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The Dark Room
| Title | The Dark Room |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-08 12:18:22 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary 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.
Review
I've owned this book since either 2002 or 2003, and tried to read it twice, never managing to read more than about 15 pages. Something made me keep it, however - perhaps it was the haunting real life photo on the cover. Anyway, serendipity struck yesterday. I picked it up, started reading, was sucked in and read more than 200 pages in one sitting. I finished it this evening in about an hour. This is an extraordinary book, broken into three tales, all of ordinary Germans, the first two of which are set during or just after the war and the last of which is set in 1990s Germany. All three stories are about what it might have been like to live during that time, as a child, an adult and as a serving Waffen SS soldier.Seiffert's sparse prose initially seems artificial, exaggerated, but as I read on it became richer and deeper, searching out the emotions of shame, guilt, denial and anger, mostly on the part of innocent Germans who had nothing to do with the terrible things done by the Nazis. Ultimately, this is a moving and thoughtful novel. I hesitate to say that I enjoyed it: the subject matter makes that very hard. However, I certainly savoured the book, and I recommend it highly.
