Customer Reviews

The Dark Room: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are two sides to every story. the vast majority of Holocaust literature has dealt with the victim's story. With her debut, Seiffert provocatively describes the guilt, remorse, and confusion that must exist for the German side of the Holocaust.

While many of us view all Germans of the World War II era as Nazis active in the genocide of unwanted groups in Europe, Seiffert shows us that this is not the case. She writes three vignette novellas on the experience of an innocent uninvolved German ; the innocent children of a Nazi officer ; and a young German man who discovers the Nazi connections of a beloved grandfather.

But this book is more than historical fiction. It encourages introspection. How would I respond if I were suddenly confronted with the unsvory past of a loved one? Would I have the courage and strength to survive should life as I know it suddenly fall apart? What am I made of?

The three vignettes do not link at all, casting doubt on the book's billing as a "novel," but that matters little. Seiffert creates such sympathetic characters that the reader is drawn into their plights and struglles along with them. Her prose is wonderful and the book becomes difficlut to put down.

I expect future great novels from Seiffert. She is a terrific writer.

There have been many narratives which deal with the world's reaction to the atrocities caused by the Nazis, but few have dealt so directly with how Germans feel about inheriting the knowledge of these crimes. Does sharing a national identity with people who have committed such crimes make you a criminal as well? This is the issue that Rachel Seiffert follows with such tenacity in her incredible first novel. The question is beautifully threaded throughout the three narratives of Germans at different points in the century. The final narrative of Micha's digs the deepest into the problem. The three central characters are connected to the Nazi warfare and are trying to understand if their relation to it is something integrally related to themselves. What emerges is a well-rounded picture of the difficulty of living with the fact of this history and trying to peacefully make it a part of your identity.

Yet, this novel isn't a meditation only for Germans to deal with their own history. (After all, who doesn't belong to a nation that has committed governmentally enforced crimes against a group of people?) It makes an important statement about World War II but also one about the human condition and our relation to the past. The human relationships are tenderly drawn. All the characters are intensely selfish in their own way, but have encountered numerous difficulties in their lives which have moderated the way they relate to people. The book moves much more slowly at the end and becomes very meditative. At times this becomes more tedious than insightful. However, the final picture is a complicated portrait of national guilt wrapped with small examples of human kindness and forgiveness.

Ms. Seiffert's book, "The Dark Room", is notable as not only an auspicious debut for this young writer, but additionally for her remarkable talent in relating a feel for human events that took place decades before she was born. None of these three stories is based on Historical Fact, what she wrote she created. That the stories probably did occur in some manner, takes nothing away from the writing she offers readers.

The book contains three stories or novellas that are not dependent upon one another, and while not all carried the same impact, the three are consistently well written. The Author writes in an understated manner, this is not a series of stories that shock by atrocity alone. The book is replete with human suffering both inflicted and endured, but it is delivered with a subtle pen. Ms. Seiffert also has taken a less familiar perspective in this book. The book does have a camp survivor as a pivotal player in the final story, however generally we see the other victims of the crimes of this war. The events that forever damage these people are explored both as they happened and as they are uncovered generations later.

The final story is, "Micha", and I found it to be the strongest. Those who were affected by being present during the war and its aftermath generally struggle with grief or rage that is more familiar; they are the immediate victims of the conflict. The final story painfully demonstrates that certain conduct has ramifications that never subside, as they literally inhabit the generations that follow. Time does not in fact heal many things.

I look forward to more of what this woman will offer as she has a manner of writing that that slowly invades the mind's eye, and in this case encompasses it with its horror and crimes. It is a powerful method of delivering themes that are all fundamentally appalling, without any added emphasis. She presents her stories without flourish and without preaching. A very talented young Author.

Rachel Seiffert is a writer who was born in England but now lives in Germany. She should be congratulated for having the courage to tackle very difficult subject matter as she did in "The Dark Room," i.e., telling the story of the Holocaust, not through the eyes of its surviving victims, but through the eyes of the murderers instead.

Although the protagonists (there are three) in Seiffert's book aren't actually murderers per se, they have become murderers by association; their implicit acceptance of Nazi Germany's crimes against the Jews has condemned them. There is Helmut, who is a Berlin teenager at the start of the war; Lore, a young girl who becomes yet another displaced person at the war's end; and Micha, perhaps the most interesting character, who is actually a member of the next generation. Micha is only thirty years old in 1997 when he begins to question his own ancestry and the history of his family.

