A meticulous account of the fiery German political scene in the 1970s holds Kim Janssen’s interest as it recreates a world of extremes

Unity by Michael Arditti
Maia Press, £8.99

THE first thing visitors to Michael Arditti’s Primrose Hill flat see is a typewritten sign admonishing them to “Please remove your shoes”.
The second, next to the first, is a surprisingly sexy print of Judi Dench playing Sally Bowles in the original West End production of Cabaret.
If the juxtaposition of the prim and the decadent appears incongruous, it also turns out to be instructive; Arditti’s latest novel, Unity, follows his previous three in its combination of a deeply moral tone and its depiction of outrageous behaviour.
And if Arditti immediately apologises for the note – “My mother was appalled when she saw it,” he admits – he has no qualms about having written an uncharacteristically ambitious British novel.
“As a novelist, I don’t want sit on the sidelines – I want to tackle the big themes,” he says.
Set in 1970s’ Germany, Unity tells the story of a recent Cambridge graduate who stars in a film about Unity Mitford, the English 1930s’ aristocrat who dabbled in fascism and was a friend of Hitler.
The actress, Felicity, is drawn into the fringes of the notorious left-wing terror group, the Baader Meinhof Gang, as her increasingly erratic behaviour begins to mirror that of Unity.
Surrounding her a cast of aging English luvvies and revolutionary Germans bed each other under the direction of Wolfgang Meier, a sadistic but inspired director.
The story is told in a series of apparently real memoirs by each of the protagonists, introduced by Arditti, who claims, in the introduction, to have known Felicity and her boyfriend at college.
Scholarly footnotes line the bottom of each page to reinforce the sense of reality.
It’s an unusual but compelling form of narrative. Arditti, reclining on a chaise long in his book-lined front room, explains: “I wanted people to look at the material in a more active way than if they just read a traditional narrative novel; there are different perspectives the reader has to weigh up.
“You then have to constantly reference it through a reality framework – although most of the novel is made up, there are many things in there that did happen; Schleyer, the German foreign minister, was kidnapped in 1977 in the last gasp of the Baader Meinhof Gang.”
For the reader, the negotiation between the varying characters’ accounts and between fact and fiction creates mystery.
Like all the very best detective stories, you are left not with a ‘whodunit’ solution but a sense of the unfathomable nature of other people, and of what drives us to evil.
Along the way some of the biggest themes a novelist can tackle are dealt with, not least national identity.
And curiously for a book about Britain and Germany, it’s the English who are butt of all the best jokes.
Arditti says: “At one point Felicity condemns several hundred years of democracy in Britain as ‘shilly shallying’, as lacking the passion and commitment of the Europeans.
“That’s true, but you may well say thank God for it, otherwise I might have been writing a book about Oswald Mosley and a German aristocrat.
“The English are rather too prone to accept and find fun, particularly when it involves the upper classes – don’t forget that British people were very attracted to fascism in the 1930s and even Churchill spoke in praise of Hitler early on, something I was shocked to discover.”
Arditti’s own time at Cambridge, from 1973 to 1976, was marked by an absence of political activity, something he seems sorry for.
For his next novel, Arditti is again touching on World War II in a story about a ship of Jewish refugees no nation will allow to dock.
“If it strikes any chords with the current treatment of asylum seekers, that’s entirely intentional,” he says.

• Michael Arditti reads from Unity at Swiss Cottage Library on June 18 at 3pm.