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In this ‘dia-blog’ historians Alan Allport (Professor of History, Syracuse University, New York) and author of Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (2020) and Julie Gottlieb (Professor of Modern History, University of Sheffield), share their thoughts about the new Netflix film Munich– The Edge of War (2022). 

The film uses the suspenseful days of the Four Powers Conference that took place in Munich on 29-30 September, 1938, as the stage for a political thriller. Based on Robert Harris’s novel Munich (2017), the plot aspires to cut to the heart of the strategically and psychologically terrifying situation faced by Europe should Hitler’s escalating demands for Lebensraum not be met. Hitler was forcing the ceding of the mainly German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to the Reich. While the Czechs themselves were not invited to the negotiating table, Britain, Italy and France agreed to Hitler’s demands in order to avert war, and Chamberlain persuaded Hitler to sign a further document of Anglo-German understanding to press the same point. 

In the film our sympathies are meant to lie with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose reputation has swung, for decades, from that of the celebrated saviour of peace and wise old gentleman with only the best intentions, to that of the ‘provincial undertaker’ and Hitler’s gullible dupe. 

The force of historical fiction cuts like a double edged sword for the historian. The power of film (and fiction) is that it captures the imagination. It visualises, it engages or enrages by romanticising or villainising, but inevitably in ways that can distort the historical record. For example, now that we have seen Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain, will most of us ever again be able to unsee the suave and smoothly-spoken actor when we animate Chamberlain in our mind’s eye? In real life Chamberlain was rather sepia toned in pallor, and not just because of the yellow-tinge of 1930s photography. 

Considering this is a work of historical fiction that began as a novel, do you feel the novel has been successfully adapted for screen?

Allport: Well, in terms of the plot, the movie remains fairly faithful to the book. A few subplots are trimmed down or excised and some of the minor characters have been omitted or altered but these are the sorts of changes you’d expect to happen in a film adaptation. 

I think the more important question is how well the story succeeds via the medium of cinema as opposed to literature. Munich is not a counterfactual history like Robert Harris’s book Fatherland, so the main political events unfurl in the film just as they did in real life – Chamberlain and Daladier will go to Munich, the Sudetenland will be ceded to Germany, and presumably the war will break out in September 1939 as in real life. The problem then is to inject some tension into a story with a predetermined outcome. 

My own feeling is that Harris’s historical novels have always been more effective at evoking a certain mood of the past through meticulously well researched detail than by providing a lot of suspenseful plot twists for the reader to follow. It’s easier to do this in book form than on the screen, I think. I didn’t feel the on-screen version of Munich absorbed me as much in the subjective sense of what it must have been like to sit in the conference chamber with Hitler and Chamberlain. This is an aesthetic rather than a historical complaint, however!

On the topic of the aesthetic qualities, film has the ability to capture mood, feeling and details of material culture in living colour. How well does the film express the general atmosphere of the September Crisis?

Gottlieb: My own approach has been to consider the history from below of the Munich Crisis, and to better understand how opinion, reactions and emotional responses ranged across class, gender, generational, regional lines and, of course, political lines. 

Here and there the film gestures to ordinary people and the deep impact of these events on quotidian lives– evacuation, gas masks, protests, mass celebrations like it was Mafeking night, allusion to the gratitude of ‘millions of mothers’ in Europe, and a few glimpses into domestic interiors. This was all backdrop and background, but generally well observed and well placed nonetheless. 

The subtitle of the film ‘the edge of war’ is evocative (the novel has no subtitle), reinforcing the cliff-hanger feature of the political suspense genre, but also suggestive of the edginess and nervousness experienced by populations across Europe and beyond. 

Still, the story Munich tells is about great/guilty men and a few good women, narrating it in the same conventional way as so much of the top-down scholarship. 

On that note, as it is hard to get away from the fact that most of the scholarship has focused on the political leaders, how does the film correspond to the historiographical reassessments and revision of Chamberlain’s foreign policy and his reputation? 

Allport: Harris’s book is more strident in its defense of Chamberlain. Because many of the contextual scenes and conversations in the novel are not present in the film, it presents a less well developed and coherent case for Chamberlain’s foreign policy. The result is an odd mixture of arguments (implicit or openly stated), some of which would be familiar to the real life Chamberlain, and others not. 

