Later, in the early 1990s, Mendel bequeaths his letters and papers to a former student, Conrad Senior, who makes it his mission to understand the unravelling of the friendship and hunt down the film of von Gottberg’s death, which he has been led to believe still exists. The question Senior wants answered is: Did von Gottberg sacrifice himself, to prove to his liberal friends at Oxford that he’d always been on their side?
Mendel and von Gottberg are based on real people – the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the lawyer and diplomat Adam von Trott respectively. But Cartwright changed their names to give himself ‘the freedom to speculate, especially about their sex lives’. Berlin is one of Cartwright’s heroes. ‘He freed me from my worries about being a liberal in intense situations,’ he says. ‘I was at Oxford with all these damn Trots and Maoists. They had absolute beliefs and thought they knew exactly what the future held, but as Berlin says, “There is no incorrigible proposition.” ’
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Cartwright became interested in von Trott after watching the film of his trial at the Imperial War Museum. ‘I was gobsmacked. The prosecutors actually call him “schweinhund”! There’s an incredible bit where, talking to another defendant, one of them says “So your belief was that the Führer should be replaced?” “Yes.” “But that’s d impossible. The Führer is the people. You can’t replace the people.” It’s astonishing to hear people saying things like that as if they believed them.’
And the execution film? ‘I don’t think it exists, but if it does, it’s probably in Russia, in someone’s private collection. What I have seen is a report by one of the cameramen, which is horrible – awful to read. I’ve seen copies of the camera sheets too. There’s something hideously interesting in how the Nazis could have been so unspeakably vicious.’
Justin Cartwright was born in 1945 in Johannesburg, where his father edited the Rand Daily Mail newspaper. He left South Africa in his early twenties to study at Oxford and work in advertising in London. (‘Believe it or not, Prime Pal is for dogs’ was one of his.) He also made films – including the 1978 soft-porn comedy ‘Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse’ – and worked for the SDP/Liberal Alliance, directing their party political broadcasts and acting as an unofficial ‘spin doctor’ before the term had been invented. (He drew on this experience for his 2001 novel ‘Half in Love’, about a politician who becomes tabloid fodder after he has an affair with a film star.)
He returns to South Africa quite regularly, but feels ‘totally a fish out of water’. ‘A few years ago I was there and someone asked me if I could do a radio interview in Afrikaans and I said yes, thinking I’d be able to manage. But after about 20 minutes I came totally unstuck.’
