The Dark Room

HELMUT
The first story in The Dark Room takes place between 1921 (the main character’s year of birth)
and 1945, but is especially focused on wartime Berlin. The protagonist of “Helmut” stands for
those in the first generation of Germans who staunchly defended and fought for the Nazi
ideology until the very end of the war. Helmut’s connection to perpetration lies in his loyal
support of the Führer and the practices of the German military. His parents join the Nazi Party
but, as Helmut was born with a birth defect in his arm, he cannot enroll in the army, which
deeply disappoints him and embarrasses his father. This disability makes him “unfit”, as he is
well below the standards of Aryan perfection and close to some of the targets of Hitler’s regime.
His Hitlerian fanaticism, then, only enhances his blindness. It is this fanaticism that makes his
non-severe disability traumatizing: it renders him unable both to serve his homeland and please
his parents, a fact he tries to cope with by taking photographs of wartime Berlin after he starts
working for the photographer Gladigau. However, his failure to understand and judge what is
taking place suggests that his obsession with photo quality and with becoming really successful
at something is, firstly, a compensation mechanism to fit within German society and please
other people (his neighbors, the school, his parents, Gladigau…), and, secondly, a screen that
hides a trauma ultimately caused by an ideology that makes him feel “unworthy”. Helmut’s
patriotism is born not out of conviction, but as a desire to affirm an identity he cannot fully
claim.
The fact that Seiffert makes Helmut a photographer is relevant in many respects, since pictures
are a symbol for his mind: neither pictures nor Helmut are able to explain reality in a truthful
manner. The photographs he takes resemble Helmut’s incompetent interpretation of the
worsening political situation in a nearly defeated Germany. Photographs in this story are shown
to be unreliable sources of information about reality: the yearly family portraits that Gladigau
takes always hide Helmut’s crooked arm, and the documentary photographs that Helmut takes
of the city are often out of focus or superficial, masking and trivializing the real horrors of the
war. That pictures are misleading is precisely that photographs stand for “an imaginary
possession of a past that is unreal”, which turns paradoxical the view that photography
constitutes “an art easily associated with realism”. Even if photographs contextualize personal
narratives and link them with history, they are untruthful images, as illusory and defective as
Helmut’s attempt to cover his trauma. The fact that his efforts are selfdeceptive throws light on
his fragmented personality, which traps him in ruined Berlin.
In addition, Seiffert denies Helmut a voice, in contrast to the other two stories where main
characters express themselves by means of dialogue or inner thought. The reader must rely on
the external narrator in order to know Helmut, which distances him/her from a character who is
never seen as rationally or ethically questioning his world. This “derealization” that evidences
“the author’s manipulations” in style was probably a conscious choice on the writer’s part. It
points to the confusion and inability to cope with such a disturbing reality in those difficult
times −especially when it comes to the experience of a youth who knows no other political
system than the Nazi regime– while simultaneously leaving to the reader the task of interpreting
and passing judgment not only on the character, but also on what he fails to see.
Eventually, Helmut achieves his goal at the age of 24, just before Berlin is invaded and the war
is about to end: as no other men are available, he is finally admitted into military service
together with other cripples and cast-offs. Even if “the vast Soviet army and the Mongol
hordes” approach, Helmut is “confident of victory” and determined “to remember it all, the best
time of his life” (Seiffert 60). Unsurprisingly, he immortalizes this moment by taking a group
photo which captures an image of him “doing something which he never did in any of the other
pictures lovingly printed by Gladigau” in the past: smile (63). And yet, this smile is but a
measure of his ignorance. It is in the following story that ignorance starts changing into
something else, as will be explained next.

- Characters:
Mutti (mother)
Papi (father)
Gladigau (employeer)

