BLINDED BY VANSITTARTISM:

Freedom fighter: Isaiah Berlin believed that humans make their own destiny. But his encounter with Adam von Trott, Hitler's would-be assassin, suggests otherwise: a review of The Song Before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright (John Gray, 3/12/07, New Statesman)

Justin Cartwright's The Song Before It Is Sung is, among other things, a meditation on the equivocal nature of human action as played out in the relationship of Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg - fictional versions of Berlin and one of the conspirators in Claus von Stauffenberg's July Plot to assassinate Hitler, Adam von Trott, who was tortured and hideously executed in August 1944. In most respects, Cartwright follows the actual history of their ill-starred friendship. The two men met in Oxford in the early 1930s, when von Trott was a Rhodes scholar and Berlin was a graduate student, then a fellow at All Souls. Though they were quite different in background and outlook - one a Jewish liberal, the other a Prussian with a fondness for Hegel - Berlin was "completely captivated". In 1934, however, von Trott wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian (which had reported that Jews were being denied justice in Germany) claiming that no anti-Semitism existed in the courts of Hesse, where he worked as a lawyer. After this grotesque assertion, which flouted demonstrable facts and still has not been properly explained, the relationship between the two men was for a time badly strained.

From one angle, The Song Before It Is Sung is a roman-à-clef, and displays some of the difficulties of that problematic genre. When must the author be strictly faithful to facts, and when is there license to depart from them? Cartwright's account of von Trott's role in the failed July Plot is rigorously historical, and despite a slightly farcical episode in which Cartwright has him being sexually initiated by an "intelligent, upper-class girl", the character of Mendel is in many ways evocative of Berlin. Yet Cartwright goes astray in suggesting - not only in the text of the fiction, but also in an afterword to the book - that Berlin "repudiated" von Trott after his letter to the Guardian, leading to a lasting "estrangement" between them. In fact, as Berlin wrote in 1986, he never ceased to regard von Trott as "a passionate patriot, a brave and honourable man, incapable of anything ignoble or unworthy".

It is a judgement that reflects Berlin's characteristic generosity. At the same time, there is no reason to doubt that it expresses his long-held view; the friendship between the two was resumed and they continued to meet until 1938. Nor is it true - as Cartwright seems to imply - that by briefing against him in America, Berlin was responsible for the failure of von Trott's efforts to gain support in Washington for a coup against Hitler.

If anyone sabotaged the mission, it was Berlin's Oxford contemporary Maurice Bowra, who warned influential Americans such as Felix Frankfurter that von Trott's loyalties were in doubt - suggesting, in other words, that he might be a Nazi agent. The suspicion was groundless - all the evidence was that he had been an anti-Nazi from the start, and it should have been obvious that high-level conspiracy of the ultra-dangerous kind in which he was engaged was inconsistent with open opposition - but it undermined von Trott's credibility and may have stymied attempts that he made later in the war to contact the British. (On hearing of von Trott's execution in 1944, Bowra remarked brutishly: "That's one Nazi who was hanged." He later expressed bitter regret for his attitude.)

Yet the failure of von Trott's mission had much larger causes. Like others in the German military resistance, von Trott visited London repeatedly in the run-up to the war, to warn against Britain acceding to Hitler's ambitions in eastern Europe, but the appeasers who were then in power dismissed his warnings. An incident in November 1939, when the Gestapo rolled up Britain's intelligence networks throughout much of western Europe after the kidnapping of two British officers who had been tricked into believing they were in touch with anti-Hitler elements in the German high command, strengthened the conviction that nothing was to be gained by courting the German resistance. There was never any prospect of von Trott's pleas being acted upon, and his belief that he could persuade Britain or the US to underwrite a coup against Hitler was an illusion.