The Dark Room - Softcover

Seiffert, Rachel

3.72

2,934 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676974074 ISBN 13: 9780676974072

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2002

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"The Dark Room" tells three stories that between them trace the legacy of the Nazi period on the lives of ordinary Germans. Helmut is a young photographer in Berlin in the 30's, who lives with a withered arm in a Nazi state that has little tolerance of the less than physically perfect. Finally called up in the closing months of the war, Helmut eventually has the chance to show his patriotic fervour. Lore is twelve as the war comes to an end. As both her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies, Lore crosses Germany, shepherding her three young siblings to eventual safety at the home of her grandmother. Half a century later, Micha, a young schoolteacher, becomes obsesses with the war record of his much loved, and now dead, grandfather, who was in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front during the war. He eventually travels to Byelorussia, in his grandfather's footsteps, but returns with more questions and fewer answers, as he struggles to love his grandparents and deal with his country in the shadow of their pasts.

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From the Inside Flap:

Rachel Seiffert?s absorbing, internationally acclaimed debut explores the modern German psyche through the experiences of three ordinary people.

At the onset of World War II, a young photographer?s assistant is kept out of the war due to a physical disability, and instead spends his time capturing on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. Just weeks after Germany?s surrender, a teenage girl whose parents have been taken into allied custody leads her siblings on a harrowing journey to find their grandmother. And two generations after the war, a teacher searches for the reason why the Russians imprisoned his beloved grandfather. Evoking the experiences of the individual with astonishing emotional depth and psychological acuity, The Dark Room develops a portrait of the twentieth century in all its drama and complexity.

From the Back Cover:

“A novel about the German soul in the twentieth century, this debut work stuns with its simplicity of style and hugeness of subject.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Ambitious and powerful. . . . Seiffert writes lean, clean prose. Deftly, she hangs large ideas on the vivid private experiences of her principal characters [to] form an allegory of the German soul in its passage over eighty years.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] probing novel. . . . Seiffert gives us pictures as evocative as they are ghostly....” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Lyrical . . . explores the experience of ‘ordinary’ Germans–the descendents of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers–and poses questions about the country’s psychological and political inheritance with rare insight and humanity.” --The New Yorker

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