LORE
“Lore” −the second story in the book− starts when “Helmut” ends, in early 1945, just after the
war is over. Lore is a twelve-year-old girl who finds herself charged with the responsibility of
taking her four younger siblings from her family home in Bavaria
to her grandmother’s in Hamburg. As children of Party members, they are left alone after the
disappearance of their Waffen SS father and the arrest and consequent
imprisonment of their mother by the Allied forces. At one point during their hazardous
journey, marked by hunger and misery, they are joined by Thomas, who claims to be a
survivor of the Buchenwald camp. His real identity remains unclear, but his probable
(though never confirmed) Jewishness accentuates Lore’s confusion, as the children’s
well-being very much depends, from that moment, on someone she has been taught to regard as
infrahuman and dangerous.
In contrast to Helmut, who shows no psychical evolution or guilt for Nazi crimes, Lore goes
through different stages: from a blind faith in Nazism (like Helmut’s) to an increasing
awareness of the horrors of the war and a critical and emotional reaction to what she sees and
learns. In fact, she realizes that all she was led to believe
during the war years is nothing but a fallacy and thus hides in silence: she makes sure her
siblings do not tell anyone about their parents and refuses to answer many of their questions in
order to avoid existential inquiry. Lore is more prone to inner reflection than to verbalization –a
protective wall she builds in order to (unsuccessfully) cope with a traumatic experience– and
this silence is in the end replicated by her siblings. Thus, after going through the death of her
brother Jochen and the disappearance of Thomas, “Lore doesn’t speak about Jochen, or
Thomas, and neither do Liesel or Jüri” (Seiffert 200).
Photography is still central in this novella, but now it plays a different role. “Helmut” is
concerned with the photographer’s moral gaze, questioned by the protagonist’s detachment
from the significance of the viewfinder’s target. In “Lore”, the concern is rather with the
photography’s effect on the audience, as the story’s protagonist reacts to (and judges)
incriminatory photographs. The Nazis flattered themselves that they made visual recordings of
their crimes as a way to immortalize the moment and assert their superiority. There is a
stablished parallelism between the camera and “the weapon” –after all, both of them shoot in
comparable ways. Therefore Helmut, as a Nazi-minded photographer coldly capturing the
horrors of the war, can be seen as guilty and responsible in this sense, since “the camera is in the
exact same position as the gun and the photographer in the place of the executioner who
remains unseen”.
In the case of Lore, the act of looking at pictures of the atrocities committed by the perpetrators
disturbs her, above all, because she is one of them, they are her people, even her family. What is
relevant here is that “the viewer is positioned in the place identical with the weapon of
destruction”, which accounts for Lore feeling like an accomplice, guilty by association.
Lore’s encounter with incriminating images gradually makes her feel the burden of guilt that
she will have to bear upon her shoulders: her mother had asked her to burn
or bury every compromising picture in their family album; looking at newspaper photographs,
she notices that men accused of criminal practices wear the same uniform as her father; and the
Allies’ poster campaigns, aimed at showing to all Germans the extermination carried out in
concentration camps, definitely help her open her eyes because “the pictures are of skeletons,
Lore can see that now” (Seiffert 103). Photographs like these –of corpses or emaciated camp
inmates– were in fact taken by the Allies in real life and publicly exhibited in cities and villages
as part of a campaign aimed at implanting collective guilt in Germany. In any case, the citizens’
response to them in the story is either secrecy –as when Lore is told to stop looking at them and
go away, for “there is nothing here for you to see” (104) − or denial –Lore hears a boy saying
that “the people in those photos are actors” (175).
Lore’s initial confusion as to what these pictures mean makes her face an existential crisis, since
she loses her sense of identity. Her progress can be related to Pascale Tollance’s argument about
the contradictory role of photography: while photography “seeks closure and an escape from
emotions”, it also “exposes the viewer or reader to fragmentation, uncertainty, and lets emotions
loose”, which means that it can lead to “emotional paralysis” but also to a gradual departure
from it (289), as is the case with Lore’s evolution.
In a world of destruction, suspicion, lies, and death, Lore’s traumatic experience consists in
opening her eyes to both the history of her people and her own family history. Leaving behind
her initial bewilderment and emotional numbness, Lore understands, and suffering comes with
that understanding. She eventually finds her grandmother but, far from providing answers, she
keeps silent about Lore’s parents and German crimes.
The story ends some time after that, with Lore crying alone, her eyes “streaming bitter
tears” (Seiffert 217). The knowledge she has so painfully acquired is coupled with her wish to
forget, to repress what she knows. In the last story, the protagonist will do the
opposite: trying to find out the truth, determined to unbury a silenced past, even if it
hurts.

