The Dark Room, a novel
By Rachel Seiffert. New York: Vintage International/Random House. 2001. pp. 278.
I used to be a darkroom photographer, and have spent many hours processing photographs with film and paper and chemicals struggling to get a print just exactly right in a darkroom under safe lights. So I could relate very well to the opening vignette in this triptych novel set in Germany from the 1920s until the end of the twentieth century.
The book is actually three independent novellas, the first of which, called Helmut, is the story of a boy growing up in Berlin during the Nazi era. It is the shortest of the three and my favorite. The character, Helmut, is the most appealing person in the book and his observations of life in Berlin and his development as a photographer had special resonance for me. The last novella, Micha, is the crux of the book and the motivation and impetus for writing it, I think. However, I find this novella the least appealing, although it offers the most in substantive issues that will dominate the discussion presented here.
In each novella photography makes an appearance, and Seiffert seems to have intimate knowledge of photography and processing photos in a darkroom. The title of the book, The Dark Room, ostensibly refers to Helmut’s use of the darkroom for processing his photographs. Apart from that there is nothing else that relates to the title and by the end of the book, one is left wondering what the title of the book has to do with the content, because the darkroom is not central to the story line or to the larger issues raised by the book.
Reading Helmut, I could feel that the story was written by a woman. Although the protagonist is a man, a handicapped man in fact, he has the sensibility and temperament of a woman. He cries way too much for a man. This is true of all the men throughout this book, with the exception of Kolesnik in the last segment, Micha. They all seem like women in men’s bodies. They are always crying over one thing or another, confused, and ambivalent, unsure of themselves, indecisive. This is particularly so in the case of Micha. He is the most feminine and most conflicted of all the male characters in the book, and I think the one closest to Seiffert’s own voice and perspective. Helmut’s story is told in a tone of detachment, it has a surreal quality that makes it very interesting. Helmut is absorbed within himself, seems almost oblivious to the political ferment going on around him. He seems to go about his daily business unconscious of the momentous changes happening in German society under the Nazis. For example, there is a description of his rising one morning and finding broken glass on the sidewalk. There is no explanation or analysis of where the broken glass came from, but the implication is that it was the result of Nazi gangs smashing the windows of shopkeepers who were either Jewish or anti-Nazi. Helmut simply sweeps it up apparently without reflection or reaction.
He has a preoccupation from childhood with watching the comings and goings of trains at the Berlin Bahnhof. During the war years his observations reveal that Berlin is slowly being depopulated, and he carefully documents this development on a daily basis. But he does not question it. He does not ask himself why this is happening. He does not seem to reflect on his acute observations. He is observationally engaged, but emotionally detached. He seems to have only minimal sexual interest for an adolescent boy. Helmut finds some pictures of nude women in a stash of magazines kept hidden away by his employer, Gladigau. “At night he conjures the images against his bedroom ceiling as the long, slow freight trains clatter below, a soothing rhythm of sleep.” (p.12) That’s all the sex he gets in the first twenty-four years of his life.
The middle of the three segments centers around a young girl named Lore. Her age is not given, but one surmises her approximate age must be twelve to fourteen at most. She has a younger sister Liesel, who is probably eight to ten, two twin brothers who must be six or seven, and an infant brother, Peter, who is a babe in arms. The story takes place at the end of the war and their mother, who appears to have been a Nazi operative of some sort, is being taken into detention by the invading Americans. She instructs Lore to take the children on a trek from southern Germany to their grandmother’s residence in Hamburg far to the north, and gives her money and jewelry for the trip. The mother then disappears and the story becomes the adventurous trek of this small troop of children making their way the length of Germany to Hamburg, largely on foot, during the chaos and uncertainty of the aftermath of the war. A rather unlikely and unhopeful scenario, I think, but Sieffert’s sensitive writing style and attention to detail make one want to believe it. Along the way they pick up an additional companion, an older boy named Tomas, who at first appears to be Jew who has been released from a concentration camp by the Americans. Later it seems that he may have been a soldier or a prison guard who stole the identity of a dead Jew to escape detection by the Americans (pp. 150-52). Tomas befriends the young group and proves himself vital to their success in completing the journey.
