Rachel Seiffert: The Dark Room

By ELSPETH SANDYS

Most people growing up in New Zealand in the latter part of the 20th century would have asked themselves: "How responsible am I for the crimes of previous generations?"

I would guess that the majority of New Zealanders take pride in the fact that genuine efforts have been made, by the Waitangi Tribunal, and other agencies, to right the wrongs done to Maori under the banner of colonisation.

How much more painful must it be to have grown up in post-Nazi Germany? To ask yourself the question, what did my father, or mother, or grandparents, do in the war? It's a subject fraught with difficulty, which possibly accounts for the fact that so few writers have attempted to deal with it head on. There was Gunter Grass' magnificent The Tin Drum and more recently Bernard Schlink's The Reader, which captures the shifting ground of moral certainty in the wake of the Nazi experiment.

Now there is The Dark Room, a remarkable debut novel by a young German-Australian writer, which, like The Reader, deals not in judgments, but in something far more compelling - moral ambiguity.

"I think there is no punishment for what I did," Jozef Kolesnik, the Belarussian who collaborated with the Germans, tells Micha, the young German searching for the truth of his grandfather's war. "Not enough sadness and no punishment." When Micha asks him if he feels sorry for what he did, Jozef replies, "How can I apologise? Who can I apologise to? Who is there to forgive me?"

These conversations occur in the book's final section, "Micha". The two earlier sections tell stories set before and during the war that are linked thematically to the final, postwar story, but otherwise sit awkwardly in the novel, the reader hoping all the time for a more tangible link between the characters and their destinies. Which is not to say the stories don't exist in their own right. They do. And perhaps it is appropriate to the subject that the first two stories have an unfinished feel to them, as if the questions they raise can never be answered or can be answered only by individuals struggling to make sense of their own particular legacies.

There were times, reading The Dark Room, when I found the deliberate economy of the writing, the piling-up of short, sometimes flat sentences, monotonous. But I never stopped wanting to turn the page, and by the end, the sheer force of the writer's imagination, and her scrupulous adherence to the principle of not judging, won my whole-hearted admiration.

Anyone who doubts that we are shaped by the past, and bear a measure of responsibility for its crimes, should read this novel. When Micha and his Turkish partner have their first child, both accept that their daughter has been born with a complex legacy, over which, inevitably, hangs the shadow of an evil that must never be forgotten. Micha, a schoolteacher, is reminded by a colleague that the history of the Holocaust is taught as a matter of law in German schools, so how can it be forgotten? Micha's answer is one that has relevance to all those who have convinced themselves such horrors have nothing to do with ordinary, "decent" people. "They [German children] are being taught that there are no perpetrators, only victims.

"They are being taught it just happened - 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."

Micha could be you or me. His grandfather, an SS murderer, could be our grandfather. Seiffert has made us feel what it would have been like to live through the Nazi years, and how it would be to have them as our legacy.

Random House

$45

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.