The Dark Room: World War 2 Fiction

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.