The story is a succession of perils and hardship which the children negotiate with a combination of resourcefulness and luck. It gets a little repetitive after a while, but there is enough richness and variety to keep it from dragging. Seiffert is a good story teller with a vivid imagination for detail that keeps her narrative alive and moving.
There is almost no mention of sex or sexual interest in this whole book, which is remarkable in a book featuring adolescents. The only glimpse we have of any sexual experience in Lore is a negative one.
Lore is awakened by noises in the dark. English male voices, whispering. German female, coaxing. Shifting rubble, no more talking, only breathing.
Lore knows Tomas is awake, too. She is uncomfortable under the blankets, shifts back against the cold grit of the bricks behind her. She doesn’t want to hear what they are doing under the ruined walls. She counts the beams on the floor above her to block it out, but her mind keeps forming pictures. Liesel turns over next to her. Lore fights the urge to cover her sister’s ears.
There is whispering, and after that, walking.
Lore wakes again later to more noise: stifled breath and sobs. She battles her straining ears, wills herself to sleep again. The sounds are closer, muffled by blankets, not rubble walls. Lore allows herself to listen to the dark around her. Tomas cries with his jacket over his face, arms wrapped over the top to keep the sound inside. He pulls in gasps of air, body a heaving shadow against the opposite wall. Lore doesn’t want to see it or hear it. She would cry, only his tears have taken over. She lies, awake and furious, until daylight seeps through the cracks in the brickwork over her face. (p. 133-34)
What a prude she is! This doesn’t sound like the sensibility of a very young, presumably inexperienced, girl. I would expect more curiosity and receptiveness in a girl of that age. To me this seems like the very unattractive attitude of an older woman, who has been conditioned to shut out and devalue sexual experience and react to it in a negative way. It is rather un-German, I think. That’s the juiciest part of this book. A very negative, sanitized presentation of young people coming of age.
On the cover of the book an anonymous critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer is quoted who calls the book a novel about the German soul in the twentieth century. I fear many people will be misled by this. This novel doesn’t come anywhere close to being about the German soul. It purports to be an exploration of the German soul, it tries to present itself in this way, but this is a novel about an English woman trying to come to terms with her own conflicted feelings about Germans and Germany.
The characters do not seem like Germans. They have German names and they are set in Germany, but to me they don’t feel like German people. The male characters do not feel like men, as I mentioned earlier. In two of the three stories the protagonists are male and in the Lore episode there is a male character, Tomas, who plays a significant role. The only male character who seems authentically male and authentically German is Kolesnik, in the final segment, Micha, and he is cast as Polish rather than German.
This is a woman writing about a subject and a domain that is quintessentially male, namely, warfare. There is nothing wrong with a woman offering her perspective on warfare through the medium of a novel. It can be a valuable and illuminating perspective. But this novel is disingenuous in that it purports to represent male soul searching and conflict over the nature of war and wartime atrocities, when it is in fact a gently aggressive, judgmental, moralistic attack on the brutality and excess of warfare from a very female perspective of naive shock and outrage. Seiffert’s position amounts to “How could you do such a thing, Grandpa?” She finds it hard to grasp how men who can shoot young children in cold blood can still love their families and be good citizens.
Micha, more than any other character and more than the other two novellas, represents what Seiffert really wants to get at in this book. Micha is a German man, probably in his 20s, who, as a hobby, takes up tracing his own family history. The story is set in 1997, so he is looking back over a century of upheaval, warfare, and social disarray that his forebears had lived through. This leads to an investigation of his deceased grandfather who was in the Waffen SS stationed in Belarus.
The Waffen SS in Belarus and Poland committed some of the most bestial atrocities of the war. After the war the German government labeled it a criminal organization. Their behavior was extreme even by SS standards. In Poland they were so wantonly rampaging that Heinrich Himmler had to send a battalion of SS police to make sure they did not attack their own commanders and other German units in the vicinity.