I like the way Seiffert tells the stories of her three protagonists. Her prose is terse, quite muted and written entirely in the present tense. We are given only information the protagonists themselves know and understand and they come to know and understand themselves and their situations very slowly and very deliberately.

It is fitting that none of the characters in the three stories that make up "The Dark Room" fully understands the situation that surrounds him or her. Helmut, the protagonist of the first story, becomes a photographer's assistant when a birth defect keeps him out of the army. In his photographs of Berlin he notices that people keep disappearing, but it is quite some time before he understands why.

The book's second protagonist, Lore, may be the character least likely to comprehend the horrific events going on around her. She is only a teenage girl, yet she must take care of her siblings on a journey from Bavaria to Hamburg. It takes both Lore and the reader time before they understand why Lore must get rid of "the badges" and just exactly what those badges really are. Lore's story is a story filled with deception and ambiguity and we really don't comprehend all of the deception until the story's end.

Micha's story is the most tangled, perhaps because he is the protagonist furthest removed from the happenings during the war. Micha is a young German school teacher who is struggling to come to terms with his ancestry and his school's activities commemorating the Holocaust.

All three of the stories that make up "The Dark Room" represent a different, but very good look at the Holocaust and help us to understand the feelings of those involved, albeit indirectly. Germany is indeed a "dark room," but it is a room in which the truth must eventually come to light.

Three stories about the effects of the holocaust on three German (non-Jewish) families: The first two are from the point of view of children and young people who are witness to war and brutality, not entirely cognizant of their meaning, who endure their own suffering, albeit never suggested by the author to be the equivalent of what the Nazis inflicted. The first is about a handicapped young photographer, who stumbles with his camera on violent scenes and mass exoduses at a train station and who also survives the Berlin bombing. The second story is about a family of five children, left to make their hazardous way across Germany at the end of the war through four occupation zones until they can reach their grandmother in Hamburg. The third and longest story, which encompasses almost the entire second half of the book, takes a different approach with a probing theme. This story takes place in the present day and the narrator, Micha, is an adult who is trying to find out if his grandfather killed Jews when he was an SS officer in the Ukraine during the war. Although the writing, particularly the dialogue in this story, is a little awkward at times and the speakers hard to keep straight, overall it succeeds with its message. Most questions and thoughts that might go through anyone's mind are examined here. Without giving away what happens, I think it would be safe to say, that Micha finds out that there can never be a satisfactory answer to why evil takes place. I highly recommend the vision of this book and the treatment of a volatile subject in a subtle, emotionally complex, and sensitive manner with a different viewpoint.

Seiffert's three novellas are bound together not by characters or plot or even theme. Together they paint a picture of a Germany most of us do not know. Unlike Goldhagen's work examining the culpability of ordinary Germans during World War II, Seiffert focuses on the truly innocent: children. Her stories cover the last half of the 20th century, the first one set during the war, the second one in the immediate aftermath of the war, the final story taking place near the end of the century. What the stories share is a focus on those who were truly ignorant of the monstrosities perpetrated by the Nazis. In the first story, Helmut never does learn what his country has been doing. Left behind because of a birth defect while other young men join the military, Helmut becomes an amateur historian of the famous on-time German trains and a gradually more accomplished photographer. While his photographs begin to record life in Berlin at the end of a lost war, in a symbolic sense, Helmut never leaves the dark room in which he develops those photos and never comes to any awareness of what has happened. We can only imagine what his awakening after the war will do to him.

In the second novella, Lore, the eldest daughter of Nazi parents, leads her younger siblings on a harrowing journey across post-War Germany to her grandmother's and eventually to the awful awakening that Helmut never experiences. Both of these first two stories are well told, and, as so many other reviewers have said, it is Seiffert's subtlety and restraint that make them effective. However, both seem familiar. Helmut's tale is reminiscent of Grass's "The Tin Drum" and Lore's story echoes so many other similar tales of dangerous journeys through a war-torn Europe. In actuality, Lore's journey is not particularly dangerous. This is not a tale of a Jewish family desperately seeking to avoid those who would exterminate them; the youngsters are resilient, but have comparatively little trouble finding the assistance they need to reach safe haven. The story takes a long time to develop to a powerful conclusion when Lore finally learns the awful truth about her country.

