“At my funeral one of our friends will describe us as pure, blameless, holy children of the universe, but Lukas and I know, if our friends forget, that these words can be true of the two of us only if they are true of us all.” So says Jutta Carroll, the protagonist of The Martyrs, The Lovers by Catherine Gammon. Jutta is a German, pacifist activist whose public image contradicts the whole story that is Jutta Carroll. Her lover, Lukas Grimm, a former German soldier turned activist, has pulled the trigger on them both. Jutta’s violent death defines her more than anything she did in life. All her thoughts and actions are lost, and the final moment of her life determines how she is remembered. Exploring this WHAT is at the heart of Gammon’s novel. 

The story of Jutta and Lucas is loosely based on the real-life tale of Green Party founder Petra Kelly who in 1992 was found dead in her Bonn apartment beside her lover, Gert Bastian. The police ruled their death a murder-suicide, determining that Bastian shot Kelly and then himself. As both were prominent members of a political party, there was suspicion of foul play, yet the lack of evidence ended their story there. Gammon transforms this political mystery into a compassionate examination of activism and the human spirit, and of the private tribulations of public figures. Drawing on 20th-century student protests and peace movements in both the United States and Germany, The Martyrs, The Lovers is even more poignant for modern audiences, as our own political figures are so closely scrutinized that we easily miss the full picture of who they are.

The story begins with its end, with the bodies of Jutta and Lukas discovered like “medieval lovers…side by side.” Readers learn about this discovery from the neighbors. But the lovers are more than the sum of these outsiders’ views: “None of those stories reaches the truth, not of her death, not of her life.” On the outside looking in, neighbors and friends make assumptions based on what they have heard and what they know. The narrator at the end of the first chapter sets up a story in which perspectives, from outside and in, tell as much of the “story” of Jutta and Lukas as there is. 

The Martyrs, The Lovers is composed of three distinct sections, each told from a different point of view, that examine the difficult balance between maintaining a private life and being an outspoken activist. The first section, which outlines Jutta’s youth, is related by an omniscient third-person narrator and features long quotations of Jutta’s correspondence with family and friends. The second section, written in a first-person, stream-of-conscious style, brings readers even closer to Jutta as she explores her thoughts and fears, her passions and displeasures. The third and final section delves into the minds of various characters—Lukas, Jutta, Jutta’s father, and others—to pose questions about what different factions stand to gain from the death of a highly public activist. Gammon’s use of these multiple points of view gives the text a lively feeling, allowing her characters to drive the narrative and contributing to a wider understanding of them.

Gammon’s prose is compassionate and poetic. While the section in Jutta’s voice provides the most intimate access to her thoughts and feelings, the first section provides deep narrative monologues that make us feel close to her. The novel abounds in monologues that are breathtaking in their specificity and full description of character. Here’s an example. In high school, Jutta did a research project on Vietnam and learned to be a “dissident” by taking anti-war stances that her stepfather disagreed with:

She had practiced with him every turn of the argument and was primed for the class debate, in that debate felt an exhilaration she could not remember knowing, felt the righteousness of her argument, the confidence of her command of the facts, and something more: the shock of her passion, its effect on her listeners, their awareness of the broken taboo, that fear and their rapt attention, their eyes, their ears, their minds attentive only to her: she was emptying her heart to them, pouring herself out, and they drank, and she drank from their drinking; she was not drained after her performance, but full of energy, ready to act, unclear what action might mean: went home to her desk, wrote a letter, letters, wrote to congressmen and generals, wrote to senators and the President, to newspapers and magazines, to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, wrote her heart and mind out and looked at the pile of paper when she was done and shook her head.

Early on, Jutta becomes interested in change and in using writing and speech to achieve it. But as she she gets older—long before she meets Lukas—she becomes increasingly aware of  certain contradictions. As a student at American University in Washington, DC, she is close to lawmakers who create change. But she’s also caught up in the anti-war movement. When students are outraged that the university did not grant a mock presidential debate to Dick Gregory, comedian and civil rights activist running for President in 1968, Jutta senses the desire for direct action even as it challenges her upbringing. “She understood why the radicals behaved as they did, breaking windows, making bombs, going on the run, and although she believed, after Gandhi, that active nonviolence was the only effective response to injustice, in this action she had discovered that she too felt more affinity with violent resistance than with no resistance at all.” 

The contradiction between the private and the public self is thoroughly dissected as we unravel who Jutta is. More than a German-born, American-educated loving sister and constantly threatened political leader, Jutta has her own doubts and fears, and they are at odds with the familiar idea of a single-minded activist. Even when her life is threatened by political opponents, she is questioning herself: “Did I allow myself to be protected by a man with a gun? I, the too famous pacifist feminist? Yes. Yes, I did.” By highlighting how Jutta is so much more than her perceived public image, Gammon gives readers an expansive view into the complexities of a public figure’s private life and sets off the contradictions with which the whole novel resonates.

The section told from Lukas’ perspective pulls a lot of emotional weight, exploring the contradictions within the psyche of an ex-Nazi soldier. An old man, his life turned towards the crusade against nuclear weapons, Lukas remains tormented by his past. Remembering himself at twenty-two, as a soldier in Hitler’s army following orders to kill, he tells himself: “Stop, Lukas, you were a boy, nothing more than a child—” He can’t reconcile his own contradictions, which manifest in the prose itself: “He loves this woman. He’s just shot her.” While murder is extreme, we feel the conflict from within more than from without. The confounding act of murder illuminates Lukas in a way that plot and public life cannot, showing him torn between his regretful past and changed present.

Written in hypnotic and densely layered prose, The Martyrs, The Lovers is an emotionally charged deconstruction of the layered character of Jutta Carroll. Just as Jutta is always using art, books, and historical figures to find comfort and reason, the novel attempts to strike the same resonant chords with readers. “Gandhi knew that the end was to be found in the means: there was no end, is no end, the means themselves are the end, the only end: the present, the ongoing present.” Like Gandhi, Gammon isn’t concerned with endings but with ideas, especially the ones that resonate now.

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Catherine Gammon is author of the novels China Blue, Isabel Out of the Rain, and Sorrow. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, and The Missouri Review, among many others, as well as online at The Blood Pudding, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Fractured Lit. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi. From 1992 through 2000, Catherine taught in the MFA writing program of the University of Pittsburgh, before leaving for residential Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center, where she was ordained a priest in 2005. She lives in Pittsburgh with her garden and her cat.

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Robert English is a writer who lives in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Under Review, Entertainment Weekly, and on WABC Sports Radio.