Featured Reading Guide
Rachel Seiffert
The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary 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 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.
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The daughter of a German mother and an Australian father, Rachel Seiffert has spent most of her life in Oxford and Glasgow. She now lives in Berlin.
topAbout the Book
The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary 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 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.
topRachel Seiffert interview/review
Sunday Herald Magazine by Aaron Hicklin
It’s hard now to imagine a time when books about the Holocaust were hard to come by. Remarkably, however, a book still comes along that sheds new thought on a subject that would otherwise seem exhausted.
It is not, she insists, autobiographical, but it might be fair to say that many of the characters, the questions they ask, their mute, puzzled, dumb responses to the enormity of the crime, are secrets of the author.
“There was no conscious decision to write out the German experience of finding out about the Holocaust, but I think that because I’m half-German – like if you’re Jewish – you can’t get away from the subject, and it’s kind of been there through my life,” she says.
Though she writes from the perspective of Germans, Seiffert makes no apologies on their behalf. The central characters in the first two tales are young, and might be forgiven their naiveté, but she makes it clear that people have the power to chose between good and evil, and that many Germans in that intoxicated era chose evil. “I don’t think everybody knew, and there was a lot of wilful delusion, “she says.
“But I don’t think you can murder six million people and there be no evidence of that. It takes a lot of people to kill six million Jews, which means there were a lot of people directly involved.”
This, then, might be described as the German problem: can the oppressors talk legitimately of their own oppression?
topStarting Points for Discussion
- What does Seiffert imply about the relationship of the individual to the atrocities? Do Helmut, Lore and Micha’s responses to their situations differ according to their proximity to the events?
- “I am a camera. I see the world from one particular standpoint, and my interpretation of events is based on that view.” To what extent can this metaphor be used to describe the novel?
- The Dark Room has been described by The Guardian as ‘cold and devoid of emotional involvement’. Do you agree? Do the three-part structure and the prose style of the novel add or detract from the emotional pull of the story?
- “The novel ends on a note of optimism. The truth has been confronted and, with the birth of a child, Seiffert holds out the hope that the shadows of the past may be about to lift” Sunday Telegraph Do you see this book as a redemptive novel?
- How does Seiffert’s investigation of the most difficult moral issues of the past century – the legacy of atrocity – challenge our prejudices and preconceptions about the Nazi era?
- Each of us is an individual; each of us has individual responsibility for our own actions. Each of us is also a member of a family, of families; each of us is a citizen of a state, a member of a nation. Can we, must we, take responsibility for them, for their actions too?
Other Books by Rachel Seiffert
Afterwards
To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph…
Field Study
From the author of The Dark Room comes a strikingly powerful collection of …
The Dark Room
The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young …
Suggested Further Reading
- American Pastoral ~ Philip Roth
- The Reader ~ Bernard Schlink
- Berlin Diaries ~ Christopher Isherwood
- Fugitive Pieces ~ Anne Michaels
- Charlotte Gray ~ Sebastian Faulks
- The Distant Land of My Father ~ Bo Caldwell