The final scene in the aircraft as the British diplomats return home from Munich is particularly interesting in this regard. Chamberlain (Irons) argues that by getting Hitler to sign the ‘piece of paper’ agreeing to resolve future differences peacefully he has created a trap which will expose the German leader as a liar in the eyes of the world if he continues to seek conflict. This will give any war against Hitler a moral authority it would otherwise lack. I could imagine Chamberlain perhaps saying this, although he sincerely hoped and believed Hitler would be true to his word. However, Irons goes on to say that he’s willing to risk looking a fool if he is proven wrong. I very much doubt the extremely vain Chamberlain would ever knowingly risk such a thing!

In the credits the film baldly states that the Munich agreement ‘bought a year’s time’ for Britain to rearm and was therefore crucial in the eventual defeat of Germany. It’s a rather strange assertion to come so late and the movie hasn’t really prepared the case for it for the audience. Historians remain divided as to whether it’s actually true or not.

Gottlieb: As Alan has said, Munich–The Edge of War is very pro-Chamberlain. Filmgoers may wonder where Winston Churchill is hiding in the film. Indeed, Churchill isn’t even alluded to, at least not by name. Is it justified to airbrush Churchill out? One could argue that Churchill’s star has shone brightly on the big screen for long enough, most recently in The Gathering Storm (2002), The Darkest Hour (2017), Churchill (2017) and Netflix’s The Crown. Although Churchill would have the last word– in fact, hundreds of thousands of words– about the Munich Agreement and its shameful consequences, he was a minor player in the diplomatic events in the autumn of 1938. He was not even the most obvious leader of the anti-appeasers, a group that in any case lacked organisational coherence and consensus about an alternative foreign policy. Opinion polls and pundits speculated that were Chamberlain to go, he would be succeeded as PM by either the former or the current foreign secretary, Anthony Eden or Lord Halifax. Incidentally, it is Halifax who is much less justifiably airbrushed out of the film.

You could say that the fictional male protagonists Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann serve as stand-ins for the appeasement sceptics and would-be resistors, embodying their sentiments and sensibilities, not to mention their elevated social status. In other ways, the fictional leads are less plausible. In order to make the plot work they are like passepartouts, with access to space, places and leaders– this just doesn’t ring true.   

The mood of the film is a kind of pre-Churchillian Britain, almost a prelapsarian Britain of a milder and less heroic age. The architecture is grand and solid, the characters and the crowds well behaved, well dressed, and quite prosperous– with few signs of the Slump and only a few inklings of the aerial war to come. Berlin and Munich are also shown with more grandeur than grit. 

Coming back now to the ambivalent power of film, will you be happy to use Munich–The Edge of War to introduce students to the topic? How can historians frame historical fiction like this to generate discussion in the classroom? 

Allport: Teaching history through film offers students an interesting set of questions to consider. How important is it that the film sticks rigidly to historical fact, or is some artistic license permissible? Should we judge a fictional movie by the same standards as a history book? Are all omissions and deviations from the historical record equal, or do some matter more than others? In the case of Munich: The Edge of War it might be particularly useful to compare the characterization of Neville Chamberlain with that in 2017’s Darkest Hour.  Both are quite different but neither is inherently the objectively ‘right’ one. Why have the filmmakers presented such different Chamberlains to the audience? Neither depiction would satisfy all historians. Is it even possible to put a Chamberlain on the screen that everyone could agree is ‘realistic’? And is that a useful historical or dramatic objective anyway?

Gottlieb: To conclude, all representations, fiction and nonfiction, reveal as much about the time they are produced in as about the historical period they seek to depict. Munich–The Edge of War is entertainment as well artifact in that sense, a film for our time!

Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015), and co-editor and contributor to The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People (2021). 

Alan Allport is a Professor of History at Syracuse University, New York. His most recent book is Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938-1941 (2020).

Cover image: Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain, George MacKay as Hugh Legat, in Munich — The Edge of War, Netflix (2022)

During the past eight decades there have often been historical parallels with the Four Powers Conference and the so-called Munich Crisis of September 1938, when Britain, Germany, Italy and France met to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia and acceded to Hitler’s territorial demands for the Sudetenland in a bid to avert war in Europe.Munich—The Edge of War, out on Netflix on 21 January, is not a dramatization of this pivotal event but a work of ‘what if’ historical fiction, based on Robert Harris’s 2017 political thriller. What about the ‘what if’ women of Munich? The vast majority of ruminations about the historical plausibility of the film will focus on the characterisation of the leading great or guilty men. The fictional male leads Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann are loosely based on the British A.L. Rowse and the German Adam von Trott, a good deal of poetic licence taken regarding their respective political insights and foresight and their proximity to the centre stage of diplomatic events.