Micha became obsessed to find out for sure if his grandfather had participated in any of that, or if he was the teddy bear that he always knew him to be. After the war, the Russians had kept his grandfather in prison for nine years. He did not rejoin his family in Germany until 1954. That ought to serve as a clue. Micha digs up where his grandfather had been stationed in Belarus and some of the atrocities that had gone on there. He makes several journeys to Belarus to investigate and after a lengthy negotiation, interviews a Polish man named Kolesnik, who was there and saw what happened and was himself a participant. Kolesnik essentially stands in for the deceased grandfather, and is the screen against which Seiffert projects the issues that are preoccupying her in the writing of this book.
After page 220, I became disgusted with it, and by page 250, I was raining down the full brunt of my wrath upon it. It was when Micha was photographing Kolesnik and his wife (p. 254-55) that Seiffert tipped her hand and I saw her for what she is. Elena (Kolesnik’s wife) wants to take a photograph of Kolesnik and Micha together, but Micha refuses to be photographed with Kolesnik. Why did he refuse to be photographed with this man with whom he had established a relationship of trust and who had been sharing intimate confidences of an utmost personal nature over several months? Why would he not want to participate in a permanent commemoration of the relationship? The photograph would represent a personal bond and an acknowledgment of this personal quest that Micha had embarked upon. The refusal indicates a rejection of Kolesnik by Micha as well as a hypocrisy in that he wishes to deny, both to himself and others, the personal connection he had forged with Kolesnik in order to induce him to talk. This refusal shows that he is not reaching out to Kolesnik from the heart to create a personal bond of trust and mutual understanding, rather he is seducing Kolesnik in order to use him to satisfy his own personal need: when he is finished with him he will discard him. It is dishonest and disgusting. I think it is a crucial moment in the novel in that it is not just a further development of the character of Micha, but rather a revelation of Seiffert’s attitude and purpose in writing the story.
Seiffert is still fighting the war and still fighting within herself how to regard Germany and German people, particularly of the World War II generation. She herself is not a wounded victim. Her family did not suffer under the Nazis. This grudge comes from an attitude of moral outrage over the atrocities committed in the war. She is making it personal by setting it in the context of a family, a German family — at least a German family as she imagines them. But I think it is a false picture, or at best very atypical.
What is offensive about this book is not so much its point of view, although I take strong exception to it, but that it purports to be something that it isn’t. As such it will misguide and misinform English speaking readers about German people and German culture. If even critics like the reviewers for New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer are befooled, then what of the general reader?
This book is a fraud, but I will tell you the truth. I was in Berlin last fall and observed a vibrant, thriving, multicultural city growing rapidly and moving forward into the future with high energy and enthusiasm. But it is also a city very conscious of its past, much more than any American city I have ever seen. The contrast between past and present in Berlin is evident in nearly every block. The weight of the past is visible in the architecture, old and new, the streets, the public art visible all over the city, and in the minds and conversations of the residents. But it is nothing like the anguish and ambivalence that you see in Seiffert.
Today there is a community of approximately 12,000 Jews living in Berlin. There are active synagogues, a large, very interesting Jewish Museum, opened in 2001, and a sizeable Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened May 2005, just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. I was told by a tour guide that it was built on the site of Josef Goebbels residence during the Nazi era, but I was not able to verify this. This memorial is very controversial in many respects, but the fact that such a substantial memorial, extending over nearly five acres, exists in such a prominent place in the city is evidence of official repudiation of the Nazi policies and attitudes toward Jews and everyone. That is a firm conviction literally set in stone. The architect who designed it was an American Jew named Peter Eisenman. In the following excerpt from an interview with Der Spiegel (May 9, 2005) he comments on the memorial and its psychological meaning and purpose.
Spiegel Online: Who is the monument for? Is it for the Jews?
