The bizarre rise and fall of the Third Reich remains one of the strangest and most terrifying chapters of 20th-century history. It is a story of collective grief and rage on the part of the victors as well as the victims. While most of the perpetrators are long since gone, successive generations of Germans have been left to explain, even apologise and deal with the legacy of a guilt that has less and less to do with their families and nothing to do with themselves.
Many novelists take the subject of the second World War, most frequently the horrors of the Holocaust, as the theme for fiction. Rachel Seiffert's committed and courageous dΘbut takes on this most profoundly difficult of tragedies and attempts to make sense of the angry shame. This is not an easy book, and perhaps not an entirely successful one, yet it is a fine and important novel. Above all, Seiffert - while seeking to answer impossible questions, explore confused emotions and wonder at the various ways in which individuals deal with the past - seldom loses sight of her characters.
At the heart of the book is a complex thesis, dealing with what exactly it means to be German in the context of an ambivalent recent history, and how a child or grandchild can deal with the actions of others. While Seiffert's handling of it is rather more na∩ve and less sophisticated than, for instance, Gⁿnter Grass, the dogged honesty of her urgent third-person, present-tense narrative convinces for most of the book
The Dark Room - the title itself proves a striking metaphor for memory - is a trio of stories all dealing with the several faces of Germany. This was a century dominated by the hell of a defeat that would, in time, lead a great European culture to a far greater abyss, that of a moral implosion engineered by opportunist Nazi leaders. Seiffert's understated approach is utterly serious and impressively dignified. She makes no political judgments. Many war novels develop into patchwork documentaries drawing on historical sources while characters are reduced to either romanticised mouthpieces or cardboard villains.
The novellas are as three acts. The first - and by far the shortest, little longer than a short story - deals with an ordinary couple in pre-war Germany. The young woman gives birth to a son. The boy is not quite perfect. A slight physical deformity determines his life and also that of his parents, who devote themselves to him. Helmut grows up surrounded by much love but little else. The family is poor; its world is small and impoverished. His mother's attention is directed at concealing her son's damaged physique and its impact on his performance in childhood games.
Of course there is a far darker aspect: he will not be able to partake in real games either, such as war. Years pass; time is marked by the annual family photograph. There is pathos without sentimentality; the tone is almost that of a fable. Subtle tenacity shapes Seiffert's depiction of Helmut's gradual retreat into an outsider's existence. This isolation is intensified following the bombing of the tenement where the family lived. From this point, his parents gone, Helmut is finally alone.
Such is the force of this opening piece with its curious inconclusive ending that Seiffert asserts herself with an assurance promising much. The next story certainly delivers. Lore is a young girl who, as the eldest child, assumes the responsibility of leading her younger sister and brothers, including a baby, to their grandmother in Hamburg. The children's time of relative safety at a farm in southern Germany has come to an end when their mother is about to be sent off to a camp. Their father, a Nazi officer, is already absent.
Not only is the plight of the children a compelling adventure in itself, there is also the added dimension of seeing a country at war. The reactions of the ordinary people are telling.
Seiffert is intent on giving some insight into the diversity of opinion that prevailed in Germany itself yet is often overlooked by the rest of the world when judging that country's history.
As with the opening narrative, the clear, simple prose possesses a determined quality. There is no fake heroism on offer. The terror and exhaustion experienced by the youngsters on the run in their own country, now a strange, frightening place, is dramatically achieved.
Story is the dynamic of the first two narratives, particularly the second. The atmosphere of a bombed country where once solid buildings and bridges have fallen overnight and everyone lives in fear, contrasts with the uneasy peace of the modern Germany portrayed in the final section. Anger, rage and confusion take over, as character and individual experience appear to become less important. All the difficulties of dealing with the legacy of the past and former crimes centre on Micha. He is a 30-year-old teacher whose life has been lived up until the late 1990s in the security of a family unit in which his Oma, or grandmother, has personified continuity of self.
This, however, is challenged when Micha becomes increasingly preoccupied with piecing together the role in the war of his now dead but still greatly loved grandfather. Opa had been an officer in the Waffen SS, on the Eastern Front.
Micha soon becomes overwhelmed by the impossible task of resolving events of a past he knows little about. His search for the truth takes him to present day Belarus. All the while, his investigations are predictably tearing his parents, sister and German-Turkish girlfriend apart. His dilemma begins to feed off an anger directed at his grandfather's past and what he views as his grandmother's complicity.
Attempting to define the guilt of others in order to resolve one's own sense of self is extremely difficult in life and fiction. Micha fails in this and, ultimately, as a character. Seiffert's handling of such complex issues is brave, if more worthy than convincing. At one stage Micha's father makes the point that war is war, but his son needs more.
The same could be said of Seiffert's daring ambitions to balance retrospectively the moral obligations of the individual within the wider terms of engagement of war.
Remarkably, it is almost a generation since Thomas Keneally's controversial faction-novel, Schindler's Ark, took the Booker Prize in 1982 for its treatment of one of the great outrages of the second World War. Seiffert's first novel, with its stronger emphasis on understanding the motivations of the individual through story, merits similar attention as a book of moral as well as artistic importance.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
