The Dark Room : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful beginning
Review: 'The Dark Room' is a beautiful debut. It is captivating, lucid and thought-provoking, without being remotely pretentious. It is a real pleasure to read, whilst at the same time raising disturbing yet fundamental questions regarding national and individual responsibility for World War II.

This is a collection of three fictional stories of young people's experiences of the War and its aftermath. The first two portray children who seem far too young and innocent to be responsible for war-time events, and yet who were/are forced to fight for their lives, for survival, whilst also trying to comprend the role of their parents, and those they love, in all the atrocities.

In the second tale, Lore progressively realises that love and innocence do not go hand in hand. She is ultimately obliged to link the imprisonment of her own parents to the guilt of the Nazis. Trust, love and understanding take on a whole new dimension for her, and for us as readers.

Micha, the protagonist of the final story, did not live through World War II. The luxury of a generation gap enables him to actively pursue his obsessive interest in his grand-father's past without pain, until he, like Lore, has to face the music. He has to understand that the grandpa he loved was not perfect. He could easily hate a stranger, but with those dear to us, that hatred and disgust is mixed so strongly with love that we are forced to reassess our emotions and our judgements of others.

This book is one more tribute to the open-mindedness of the German nation. From the outside, at least, the Germans seem to have tried their utmost to take responsibility for the evils they committed in World War II. They aimed to face mistakes and to learn from them. We have not all been so brave and so painfully honest, and the writing of Rachel Seiffert reflects what Germany has learnt in the most positive, yet deceptively simple, way we could hope for.

Rating:
Summary: top ten of past year
Review: ...The Dark Room concerns itself with events in Germany before, during and after the Second World War. There is Helmut (who reads like an echo of The Tin Drum's Oscar Matzerath), a boy born without a pectoral muscle who, as a result, cannot fight alongside his friends and neighbours in the war. Already quiet and withdrawn, Helmut withdraws from his family into the dark room where he works developing photographs of Berlin and surreptitiously noting the numbers of people leaving the city not to return. Lore comes next. She is a fourteen year old girl forced by circumstance (her parents are imprisoned by the Americans in the first days of defeat) to travel across country with her sister and three brothers, confronting death and national shame in the revelation of the Holocaust (they are American actors those people, yes, the people in the large graves covered in lime?). Micha figures last (and figuratively acts as Sieffert's retelling of Schlink's The Reader), attempting to understand the role played by his grandfather in the war (that perennial question, did you kill, did you kill, did you kill?).

All of which makes for a thoughtful and compelling read. Sieffert has a remarkable talent for saying something complex simply. Her sentences are short. The words she selects do their job better than you would ever expect simple words to do. Stray details (tree blossom, cloud, shoe leather, straw) conjure wider space. A world falls into place without you noticing.

And yet there is a problem with Rachel Sieffert's debut novel. The problem is this: this is not a novel. What you have here are two novellas and a short story. Two novellas and a short story that are connected by the fact that they are all set in Germany and revolve around events that took place during the Second World War. Because you read expecting a novel, you strain your eyes looking for what connects the characters within each section but, of course, nothing (other than historical context) connects these characters. Each tale is distinct. The Dark Room (like David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, another collection of pieces masquerading as a novel) is very, very, very good. But it is not a novel.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Truth Comes to Light
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A national portrait
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great insight into the other side of WW II
Review: The books describes the struggle of 3 generations of Germans to cope with the war.

Helmut is 18 when the war starts. All through the thirties his parents have led a life of near poverty, slowly climbing up the social staircase. Helmut really wants to join the army, but a crooked arm prevents him from participating. As an outsider he watches and takes pictures of the destruction and desolation that slowly but surely turns Berlin into a ghost city. He loses his parents and house during a bombing raid and lives for the rest of the time in the remains of the photoshop.

Lore is 12 when the war is over. Her mother tells her to take the other children, who are even younger, across Germany all the way from Bavaria to Hamburg. The story describes the hardnesses, the hunger, but also initial mistrust that slowly develops into a friendship with Thomas, a concentration camp survivor.

