Product Description

The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; Lore, a twelve-year-old girl who in 1945 guides her young siblings across a devastated Germany after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies; and, fifty years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54491 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Dark Room is a careful study of three Germans affected by the Second World War: Helmut the young photographer with the deformed arm; Lore the 12-year-old who manages to get her refugee siblings to Hamburg in 1945; and Micha the young teacher who pursues the truth about his grandfather's war years 50 years later. Micha is the most instructive in getting to the core of this book:

I think they should read about the people who did it, too. The real, everyday people, you know. Not just Hitler and Eichmann and whoever. All the underlings, I mean. The students should learn about their lives, the ones who really did the killing.

Seiffert writes about the "real, everyday people", about the ones who didn't actually "do it". She writes chronologically, from Helmut's birth in 1921 to Micha living in Germany in 1997, and widens the time-frame with each story.

Helmut is unable to join up because of his weak arm--his parents become ashamed of him in Nazi Germany. Yet by taking part in the last-ditch stand against the Russian invasion of Berlin in 1945 he is at last happy. His story, represented through his tiny photographer's lens, is indicative of his own narrow vision. Seiffert widens her view with Lore, and her encounter with Thomas, a young man who has blue-smudged numbers up his arm and (false) documents saying he is Jewish. As a well-off 12-year-old, whose father was in the Nazi Party, Lore too is at first oblivious to the effects of the war on others. She tries to believe that the pictures the Allies pin up of the Jews in the camps--whether alive or dead--are American actors. Micha's story, raking over the past and with the advantage of hindsight, well-documented history and the public German admission of guilt, feels the most raw and truthful. Seiffert writes delicately and plainly, making clear that it is not just the Jewish or Nazi experience of the Second World War which is valid, but that a whole country was involved, and is still affected by it. The Dark Room reminds us again that every person's experience is unique, and every person's heritage (whether German, Byelorussian, American or Jewish, Christian or atheist) will always be unique to them. --Olivia Dickinson

About the Author
The daughter of a German mother and an Australian father, Rachel Seiffert has spent most of her life in Oxford and Glasgow. She now lives in Berlin.

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Customer Reviews

Beautiful debut
'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.

More deserving of hype than "the Reader"
I approached this book warily: I was very disappointed by Bernhard Schlink's much-hyped The Reader, which I found too cold and oblique to make any sort of impact. Also, I did wonder if this subject matter had to some extent been exhausted by others.
The experience of my own (German) mother was similar to that of the girl Lore in the second section (although her father wasn't a Nazi..) and I found it extremely moving. With the lightest of touches - appropriate to the import of the material - this section has a real cumulative punch. I found this section and the third full of characters and situations that I recognised with chilling resonance .. the bleak, terse descriptions of post-reconstruction Germany are very telling.
I don't see the relevance of the "is it a novel?" debate, but I am glad it made the Booker shortlist or I probably wouldn't have read it. I still think David Mitchell should have won though!

How war touches 'little' people
...I don't think that the atrocities of war are absent at all in this book - as far as I see it the whole point of these three stories is to show how the war touched the lives of so many 'little' people. Seiffert may not have decribed the fighting and killing in great detail, but surely that is not the point of her novel. Helmut's life (the first story) is tragically affected by the war, but at the same time the events in Berlin give him a purpose as he gains an interest in photography. We see the war through his eyes - the Berliners deserting their capital, the feelings of guilt that he has because he isn't fighting at the front, his growing interest in photographing people. It may sound naive in places, but Helmut strikes me as being a bit of a simple lad, and indeed, the whole point is that this is the war as seen by him. Indeed, the war gives him an identity - he changes from a deformed boy to a strong man with his own career and skills, no longer mollycoddled by his parents.

Just to emphasise, in the second story, I think the point is that the war is conveyed through the children's eyes; this may therefore be construed as a naive view, but this is deliberate. They don't understand what is really happening, or why their father is in prison, or their mother has deserted them, but they know things are bad and they really do suffer. Seiffert's skill is to show their suffering on a small scale. This is how the war affected one family, in particular one girl, it happens over a short period of time - it's not meant to be a potted history of the Second World War.

In the third story Michael is struggling to come to terms with his grandfather's role as an SS officer in Belaruse. There are graphic descriptions of people being shot and killed, and this is enough to evoke the sense of violence, horror and war, but again on a different level.

I think that Seiffert's understanding of the effect of war on the lives of ordinary people is very profound, touching and emotional. This is powerful stuff. She uses some very moving imagery, and although she might not discuss things in a broader sense, and the tone is quite desensitised, this is not the point of the novel, and what she does achieve is a moving portrait of 'smaller' lives and events which are touched by the horror of war.

I highly recommend this book and commend Rachel Seiffert on her achievement.