Author grappling with horror

Booker Prize finalist Rachel Seiffert is not afraid to tackle morality and the meaning of the Holocaust for modern Germans, writes books editor MARGIE THOMSON.

It's been called the Gorgon effect: the paralysis of imagination and will that occurs when we try to confront the horror of the Holocaust. It's too awful to think that ordinary humans committed such atrocities, so we back away, chanting words like "evil" and "unthinkable" to hold the monster at bay.

But not Rachel Seiffert. She - young, handsome, brave - has stared the Gorgon down. Unlike the mythical Perseus who held up a polished shield so he could kill Medusa without looking directly at her, this vanquisher has turned the mirror back on us, the decent, muttering masses.

Seiffert is the half-German, half Australian author of The Dark Room, a tender, shocking examination of the Holocaust's enduring meaning and legacy in the life of the German people. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, and is a powerful achievement for one so young (Seiffert is 31 now, but wrote this, her first novel, while in her 20s).

The difficulties for a German grappling with the Holocaust are obvious. Even now, in the third and fourth generations after the events of 50 years ago, there is questioning and discovery, heartache, guilt and anger on the part of those who discover an intimate relationship, a compelling, repelling link, with horror.

Thus, in the third part of the triptych that makes up The Dark Room, Michael, a young German man, becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his grandfather's role in the Third Reich.

His grandfather was a loving, patient man, adored by his grandchildren. And yet, Michael comes to realise, he had been in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, almost certainly involved in the wholesale murder of Jews in the forests of Belarus.

It is this juxtaposition of humanity with inhumanity, of vulnerability and kindness with brutality that provides the key to looking at the Holocaust for Seiffert.

The body of writing on the Holocaust is enormous, despite a slow beginning (in 1948, Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase "the banality of evil", attributed the scarcity of published accounts to war fatigue, and charged that "the world wants to hear no more of this").

Seiffert says the number of publications might be reaching critical mass, although it seems that someone will always find a new perspective, a new gap in understanding that must be filled. Germany has been obsessively soul-searching for half a century, yet it is as if enough can never be done.

Among all this, Seiffert stands out for her youth - few people of her generation have tackled the subject publicly - and her insistence on the insidiousness of the crime.

"It takes a lot of people to murder so many millions, which means there were a lot of people directly involved," she says.

The meaning for Germany - and for all of us - even today is profound, Seiffert says. As her character Michael says, speaking of the education German children receive in schools about World War II: "They are being taught that there are no perpetrators, only victims. They are being taught like it just happened, you know, just out of the blue people came along and did it and then disappeared. Not the same people who lived in the same towns and did the same jobs and had children and grandchildren after the war ... "

Seiffert grew up in Oxford, England, with a German mother and an Australian father who was a German professor (the family name comes from her father's great-great-grandfather, who emigrated to Australia in 1835).

They spoke German at home and had close relationships with her mother's family.

"I had very positive associations with Germany," she remembers. It was a shock when, going to school, she was called a Nazi. "I realised quickly that some people hate Germans."

In her book, Michael, visiting Belarus, is asked by a local where he is from, and Michael points mutely at the map, realising he is expecting a negative reaction. This, Seiffert says, is common to many Germans who travel, especially the younger generation.

She remembers sitting in a class with a relieving teacher who assumed, from her name, that she was Jewish.

"I didn't deny it," she admits, "and I was really ashamed. I've never denied being German apart from that one time."

This appalling irony - of a German seeking temporary safety in a Jewish identity - is one she repeats to great effect in her book.

While some German families choose silence as a way of dealing with the past, Seiffert's was open. Her mother and aunts were involved in the peace movement that swept Europe in 1968, and Seiffert always felt able to ask about her family's involvement in Hitler's war.

She claims some privacy about this, however, other than to say there are "no huge family secrets". She has said elsewhere that some family members were initiated into Hitler Youth.

Seiffert rushed through Wellington and Auckland last week, speaking at a packed meeting in a capital gearing up for Readers and Writers Week, and finding time in Auckland for some interviews.

She's the first in what is shortly to become a stream of writers wanting to talk about our moral perspective: Australian historian Inga Clendinnen (profiled on page 7) who named the "Gorgon effect" in her book about the Holocaust, is speaking at a public meeting in Auckland following the Readers and Writers Week.

In Wellington she is part of a panel discussion called "Beyond Good and Evil", exploring how writers deal with subjects that seem to threaten our sense of self, with German-Jewish writer Gila Lustiger who, in her novel The Inventory, "tracks the brutalising effects of the Nazi regime on the common German citizen", and the philosophers William Gass and Raimond Gaita.

Such moral probing is perhaps a natural progression from the growing body of work - fictional and non-fictional - that has forced us to take fresh stock of the World Wars, just as our physical link with the generations involved in those conflicts is loosening.

Says Seiffert: "Evil is a useless word to use when talking about the Holocaust. Well, it's useful because it protects us.

"I can understand if someone wants to hold the Holocaust at arm's length and say that it's not part of their life. But fundamentally what we do when we say that the people who committed these acts were evil is we remove their responsibility: 'They're evil, not human.'

"The point for me is that we have to admit that we are all capable of doing it. We're just the same as those people were. Time has passed, the context is different, the context that produced the Holocaust was very specific.

"But that's not to say another set of circumstances won't come about and produce another Holocaust. And there have been holocausts since of a different nature: Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia ...

"If we do not accept that we, living in Auckland, London, wherever, are capable of doing it, then I think we're being complacent.

"Our generation is the last that has an emotional or human contact with survivors or perpetrators, and for our children it will be something that happened to other people done by other people, and they won't have the physical connection," Seiffert says.

This perspective increases the urgency of understanding, of wringing meaning out of travesty - but perhaps a process of this kind is just that: a process, a journey without ever really arriving.

Seiffert, for instance, feels she's said all she has to say for now. She won't be writing on this matter again, unless, with age, she feels she gains some new insight worth sharing.

This is possible, she says, drawing attention to what Michael's girlfriend Mina says after the birth of their daughter: when she was young she used to think how awful it was, all those children losing their parents; now that she is a mother, she thinks about all the parents who lost their children.

You would think that after a year of talking about her book, about the Holocaust, Seiffert might have dried up, become pat. Not at all. There are times in our interview when her eyes still fill, her tension is palpable. She's talking about the fact that the Nazis took many photos of themselves committing atrocities.

"What was that about?" I ask, and a "moment" occurs. Our eyes lock, and she mutely struggles for a few seconds before attempting an answer. It's very moving, very hard stuff, and we must believe her when she insists that writing The Dark Room has not been an expiation.

"If you are German or a Jew you can't get away from the subject," she says.