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In 1961, Max Hofmann, a violin teacher, is dying in London, where he has lived in safe but empty exile. He was once Max von Hofmannswaldau, a Prussian aristocrat and an intellectual lawyer. On his deathbed he charges his favourite pupil, a girl of 17, to uncover his story and that of his friends. He gives her a postcard with seven names on it, the last name his own. ‘Hitler killed all of us’, he tells her, ‘Or Stalin. Even me, I lived, but was I alive?’ Lucy Beckett is, in effect, this girl, and the novel is her telling of Max’s story — ‘A story to make up and a story that is true.’
The young Max escaped being turned into a Prussian cavalry officer like his brothers by virtue of his father’s sudden death. Instead, he attends the Gymnasium at Breslau, where he is befriended by the preternaturally gifted Adam Zapolski, scion of a noble Polish family who, rejecting his Catholic background, flirts with Nietzschean ideology. Beckett is passionately interested in philosophical and religious questions; she has a weakness for using her characters as mouthpieces, and the long debates between Max, Adam, and their civilised teacher Dr Fischer are at times both improbable and wearisome. Characters are either good or bad, and somewhat stereotypical. The wise and kindly Dr Fischer is almost indistinguishable from Max’s wise and kindly tutor at home or his wise and kindly Jewish grandfather. The two girls in Max’s life — pure, innocent, musical Anna, and predatory, sensuous Eva — do not convince as sensate beings. Our sympathetic attention is, however, held by Max himself.
The charismatic Adam is the most important person in Max’s life. The two young men set up home together; together they argue, play music, travel, compensate each other for their family inadequacies — Max’s brother is one of the first to follow Hitler’s call; Adam’s promiscuous socialite mother wears a diamond swastika on her evening gown. When Adam plays Hamlet in a student production, his friends fall into role — Max becomes Horatio, gentle Jewish Anna becomes Ophelia, her possessive brother Laertes. Luckily this analogy is not overworked; Beckett is skilful at incorporating ideas from art, music and literature into her narrative without insisting on the parallels.
Max’s world falls apart when Adam finds his vocation and rejects the arrogance of Nietzsche in favour of the humility of Roman Catholic priesthood. As the strangling grip of Nazism takes hold in Breslau, Max’s own identity becomes confused; to whom does he belong, his Junker father or his almost invisibly Jewish mother? As personal freedoms are swiftly stripped away in 1933, Max decides to escape to England. His friends are not so lucky.
Beckett is superb in her handling of the bigger picture — Poland, choked between Bolshevism and Nazism; the death throes of the Junker class, their obsolete code of conduct slipping from their weakened grasp. A Postcard from the Volcano is a valiant attempt to understand this horrifying and fascinating period from a German point of view. But her characters are not sufficiently enmeshed in quotidian reality to engage us. This is a deeply interesting book by a highly intelligent writer, but it’s not so much a novel as animated history.
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