The film aims to be relatable by subtly but no less deliberately framing the strategic and ethical quandaries faced by the appeasers and the would-be-anti-Nazi resistors in ways that will resonate with audiences in our own age of crisis and rising extremism. Indeed, some commentators are comparing the current crisis in the Ukraine to the Munich Crisis.

The portrayal of Neville Chamberlain is nostalgic, highly sympathetic and (perhaps, too) attractive. Jeremy Irons’ Chamberlain is the saviour of peace, the epitome of respectability, good manners and tradition— a striking foil for the current resident of 10 Downing Street, a PM who uses the same austere spaces for, we now know, far less serious business. 

Munich-The Edge of War speaks to modern audiences in other ways too, for instance, with integrated casting (casting without consideration of the actor’s ethnicity). In a similar vein, the filmmakers have worked on what we might call ‘gender-blind’ casting. What I mean by this is creating strong, intelligent, well-informed women characters whose actions have a direct bearing on events. The ‘what if’ genre allows for an attempt to right the wrongs of the very real male-exclusivity and unexamined sexism of interwar diplomacy. 

There are four key but still supporting women characters in the film, serving important symbolic, romantic and dramatic functions. There is Lenya, the German-Jewish friend of both fictional male leads, whose body will eventually wear the marks of Nazi persecution. There is Pamela Legat, the protagonist’s wife, who stands in for British mothers, faced with the terrifying prospect of a war from the air, making wrenching decisions about evacuating children, and looking at this new world through the dehumanizing visor of newly acquired gasmasks. Third, the film takes one of Chamberlain’s typists on a flight of fancy, so to speak. She is given the name Joan Menzies. While women typists did accompany Chamberlain by airplane to the Munich Conference, as far as we know none served overt or covert functions in the negotiations. Fourth, on the German side, there is Helen Winter, widow of a General, holding some kind of administrative ministerial post, and both von Hartmann’s love interest and co-conspirator—the pretty face of German anti-Nazism. 

These token women are all ‘great’ rather than guilty women, with assorted qualities of courage, heroism, pathos, insight and intuition, not to mention sex appeal. They are all variations of the mythical Cassandra, speaking truth to power and issuing predictions about the consequences of the naive acts performed by men. 

To their credit, the filmmakers have included a number of reminders that the Munich Crisis was not an all-male affair in its impact on the population at large. Women are evoked as the ‘millions of mothers’ who will be thanking Chamberlain for saving the peace. Women are extras in the scenes of political protests. An anonymous German girl presents Chamberlain with a bouquet upon his arrival in Munich. Women are a high proportion of the jubilant crowds receiving Chamberlain when he arrives home with the document promising ‘Peace for our time’.  

To avoid giving away the plot, I won’t give any more detail. But in terms of the historical record, some spoilers are called for. Indeed, the main problem with plot devices and the dramatic functions assigned to these women characters is that women just did not have this kind of access to power, certainly not in an official capacity. 

To say that women would not have been able to act in the events as they do in the film is not to say that women were absent from the history, even at the level of high politics and diplomacy. I suspect elements of the life story of Shiela Grant Duff have been mined for the composite heroines. Grant Duff and von Trott developed a close friendship at the University of Oxford in the early 1930s. They fell out over politics when he became a supporter of the Nazi regime, and as a woman she blazed a trail as a foreign correspondent, and expert on and advocate of Czechoslovakia. Her best-selling Penguin Special Europe and the Czechs (1938) was published just days after the Munich Agreement was signed. 

Moreover, a small handful of women MPs from the small group of women who were MPs in the late 1930s were formidable critics of appeasement, including the Independent Eleanor Rathbone, Labour’s Ellen Wilkinson, and Chamberlain-scourge the Conservative Duchess of Atholl who made sure that all British MPs were presented with the unexpurgated translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Other women MPs led from the front as Chamberlain’s fan base, including Conservative MPs Nancy Astor, Florence Horsbrugh and Marjorie Graves, and the political hostess Edith Lady Londonderry. 

Munich—The Edge of War, a brooding and evocative fictionalisation of the Munich Crisis, does a commendable job of writing women into the drama and inviting audiences to take a gender-blind view of the event. It is also a welcome invitation to look more closely and carefully at the historical record, and acknowledge the opportunities as well as the significant constraints real women faced in the 1930s to play the kind of decisive roles created for them in this film.

Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Her publications include ‘Guilty Women’ (see cover below), Foreign Policy and Appeasement (Palgrave, 2015), and she is co-editor of The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People (Manchester University Press, 2021).

A slightly different version of this blog post was published earlier on The Conversation.

Cover image: Lenya in Munich— The Edge of War, Netflix (2022)