The Dark Room

The Dark Room
by Rachel Seiffert
Reviewed by Claudine

Found it really good in the way it dealt with the Holocaust from the German perspective. Definitely not a 'tra la la' book, with some really heavy impacting scenes, but very readable, with no lengthy paragraphs and mostly written in conversational style, which certainly brings out the emotions in the characters as they struggle to deal with the War, or the past.

My favourite story is about Lore. It was really painful to read about her struggle to bring her younger brothers and sister, across the country to Hamburg to look for their Oma (grandmother) after her parents were captured by the Allies and may perhaps never see them again.

The part below was taken from the book jacket.

The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert
(Winner of the Booker Prize 2001)

Each of us is an individual; each of us has an individual responsibility for our own actions. Each of us is also a member of the family, of families;each of us is a citizen of a state, member of a nation. Can we, must we, take responsibility for them, for their actions too ?

Perhaps in no other country in twentieth century Europe have such questions has as much resonance as they had in Germany. What has it meant to be German in the twentieth century ? What has it meant to be the child of German parents, the daughter of members of the Nazi party, the grandson of a grandfather who was in the Waffen SS, the father of a German child ?

The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary twentieth century 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 Germany after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies; and half a century later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.