know, all the books I've written, including this one, have been sold for film or television and many of them are now in the process of elaboration. In some I have been very involved, I wrote the script for the ghosts, so that is my favorite, obviously it had application and then others, others had been the disastrous homeland.

I know some people quite like the movie version of the homeland but I can't stand it and it was bought by Mike Nichols so it should have been good but it was him. I had lunch with him at the Russian Tea Room in New York, aside from my first novel. He was thirty-five-four and Mike Nichols was like, "Oh, he's going to hire David." Hare did the script and it was going to be huge and stuff, and then the studio Columbia TriStar investigated what teenage audiences thought about the idea of ​​a book where Hitler won the war movie and they didn't.

They even knew it had been a war and the only ones who had actually won it didn't even know what the Holocaust was and it quickly started to wind down at that point and it became an HBO movie and Mike Nichols was a great friend of the Kennedy family , so the idea that Joe Kennedy would make a deal with Hitler had to go and then he didn't like the idea of ​​a hostile relationship between a father and son, he said the American public would never take it that way. that then became kind of a friend, you know, they're great friends, Joe, the president, Joe Kennedy, he's a great man and you know everything, everything started to fall apart and it's pretty bleak, the worst thing was we went.

I went with my wife to see. During filming and Pryor we substituted for Berlin and one spring weekend and everyone else on the plane was going to have some kind of romantic weekend and we arrived and there were a thousand people dressed like SS men and giant swastikas flying overhead of the city, it was unbearably embarrassing altogether, so I'm like, you know, I think it's interesting, the play is a completely different experience. I've never had something turned into a play before and that's something much more alive because there's the director and the playwrights and the actors are commenting and you know it's going to be fascinating to see what they do with it.

Hello, this gentleman here is that gentleman who has the microphone. I think so, hello. Mike. Sorry, who goes first. Francis. So I know that gentleman. This one yes, thank you since one Andrew Roberts trashes Churchill's D-Day film for its historical inaccuracy. How important is it to you that professional historians basically give the historical parts? They are an A grade. You know, in the historical profession, my experience is divided between those who voted generously and those who want to encourage. You know, in reading history, I found this particularly with people and with Cicero's novels, that Maria Barba, for example, was very encouraging to others. hostile and that has been a pattern that I do not follow.

I can't pay too much attention to it, to be honest. I try to do things precisely. I always try to make it a rule that whatever happens in the novel I make up can happen and I tried to never include anything that I know didn't happen and I tried to stay true to the facts, for example in Enigma we all know the famous story that Churchill left that the Germans bombed Coventry to avoid revealing that they were breaking their codes, the submarine convoy battle that allowed us to return to the submarine codes and therefore win the Battle of the Atlantic, we returned paradoxically because it was such a disaster that there were so many sightings, so many Many sinking reports said there was enough material to crack the codes again.

It would have been easy enough for me to force us to do it to make it look like the British were deliberately sacrificing convoys for the broader purpose of winning the Battle of the Atlantic by breaking the codes. However, I wouldn't do that because I think that's a defamation of the story and I would try to avoid it if possible, in the end what you do, I think above all what you do is shape the material and you are much more concise, you know, the Dreyfus case, it's a long book, that novel, which the office would be the longest novel I wrote, but it's that big and the Dreyfus.

The thing is that big and I had to leave out a lot of things and that's probably the main distortion, the condensation. I would say you said at the beginning that, pretty early on in your novel, you have the structure pretty well sorted, how does that play out? Well, one has to know that a novel tells something that has already happened, it is like an incident, like a traffic accident or a murder or something that happened, and then you appear as a novelist and describe what has happened in many. There are several ways to do it: you can start at the end and go back to the beginning, or the middle, or wherever, but the thing itself has already happened and I think it would be very difficult to write a novel as a game of consequences in What will happen day by day on the first page of Munich is the DNA of everything else in the book and, in particular, of Hitler's speech, so you have Leggett waiting for his wife, who is opening trenches.

She dug up and is reading Hitler's speech, particularly the passages that will later appear at the end of the novel. It's great if you can put all that on the first page. That said, if you are trying to have rigorous monitoring, rigorously follow an established plan. Maybe the novel will be dead on arrival because it has to be organic characters. Characters emerge and there's a secretary in this who was the one Leggett reads aloud to and dictates Chamberlain's broadcast about a far away town we know nothing about and in my plan that's it. I only see the secretary's pleasure, but while I was writing it she turned around and made an intelligent comment and I knew that this character would have to appear again and she does throughout the novel and that's what makes it happen.

It's interesting as a writer that things change and develop. I didn't know the twist on the ghost, for example, until halfway through writing the book. Similarly, with Conclave you know that these things come up as you work, so it's a bit of both. This is the appropriate response. Has it occurred to you? I'm sure it's occurred to you how this book of yours intensifies the dilemma for baby boomers, if not Millennials, about whose side they would have been on in the late 1930s. I mean, he... everyone . he was against appeasement, he couldn't dare say he had heard of peace, he was doomed and had to be on the side of the strong men and the church and Chamberlain was the loser, but assuming Chamberlain really was the man really hard that almost outwitted Hitler, no That doesn't change the way many people think about the word appeasement, it's still a dirty job, maybe it shouldn't be so dirty.

Well, that's it for me, there's the heart and the emotion of writing these kinds of books, because I'm talking about Churchill, who liked Chamberlin. If the two men got along well enough, he said poor Neville will come out of the story badly. I know this because I will write the story and Chamberlain was caught between the Conservative Party who wanted to repudiate their full support for Chamberlain, actually that is until 1940. and the Labor Party which had shamefully opposed all the rearmament measures that Chamberlain had adopted , denounced him as a warmonger and voted against conscription in 1939. Can you believe it?

However, Michael Foot, who worked for Beaverbrook Archer Pisa, wrote the culprits this pamphlet attacking Chamberlain, so it was destroyed on both sides, right and left, and has rarely been treated with contempt since and I, people with the one I talked about, many of them remember that time they just feel relief, they just remember the feeling of relief and when you look at that, I personally don't believe that without 1938 it wouldn't have been 1940 and really the war could have had a very different outcome if we had tried to fight it in a way 38 certainly that was Hitler's opinion until the end of his life. saying that we should have fought in 1938.

September 38 was the perfect moment. I mean, he said that he thought that throughout the war he was a year behind where he should have been and therefore I think we should think about 1938. Because there are so many things about 1940, it has become the big fetish of this country, the movie Dunkirk, which I liked, a new movie with Gary Oldman as Churchill, which I'm sure will be very good, but there is more to our history than 1940 and if that's all. by which we are guided and we know ourselves and I think we are in danger of falling into self-deception and people say appeasement I was trying to think how I could convey what would be an appeasement that is not loaded and it occurred to me For me, and it is not an exact analogy, but the Good Friday Agreement was an appeasement, the peace process in Northern Ireland took violent psychopathic criminals who killed their soldiers and civilians and who had tried to kill on sight as a government and yet They said "we'll be fine, we'll do it." do the hypocritical thing we will talk to them what the grievances are we can eliminate them we can bring an era of peace of course it works so that no one will denounce us John Major and Tony Blair or very few people do it as it appeases and the case of Neville Chamberlain is I don't do it. did, but having spent 30 years watching it, I think it deserves a little more credit than it gets, frankly.