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Rachel SeiffertRachel Seiffert
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BiographyRachel Seiffert was born in 1971 in Oxford to German and Australian parents, and was brought up bi-lingually. She has lived mostly in Oxford and Glasgow, and after a short period living in Berlin, has now moved back to England.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Short stories
BibliographyThe Dark Room Heinemann, 2001 Field Study Heinemann, 2004 Afterwards Heinemann, 2007
Prizes and awards1999 Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition (shortlist - short story 'Blue') 2001 PEN David T.K. Wong Award (short story - 'The Crossing') 2001 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Dark Room 2002 Betty Trask Award The Dark Room 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction) The Dark Room
Critical PerspectiveWith her elegant and disarmingly economical prose, and in tales set against a backdrop of historical and political change, Rachel Seiffert chronicles the enduring complexities of human relationships. Her storytelling is compelling in its subtle and impressionistic beauty, and in the eloquent way in which its eye, unwavering and unafraid, records the one telling detail that will linger long in the reader’s mind.
Seiffert’s first book was marketed as a novel yet The Dark Room (2001) is, in reality, three novellas, each of which explores the affect of the Second World War on three Germans. In the first Helmut is born without a pectoral muscle, which means he will never have the full use of his right arm. As a young man he joins the photography shop where his father works. He learns his craft as a photographer and when war comes he documents the slow exodus of people from Berlin, becoming increasingly attached to viewing life through the protective and distancing shield of the camera lens. The second novella begins towards the end of the war and follows a family on the move, as it lives in barns and finds food where it can. The allies have captured the father, a member of the Nazi party, and when the war comes to an end they also take the mother into a camp. She tells the children to journey to Hamburg to find their grandmother. By now Germany has been divided into zones and it is illegal for the children to travel without papers and an almost impossible task without transport. Lore, the eldest at 12, is remarkably stoical in her refusal to give in and in her determination to reach her destination. The third novella deals with Micha, a young teacher obsessed with the truth of his grandfather's role as an SS officer 50 years before. Micha attempts to uncover the reason why his grandfather spent seven years in a Russian prison after the war. Although barely able to believe that his beloved Opa might have been complicit in the Holocaust Micha says to his wife, ‘I think (the students) should read about the people who did it, too. The real, everyday people, you know. Not just Hitler and Eichmann and whoever. All the underlings, I mean. The students should learn about their lives, the ones who really did the killing.’
In Anglo-Saxon culture much has been made of the stereotype of the evil Nazi: something which has not only served to cement the reputation of the noble allied soldier but has also had the pernicious affect of denying the German nation its right to the exorcism of the pain and grief of war. Seiffert, whose mother is German, has said, ‘as a child I had a vague feeling that being German was bad. Being a German meant being a Nazi, meant being evil.’ The Dark Room gives voice where one has so often been denied. It presents ordinary German characters who are, for differing reasons, not directly involved in the war but are nevertheless, profoundly affected by it; Helmut is unable to enlist due to his weak arm; Lore wants nothing more than to avoid soldiers and fighting as she leads her siblings to their grandmother’s home; and Micha, two generations on, can, of course, only look back upon the war as he attempts to uncover his grandfather’s involvement within it.
An ambitious work, poignant and subtle, The Dark Room is a powerful exploration of guilt and responsibility; it comments on the complex issue of blame and finds that in the vast moral morass of 20th century ideology, no-one can emerge entirely without shame. The book is an investigation of German national psychology; it wrestles with the problem of Germany’s inheritance of its Nazi past and asks profound questions about personal and collective responsibility.
Seiffert followed The Dark Room with Field Study (2004), a collection of 11 short stories, mostly set in East Germany and Poland in the post-Communist world. Many of the stories occupy a landscape of understated discomfort, a discomfort which is beyond the scope of the characters’ ability to communicate it. The child in ‘Dog-Leg Lane,’ full of distress at his parents’ news that they are to move to another part of the city, expresses his anguish through tears and screams and physical immobility; yet he cannot convey his terror in words. There is therefore, a sense in which his fear of relocation is beyond the communicable. In the title story, a young Ph.D student, investigating pollution levels in a Polish river, strikes up a friendship with a waitress, with whom he is only able to communicate through the woman’s son, who acts as an interpreter. In the fable-like ‘Late Spring,’ a young boy appears out of nowhere, shattering the isolated life of an old beekeeper whose remote valley home has kept him separate from other people for many years. As the boy is seriously ill and completely silent, we never learn of his origins. He remains as mysterious and enigmatic a figure as the beekeeper himself. In ‘Blue,’ a young man of meagre resources prepares a flat for his pregnant girlfriend. He is awkward, unable to express emotion, opinion, desire; his failure to articulate need contrasts with his girlfriend’s indifference. ‘Maria is quiet, nodding, non-committal. Kenny wants her to smile at him and say nice things like it’s good to have a gas cooker,’ but ‘there are long silences between them.’
As with The Dark Room, the characters in Field Study are taken from ordinary life. Seiffert offers us no more than a snapshot of their everyday trials and disappointments; the young Polish mother who leaves her son to spend a summer working on an asparagus farm in Germany; the architect slowly disintegrating as the threads of his life unpick themselves; a man embarrassed by his East German father’s dogmatic devotion to the Communist cause. Seiffert allows us a brief moment to observe and reflect: she doesn’t extend any scene beyond its natural life and doesn’t waste a word. Field Study is just what it suggests it is – an analysis, a dissection and an examination. Like The Dark Room, Field Study deals with serious themes; guilt across the generations; loss and responsibility; the political consequences of the fall of the Communist order. Yet Seiffert’s lightness of touch never allows the reader to become overwhelmed.
With a sparse language Seiffert builds her poetry through the accumulated rhythm of simplicity. Seiffert has described her job as a writer as ‘taking things out.’ Hers is the opposite of the inflated style that is so often deemed literary by critics and prize judges. In ‘Helmut,’ the first novella in The Dark Room, Seiffert takes on us on a 20-year journey in a single sentence: ‘life between the wars is harsh: food plain, luxuries, scarce, living space small.’ This is a rare skill, and one to be cherished.
Garan Holcombe, 2004
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