Eisenman: It’s for the German people. I don’t think it was ever intended to be for the Jews. It’s a wonderful expression of the German people to place something in the middle of their city that reminds them — could remind them — of the past.
Spiegel Online: An expression of guilt, you mean? Some have criticized the monument by saying it looks like a gigantic cemetery.
Eisenman: No. For me it wasn’t about guilt. When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are guilty. I have encountered anti-Semitism in the United States as well. Clearly the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it is clearly a terribly moment in history. But how long does one feel guilty? Can we get over that?
I have always thought that this monument was about trying to get over this question of guilt. Whenever I come here, I arrive feeling like an American. But by the time I leave, I feel like a Jew. And why is that? Because Germans go out of their way — because I am a Jew — to make me feel good. And that makes me feel worse. I can’t deal with it. Stop making me feel good. If you are anti-Semitic, fine. If you don’t like me personally, fine. But deal with me as an individual, not as a Jew. I would hope that this memorial, in its absence of guilt-making, is part of the process of getting over that guilt. You cannot live with guilt. If Germany did, then the whole country would have to go to an analyst. I don’t know how else to say it.
The memorial and the behavior of the Germans toward the architect illustrate a decisive repudiation of Nazi-ism within the mainstream German culture. There is no squeamishness about facing up to the past as represented in The Dark Room. This memorial in the center of Berlin is vast. It doesn’t show any indecisiveness or unwillingness to face up to the issue. At the same time a controversy blew up during the construction of the memorial because of a coating on the stone slabs meant to inhibit the scrawling of graffiti on them. It happened that the company that manufactured this coating to preserve the Jewish Memorial from defacement was also the same company that manufactured the gas that was used to poison Jews in the concentration camps.
The product was to have been provided by Degussa, a big German chemical company.
Now it turns out that Degussa once owned Degesch, the firm that produced the Zyklon B used to gas Jews in concentration camps. At first, nobody noticed—or nobody wanted to notice. But then the press discovered the link, reportedly after being tipped off by a Swiss company that had hoped to win the contract until Degussa decided to donate half the material needed.
After the story broke, the memorial’s board of trustees, after an apparently heated discussion, concluded that using the firm’s product, called Protectosil, would be “unacceptable given the specific nature of the Memorial project”. It advised the construction company to stop using the coating until another product could be found.
Degussa has not, in fact, been one of the companies that shies away from its past. It is an active member in the foundation created by German companies to compensate victims of forced labour. And it has commissioned researchers to look into its history, without having any say over what they publish.
This behavior is by no means exceptional these days. Since the mid-1990s, says Manfred Pohl, a historian and head of corporate cultural affairs at Deutsche Bank, most large German companies have reappraised their history. It is now time, he argues, to forgive them (not the same as forgetting). By excluding Degussa from the Holocaust memorial, an opportunity has been missed to do just that. One could also claim that it is unfair to penalise today’s shareholders or employees of Degussa for the actions of the company in the past. (The Economist, October 30, 2003)
It is exactly the same issue in play in Seiffert’s novel. But the Germans do not show the anxiety and confusion and paralysis before the issue that Micha shows. He does not represent typical German attitudes or behavior. Germans are quite good about facing up to the issue. They might come to differing conclusions, but they are almost always decisive and surefooted in whatever their direction. Germans want to get on with it. That doesn’t mean they want to forget. They are not deniers. But the kind of anxious preoccupation shown in Sieffert’s lead character is very un-German in my eyes.
When I was in graduate school, I took several seminars that fell under the umbrella description of “Ethics.” We studied books by authors such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. I was shocked at how naive and simple-minded they were, and the crudeness of the methods whereon these intellectual edifices were constructed. My professors took it all very seriously, but I had undisguised contempt for what I was being taught. The professors and the authors of these books believe that there are timeless principles of ethical conduct that are independent of time and circumstance and culture, and that they can be discerned and refined by a process of concocting (usually) hypothetical situations and then testing various alternatives and outcomes against our “intuitions.” In the case of Robert Nozick it was individual rights, in the case of John Rawls, it was principles of distributive justice. My professors had great faith in this faculty of moral intuition which they thought was inherent in people and could lead in principle to universal agreement. Absolute standards of Right and Wrong could be discerned and applied to people and events independent of cultural or historical frames of reference.
