“Any country’s present,” says Robert Harris, “is shaped by its interpretation of its past.” Harris, whose bestselling second world war novel Munich is now coming to the big screen courtesy of Netflix, adds: “We have a very strong image of this island standing alone, weak, defenceless – pulled back together by an effort of will. Well, none of it’s really true.”
The big stories Britain creates from its history require heroes, but they also require cowards, failures and villains. How else could we be sure that our heroes were truly heroic, if we didn’t have comparable figures who fell short? This has been the fate of prewar prime minister Neville Chamberlain, remembered for his policy of trying to appease and contain Hitler. Munich: The Edge of War is a bold attempt to change the story. But can this fictionalised film shift public perceptions of history?
“Chamberlain is a tragic hero to me,” says Harris. “He fails, but there’s something noble in the attempt – not squalid, which is the way it’s normally written.” Harris was thinking about putting the book on screen before he had even finished writing it – partly because he was convinced his friend Jeremy Irons should play Chamberlain. The two discussed it in 2016, a year before the book came out.
Now, in a London hotel, Harris turns to Irons, who is sitting next to him, smoking languidly. “You’re at the right age,” says the writer, “with a certain aquiline look, and an imposing physical presence. He was prime minister, the dominant political figure, so it needed someone with that sort of stature.”
Irons replies: “I only knew him as history has sent him down to us, as the appeaser, the man who was fooled by Hitler.” Playing Chamberlain changed his view. “I got into the mindset of a man who only 20 years ago had witnessed a war where a lot of his colleagues and friends had died. An appalling war. I was very excited to be part of what I thought was a real re-evaluation of this historical figure – a great man.”
In September 1938, Hitler wanted to invade Czechoslovakia and annex the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew to Germany three times to try to persuade the Führer out of war. His third visit was for the Munich Conference, the subject of this film. On screen, the negotiations become a tense thriller driven by a fictional plot: a German official tries to convince one of Chamberlain’s staff, a former friend, that the British must stop Hitler. “I did toy with whether there might be a way of writing the novel with Chamberlain as the central character,” says Harris. “But I think that’d be a pretty tough ask.”
The film focuses instead on the younger cast who have, it must be said, a sexier story. Paul von Hartmann (played by Jannis Niewöhner) is the German official, who befriends Hugh Legat (George MacKay) at Oxford University in the early 1930s.
The two disagree politically – Hartmann initially supports Hitler – but the spark between them is powerful. There’s a subplot involving their rivalry over a woman but the film doesn’t give any of its female characters much depth – the far more interesting sexual energy is between the two men. When Legat accompanies Chamberlain to Munich, Hartmann is desperate to give him secret documents showing Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe. If Chamberlain won’t stop Hitler, Hartmann wants to – whatever that takes.
Though Hartmann and Legat are fictional, Harris confirms that they are partially inspired by the diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz and the scholar AL Rowse. The latter, who was gay, wrote about his intense platonic attachment to Trott at Oxford. Trott, though a considerably less amiable character than the fictional Hartmann, went on to join Claus von Stauffenberg’s 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. It failed and Trott was executed.
“The film-makers saw the thrust as being the attempt by the youngsters,” says Irons, “but I said we had to care about the political situation. While the script was being developed, I kept fighting Chamberlain’s corner. I said, ‘You have to know where these people who are negotiating are coming from.’ We can’t just be wallpaper.” Harris agrees: “You were crucial in all that, much more so than any actor in any film I’ve been involved in.”
One of the scenes Irons fought for is set in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Chamberlain is with his wife and Legat joins them. The PM speaks movingly of the first world war and his responsibility to help the nation avoid another trauma. “He believed the country would have a spiritual crisis if the people didn’t see their leaders doing everything possible to avoid another war,” says Harris. “It’s a very interesting line and one that he did actually say.”
“One could say,” adds Irons, “that the country is in a spiritual crisis at the moment, because our leaders don’t seem to be dealing with the things we care about: the national health, global warming, balancing up between the rich and the poor. We’re going through a moment where we don’t trust our politicians – and to portray a politician who is honest and truthful and has real problems and is trying to deal with them is very important.”
Munich has a German director, Christian Schwochow, who has directed episodes of The Crown. Everyone in the cast and crew seems to have been excited by the opportunity to create an Anglo-German version of this moment in history that set both nations on a path to war. “At the first reading rehearsal,” says Jannis Niewöhner, who plays Hartmann, “we were sitting with all the English actors and the German actors and you could see the difference in the cultures, the ways they would say their lines. You could sense this is going to be a great movie.”
Chamberlain and Hitler both signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland. That was the appeasement: giving Hitler what he wanted in the hope it might satisfy him. But in an intriguing twist – given prominence in the film – the next morning Chamberlain persuaded Hitler to sign a separate declaration in which Britain and Germany promised never to go to war again. This was the famous piece of paper that Chamberlain waved triumphantly on his return, claiming that he had secured “peace for our time”.
Hitler was not appeased and, 11 months later, invaded Poland, precipitating the second world war. Munich makes the case that Chamberlain’s avoidance of war in 1938 was a boon to the allies, allowing Britain time to rearm. By then, says Harris: “We had the world’s most powerful navy. We had an integrated air force, all of which was bequeathed by the loathed Chamberlain – who was spending 50% of the government’s tax revenue on rearmament.”
Among those who benefited from the vilification of Chamberlain was his rival, Winston Churchill. He doesn’t appear in Munich, but in a sense the whole movie is a riposte to his version of history. “I don’t seek to denigrate Churchill in any way,” says Harris. “He clearly was a brilliant war leader and an inspiring person. But he certainly went out to denigrate Chamberlain, and his memoirs really are a great counterfactual. ‘If only that, if only this – then Hitler could have been stopped.’ None of it seems to really address the things Chamberlain had to deal with. And if we’d followed Churchill’s advice, the army would have bought a lot of biplanes.”
Churchill’s portrait of Chamberlain in his memoir The Gathering Storm isn’t entirely negative: he emphasises that Chamberlain was able and forceful. Yet overall he portrays him as “opinionated and self-confident in a very high degree”. The sneer is audible in some of Churchill’s lines: “Mr Chamberlain continued to believe that he had only to form a personal contact with the dictators to effect a marked improvement in the world situation.”
Chamberlain died six months after leaving office in 1940. By the time The Gathering Storm was published in 1948, no one had much interest in defending the man who had tried to make peace with Hitler. “Chamberlain,” says Harris, “was a very convenient scapegoat both for the Conservative party and for the Labour party, who had opposed all the measures of rearmament that he had reintroduced.”
Munich is an ambitious film, aiming not only to thrill but to shift British – and possibly German – views of their national story. “It has a slight polemical intent,” says Harris, “because I’m arguing against a tidal wave of 80 years of the other view.”
Still, as many have found in the past, challenging the national story can be dangerous. Is Harris worried about the reaction? His eyes twinkle. “All my life, right from when I was a schoolboy, I’ve liked to cause trouble and stir things up. I couldn’t be happier.”
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