The Dark Room

Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert's Booker shortlisted novel is really three short stories loosely sharing a common landscape.

In the first story a young German, Helmut, grows up slightly quiet and serious and simple-minded as an only child in an ordinary German family. His parents are low key nazi supporters but beyond that we learn little about them. When the war comes Helmut, to his and his family's disappointment, is barred from serving in the army because of a slight disability and finds alternative employment and fulfilment in a photographic studio. Near the end of the war, as the German army fills up with the old, the very young and the unfit, Helmut is at last drafted and, we have to assume, destroyed in the battle for Berlin.

The second story moves us on a few weeks to a Germany transformed by defeat. A twelve year old German girl, Lore, sets out on a journey across Germany with her younger sisters and brothers, aiming to reach the safety of her grandmother's house in Hamburg. We learn that the children's mother and father have been imprisoned by the Americans. While Lore and her siblings do, indeed, heroically complete the journey there is little else in the story constituting a happy ending.

Rounding off the book is the most interesting story of all and it's set in the modern day. Unpicking the history of his family's SS past is Micha, schoolteacher, boyfriend to a thoroughly modern German girl and father to a thoroughly modern German daughter. A thoroughly happy, modern chap. Until the unpicking begins. Micha travels to Belarus to seek out the villages liquidated by his grandfather's SS division during the war. Micha's discoveries quickly drives a wedge between himself and his family, each side sickened by the other's behaviour. But while Micha's ruthless honesty and courage is to be admired it's also hard to see what purpose it serves when his quest proves so destructive. Even his girlfriend (whose Turkish roots render her a strict neutral in these matters) explodes that he's "sanctimonious and obsessed". But this third and final chapter does at least end on a more optimistic note.

It's really a novel about ordinary nazis. There are no Schindlers here. But neither are there are any monsters, at least none that are directly revealed to us. It's a superb, uncomfortable piece of writing, easily the best novel so far in what, for me, has been a very lean year of reading.