And then there is the final novella--the story of Micha. And it is in this final tale that Seiffert has written a work worth remembering and rereading. Micha is the grandson of a beloved, now departed Waffen SS soldier, a grandson who finds he must learn more about what his grandfather did during the war. Late in the book, Micha speaks to an old Russian man who confesses to having participated in the genocide. The old man says he does not feel sorry and does not feel he has been punished. He is trying to articulate the ineffable: how can someone who participated in such events ever feel truly human again? More problematic is how can someone, like Micha, who loved a man who might have been a murderer, learn to deal with that awful truth? In Micha's plight, we can see the damage done by the German genocide even two generations later. As others have pointed out, Micha is not easy to like or care about, and his difficult situation doesn't rival that of Jewish descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors. But trapped as he is in the dark room of post-Holocaust Germany, Micha represents an entire people who must somehow learn to deal with the awful legacy bequeathed them not just by monsters like Hitler and Himmler, but by beloved Omas and Opas. This third novella is shattering to read and is connected to the earlier two as a capstone. In all honesty, however, it isn't necessary to read the first two novellas to fully appreciate the art and the power of the third one. Micha's story is a complex and powerful accomplishment of great note.

In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert writes a moving novel about three Germans who feel the pain of the war at different times. One is about a young boy named Helmut, a photogapher's assistant during the 1930s. He cannot grasp the meaning of the events he sees in his pictures and only understands his photography. In another tale, Lore, a girl whose father and mother are captured by the Germans, is forced to make a quick transition to adulthood. She must take her 4 siblings illegaly to her Oma(grandmother). Along the way they must endure many harships, and meet a friend to help them through. The final tale is about a man named Micha who lives many years after the war. He tries to find out why his Opa(grandfather) was imprisoned for nine years by the Russians. He goes on a journey, making his family and loved ones angry in the process. He is still affected by the war, a time in which he never lived, many years later. My words cannot display the power of this book and if you read it, you will understand. I recommend that you read this superb novel that will show you the side of the war which is seldom seen.

War. How does it affect our lives? How much damage does it do to the human soul? And, can this damage be ever repaired? Rachel Seiffert's debut novel, The Dark Room, deals with these issues about Nazi Germany, curiously, from a German point of view. Curiously, because most of us are so used to reading, seeing and accepting British and American points of view to World War II that we often overlook the other side of the story - the pains of the German people in Nazi Germany, and thereafter. And curiously, because The Dark Room doesn't give the usual soldier's point of view, nor a political one, but describes the lives and trials of ordinary people like you and me.

The Dark Room tells three stories. The first is about Helmut who grew up with a physical deformity, keeping him away from an active life and the war. He champions this by chronicling the advent of the war - and the war itself - through numbers and photographs, only to be left hollow and abandoned when the Allies strike Berlin. The second story is about an adolescent girl, Lore, who has to take on the responsibility of her younger brothers and sister when her parents are arrested by the Allied army. She journeys across Germany with the younger children in search of her grandmother in Hamburg, picking up a friend and losing a brother on the way. A responsibility she accomplishes like an adult, but one that leaves a scar in her life forever. The third story is about a schoolteacher, Micha, in present-day Germany, who is obsessed with his grandfather's Nazi past. Micha is unable to absolve himself from guilt for his grandfather's suspected crimes during the war, and he pursues his search for truth, at the cost of unhappiness in others, till it exorcises him in the end.

The Dark Room is about the effects of war - even after reconstruction. It's about relationships and responsibilities. It's about personal grief, challenges and new beginnings. And, who wouldn't want to read about that!

Perhaps this book is mismarketed as a novel. Yet, this book--really three novellas loosely connected by the events of WWII--is one of the best I've read in a long, long time. The characters are compelling (especially Lore in the second section), the plots are trustworthy without being predictable (even though we think we know the story of WWII), and the language is rich throughout (especially in the first two sections). I continue to remember the three stories, each revealing a different truth and legacy for us as readers who look back fifty-plus years to understand WWII. One need not be interested in history, however, to appreciate this amazing literary debut. The paperback edition appears in October, and I'll be purchasing copies for holiday gifts.

When a friend recommended this book to me she said it was a page-turner but not enjoyable. I must say I found this to be an accurate assessment of a beautifully written but ultimately disturbing book about Nazi Germany. It has a deceptively simple style and its starkness is wholly appropriate to the subject material. The book is in three distinct parts. The middle section is a harrowing read which I found profoundly moving. The vivid images haunted me long after I had finished this book and I commend it to anyone interested in the ravages of war from `the other side'. Pain, degradation, misery, shame, outrage, cruelty, courage - all these are universal. And universal is the endurance of the human spirit with its capacity for transcending all adversity.