Sally-Ann Spencer
We have all seen the photos – the terrible photos of skeletal corpses, the frightening pictures of uniformed killers. In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert returns to the horror of the Third Reich to reveal these and other, less familiar images. Alongside photos of concentration camps, we see pictures of a kindly mother and a loving father. A honeymoon snapshot becomes mixed up with the evidence of mass shootings. We view the Nazis at home – living normally, and sometimes even suffering. The pictures Seiffert shows us are not of soldiers or monsters, but of ordinary men and women. They are homely shots that cannot comfort, but disturb. Seiffert is by no means the first writer to venture into this dark period, but in her debut novel she takes us deep into the mire.
In The Dark Room, pictures are taken, framed, buried, stolen, burnt, copied and sought for. The photos record personal history and document public shame. In the first of three interlocking stories, Helmut, a photographer’s apprentice, chronicles the everyday events of wartime Berlin. Prevented from fighting by his disabled shoulder, Helmut devotes himself to photographing the city. His shots of deportations emerge from the same dark room as the portrait photos framed by his parents each year. In his last photograph, Helmut stands triumphant, armed with a pitchfork to defend the collapsing Reich.
The second story picks up where Helmut’s ends. Hundreds of kilometres to the south, twelve-year old Lore is stranded with her siblings, as their Nazi parents are captured by victorious Allied forces. Lore has to find her way to Hamburg without the help and comfort of family photos – the pictures of her parents are as incriminating as the grainy posters of emaciated bodies now displayed in village squares. For Micha, the protagonist of the third and final story, such photographs are a vital source of information. A child of post-war Germany, Micha views his family’s Nazi past through photo albums and museum displays. Realizing his grandfather’s role in the SS, Micha struggles to reconcile his memories of Askan with the evidence of mass killing.
For Helmut, Lore and Micha, photographs tell a story of guilt and shame, but this novel takes care to expose the pictures that have were forgotten or destroyed. We see the images of the Berlin deportations, discarded by Helmut, as he reproaches himself for blurring the pictures. Helmut is fortunate: a fervent Nazi, he does not feel guilt at the sight of the deportations, but is troubled by the aesthetic inadequacy of his photos. For Lore, photographs are a liability – we watch as she buries the picture of her uniformed father. At the end of the war, photographs provide uncomfortable evidence of culpable allegiances and horrific crimes. Fifty years on, we follow Micha, as he tracks down the documents that will indict his grandfather, determined to restore the incriminating pictures to the record of his family’s past.
In The Dark Room, we see the missing scenes in ordinary German lives. Yet the pictures Seiffert shows us tell of pain as well as guilt. The blank pages in Micha’s family album conceal the evidence of murder, yet they also suppress a story of imprisonment. Seiffert reveals the pictures of mass killing, but she also tells of Askan’s years in a Russian camp, his subsequent alcoholism, the sudden rages. Her novel describes German and Nazi suffering, in the bombing of Berlin, the wartime deprivation, the defeat and occupation, and, above all, the sense of enduring guilt. As she retrieves the lost images, she reinserts the pictures of cruelty into the stories of apparently ordinary Germans, at the same time exposing moments of normality in the account of terrible crime. The images of evil are troublingly human. There is no black or white, but only the darkness of moral dislocation.
In The Dark Room, people are ‘both right and wrong, good and bad, both at the same time’. Helmut appears likeable in his status as an outsider, but it is his disability that prevents him from participation. Lore’s parents are high-ranking Nazis, yet are loved by their children. Askan is a doting grandfather, but responsible for countless deaths. The elderly man who befriends Micha is a collaborator and a killer. And Thomas, Lore’s benefactor, helps the children, but steals Jewish papers from a corpse. These actions are monstrous, yet their perpetrators are not monsters. Seiffert forces us to confront their humanity, but also their guilt. Whatever their qualities and however they suffer, they may not atone for their action. For such people ‘there is no punishment ( ) not enough sadness and no punishment’.
In nude and lucid prose, Seiffert describes the horror of the fathers, friends and brothers who committed murder. The narrative refrains from commentary, using bare description and language of a calm simplicity. The style is sparse, but each detail weighs heavy with emotion. We see the suffering in a deep crease of a photo and the anguish in the brightness of the light. The visual quality of Seiffert’s prose refuses the redeeming power of narrative, resistant to our urge to comprehend. The conflicting images of love, pain and crime do not ‘work through’ the stories of guilt, but capture the evidence of unspeakable human calamity. In The Dark Room, the return to the past brings no relief, for we are left to face the simple and terrible reality of ordinary people who chose to kill. As the collaborator, Josef explains: ‘Over and over again I can say these things. Nothing changes. I chose to kill.’