MICHA
Set in the late 1990s, the third and last section of The Dark Room moves the action forward in
time. This novella deals with the third generation of Germans (the one
Seiffert belongs to) and the way in which they try to negotiate the past of their country and,
sometimes, their family past –for some time buried in silence as “Lore” shows. In
this sense, “Micha” provides a portrait of the transgenerational haunting of a silenced
past and throws light on the work of post-memory as affecting perpetrators’ descendants.
Micha is a thirty-year-old teacher of English who is eager to break the silence
advocated by his family and find out the truth about his grandfather, who died when he was
only a child and whom he suspects of taking part in Nazi crimes. During one of his visits to his
grandmother, she tells him that his grandfather Askan did not return home until 1954 because he
was Waffen SS and was imprisoned by the Russians after the war. Micha learns then about his
Opa’s being a member of the SS elite military force, but when he tries to find out more, he is
discouraged by the silence and repression of his relatives. The two preceding generations of his
family choose to remember Askan as a good husband and father, and reject to ponder on his
involvement with Nazism. This opens a breach between them and Micha: he distances himself
from his parents, stops visiting his grandmother, and frequently engages in strong arguments
with his sister and with his pregnant girlfriend, Mina. “Micha” is the story of the protagonist’s
obsession with dismantling the family myth, best represented in the story by the photo album
that Micha’s grandmother treasures and where all pictures are happy.
Again, photography is a key motif, but now it works as a link not only between family and
national histories, but also between the past and the present in a way that highlights the gaps in
the middle, information gaps, gaps in the photo album, etc. Micha starts his quest by looking for
his grandfather in visual archives on the Holocaust. However, these disturbing images do not
help since, as happens with the photographs in the family album, they conceal as much as they
reveal: photographs acknowledge and evidence a real past while they simultaneously give us
only a partial, and thus perhaps a misleading, knowledge about that past. For Micha, this could
mean that, just as some pictures and videos conceal what Hitler was, his photos of his
grandfather may conceal that he was a murderer. Micha fails in his attempt to spot his Opa in
book illustrations and video recordings, but he manages to establish a connection between a film
clip of Hitler and the photographs of his grandfather. Surrounded by kids at his mountain home,
the Führer appears as a loving uncle “who doesn’t look at the camera, only at the child”
(Seiffert 259). Askan’s eyes similarly keep staring at his grandson, avoiding the camera in the
photographs Micha keeps. This coincidence strikes and upsets Micha in a way that recalls
Roland Barthes’
notion of the photograph’s punctum, Barthes defines punctum as a specific detail in a picture
that becomes the viewer’s sudden focus of interest, and with it comes “a puncture”, a click
which abruptly “overwhelms the entirety of my reading”, thus changing the viewer’s
interpretation and reaction to the image on the basis of the subjective meaning given to one
particular item or element in it. Thus, what could be an insignificant detail –the filmed or
photographed person’s averting his gaze from the camera– becomes a punctum for Micha, who
reads it as an index of guilt which changes the way he sees Askan. The loving memories of his
grandfather are tainted by the fact that, on his mind, “sometimes he’s a Nazi now” and this
makes him feel “guilt by association”.
Micha’s quest lasts a year and a half, approximately. He travels to a village in
Belarus more than once, as this was the place where his grandfather spent the last part of the
war. There, Micha seeks for someone who can recognize Askan in a photo and at last meets
Jozef Kolesnik and his wife Elena. The first journey is of no avail because of the characters’
omissions and negations: Micha hides his real reasons for being there and Jozef hides the fact
that he was a Nazi collaborator. The second trip proves more successful as they tell the truth,
but their conversations convey the difficulty to deal with guilt, shame, responsibility and the
fear of being blamed or misunderstood. Jozef’s narrative is significantly fragmented because of
the nature of what he tells, and because he speaks in German with Micha, which is not his
mother tongue. The German language’s relation to the past cannot be underestimated: German
is the language of traumatic memory. Jozef does not soften the account of his
collaborationism and does not regret what he did: as “I was hungry” and “orders were
orders”, “I chose to kill” (Seiffert 345). Unlike him, his wife Elena is an ambiguous
character because she stands both for the victims –she had to hide from the Germans, the
partisans, and the Russians in order to survive− and the victimizers −her brother and husband
were collaborators and she has been ostracized for that all her life. She cannot speak German, so
she is rendered unable to talk with Micha and remains silent all through the narrative. Elena
illustrates the way in which
silence and muteness figure prominently in Holocaust narratives, as related to both
traumatized survivors and perpetrators.
The more Micha finds out about his grandfather, the more he needs to distance
himself from perpetration, which accounts for his refusal to pose with Jozef and Elena in the
pictures he takes of them. Significantly, and as Micha notices, Jozef does not look at the camera
when a picture is taken. This reinforces his theory that perpetrators avert their gazes, and thus he
regards his grandfather’s guilt as more and more likely. When Micha finally shows Jozef a
picture of Askan, he remembers him, but not as one of the men who refused to shoot people.
This was Micha’s only hope, that his grandfather was among the very few who refused to kill.
In the end, Micha’s attitude evolves from an obsessive wish to detach himself
from perversion to resignation and acceptance of both his present and his family past.
This evolution illustrates what Berberich calls “coming to terms with the past”, which
she defines as a process that does not imply “closure” but an acknowledgement of (and
reconciliation with) “both sides of the coin”: perpetrator and victim. It is in this
light that one can interpret Micha’s final visit to Elena in Belarus after he learns about
Jozef’s death, and also his decision to resume his visits to his grandmother, interrupted on
account of his discoveries. Eventually, Micha realizes that the past cannot be changed and that it
cannot be fully known, either. Neither anger nor hate make life any easier for him, so he finds
ways to cope with guilt (his grandfather’s, his country’s) and reconcile himself with a past that
must be faced, and accepted.

Overall
Seiffert’s novel explores the various degrees in which young people are able to
negotiate things like responsibility (“Helmut”), culpability (“Lore”), and acceptance or
forgiveness (“Micha”). To do so, she makes of photography a recurrent motif as part of
her attempt to delve into the connection between trauma and memory and their effects through
time. Pictures recurrently appear in the three stories but, interestingly, the novel’s title already
foreshadows the importance of photography: a “dark room” is the chamber where photographs
are developed, as Helmut’s physically existent cellar; it is the world itself, obscure and
shadowy, where Lore desperately tries to survive; but it is also a metaphor for a place to be
forgotten because of its disturbing and painful contents, as illustrated by the silenced history of
Micha’s family past. The dark room is also the book itself, a closed space producing images in a
sparse, descriptive style that could be termed ‘photographic. Indeed, the text is made up of short
paragraphs separated by blank spaces and this is a structure that reminds of a photo album, as if
each paragraph showed the reader a mental picture or a frozen moment of the story that is being
told.