Micha is born long after the war. He is an English teacher, living together with a Turkish girlfriend, a typical new German. But then he start to wonder what his grandfather did during the war: he was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS stationed in Russia during the war. Micha cannot reconcile his loving feeling for his grandfather with the idea that his grandfather may be a war criminal. He travels to Belarus, where he talks at length with an old man, who has first-hand experience with the Germans during the war.

A beautiful book that does not judge, that shows the hardships of war and that also future generation can suffer from the aftermath. A must that was nominated for the Booker Prize and rightly so.

Rating:
Summary: The Truth Comes to Light
Review: These three novellas take a different approach from the usual in WW2 literature: they present the difficulties for the German people. I happened to think that the middle novella, Lore, was the strongest. Lore's parents have been captured by the Allies, and she is forced to take the children, including a baby, on a harrowing journey north to Hamburg. Her parents are Nazis (a fact that she seems too young to fully comprehend), and there is a growing realization of what happened during the war.

The novellas remind me of James Joyce's Dubliners in their presentation. Like in Joyce, the characters here come to a realization about life and their place in it, and like in Joyce, they're not happy about the nature of their lives.

This is not light reading: it's depressing and often disturbing. If you want a serious and philosophical work that requires some work, then this book is your next choice. It is not, however, summer beach reading. There aren't easy answers here, in fact, there aren't many answers ... just lingering questions.

Rating:
Summary: Memories of war - simply told
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Restrained and Subdued, but Sadly Uneven
Review: When I began THE DARK ROOM, I felt sure I was reading a five-star book. The first section "Helmut," was beautifully subdued, restrained and understated. In writing about a subject that could so easily drift into unbridled melodrama, Seiffert remained detached, yet somehow she managed to explore a huge range of emotions. Helmut's story was both beautifully and masterfully told.

Then came the second section, "Lore." This section began with all the beautiful restraint of the first and Lore was a fascinating character...at first. While I was initially engrossed in Lore's story, I thought it rambled; some of the individual events went on far too long. By the time Lore's story "finished," I found I almost didn't care anymore. To be fair, this section did contain some lovely imagery and Seiffert maintained her restraint and detachment, even in the face of several horrific happenings. Had she tightened the story and given it a bit more tension, I think it would have been almost as good as Helmut's.

The third section "Micha," also began intrigingly, but it didn't take many pages for me to realize that "Micha" was going to be the section I liked least. While "Micha" contained more story tension than did "Lore," the character of Micha, unlike Lore, was very annoying, childish and selfish. I couldn't feel anything even remotely akin to sympathy for him or empathy with him and I soon came to actively dislike him. One quote from Micha sums up his entire attitude toward everything: "Even when I cry about it, I'm crying for myself. Not for the people who were killed."

Everything Micha does is for and about...Micha. I found him to be a very unlikeable character.

Even had Micha been a sympathetic character, his story soon became far too repetitive. It was a case of "first he will, then he won't." Micha waffled more than any other character I can think of.

While I have to applaud the restraint present throughout Seiffert's writing, the short, choppy sentences, all in the present tense, eventually got on my nerves. I think this stylistic device would have been good in a short story or a novella, but for the longer form of the novel, it was irritating.

I loved Seiffert's premise: giving us a view of the Holocaust through the eyes of those who were pepetrators by association only. Perpetrators, who, with the exception of Micha, knew less about the Holocaust than most American children do. Helmut, a resident of Berlin, sees only what his camera sees; Lore is almost completely in the dark and Micha is two generations removed from the atrocities that may, or may not, have been committed by his grandfather.

I thought Helmut's story rated four stars; Lore's three and Micha's only two. That's nine stars for three stories, so, overall, I think the book rates three stars with me. If Seiffert ever writes an entire book that equals or exceeds the quality found in the section "Helmut," it will no doubt be a five star treat, indeed.