For example, Aristotle, and virtually everyone in the ancient world, took slavery for granted and never questioned its legitimacy as an institutionalized social practice. My professors thought that today, from our vantage point of modern enlightenment, we can judge with finality that Aristotle was wrong and that those ancient societies were unjust with the same surety that we can judge that their calculation of the circumference of the earth was wrong as well as their conception of the causes of disease. In other words, “ethics” can make “progress,” and our understanding of proper moral conduct can be “improved.” In fact, human beings can themselves be made better in terms of their moral character should they apply these advances in ethical insight to their daily lives. By implication, some people can be judged to be morally superior to others with absolute certitude and conviction. One professor once asserted with fervent conviction the he was a better human being than Adolf Hitler. I nearly laughed in his face. This whole project of constructing these “ethical” systems by which human beings could be evaluated and compared seemed to me to be breathtakingly arrogant, naive, and stupid. Unworthy of serious scholarly consideration. I couldn’t believe they were teaching this in a university and that they expected me to read this stuff and take it seriously. They judged me to be devoid of capacity for ethical thinking and unsuitable to even be in graduate school. We didn’t like each other.
This approach and mindset behind all of these modern formulations of universal human rights and war crimes goes back to Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, who believed that moral principles must be understood a priori, that is independent of the contingencies of time, circumstance, and experience. A categorical imperative is one whose validity and applicability is universal, that is, in all circumstances and it is justified as an end in itself — as opposed to being a means toward some greater good. How one recognizes such imperatives and applies them to practical situations is not easy to grasp, but Kant had great faith in reason and he also believed that we had an innate sense of what was right that was not dependent on experience, that conscience tempered by reason could yield access to this inner light of moral right. This was roughly the approach that my professors believed in and tried unsuccessfully to inculcate in me.
I think Rachel Seiffert believes something similar to what my ethics professors believed, although she doesn’t think in these grand philosophical superstructures, but I feel that same revulsion toward her and what she is doing that I felt toward them. She thinks she can judge her Waffen SS grandfather with the same righteous certitude that my professor felt when he asserted his moral superiority to Adolf Hitler. What is offensive about it is that Seiffert and the professor think they are delivering “objective” judgments that have universal validity rather than subjective reactions. They want to claim a correctness that goes beyond themselves and their own subjectivity, the limitations and contingencies of their own personal point of view and position in the world. This “correctness” can be imposed as “truth” on anyone. It is not simply a point of view. It is what everyone should think. This is what is objectionable.
I probably would not like her son of a bitch Nazi grandfather either, and I’m sure I wouldn’t care much for Adolf Hitler. But that is because of who I am, how I have been brought up, my values and goals and assumptions about life that have been shaped by long experience and the time in which I live. I do not claim that they has any validity beyond myself. I’m willing to concede that others with different experience in different times and circumstances may see things differently. Seiffert and the philosophy professors are not.
I am squarely in the Nietzschean camp, who reject Kant and any attempt to formulate moral principles that are absolute and universal. Moral sentiments have to be understood as arising not from abstract principles, reason, or some window of universal conscience, but in deep, visceral, emotional reactions. When we see the piles of emaciated bodies in the concentration camps, our reaction of shock and horror is not a reasoned inference based on some universal principle. It is a gut reaction of the most visceral emotion. Our sense of morality, our understanding of Right and Wrong, begins in these primitive emotional responses. Principles are abstractions that attempt to generalize from these primitive feelings to guide our future conduct and judge the conduct of others in situations that might have less immediate clarity. But the fundamental basis for morality is our human emotional dispositions. As such, moral preconceptions are highly variable and dependent on time, circumstance, culture, experience, and personal psychology. They are inherently precluded from ever becoming anything like a universal imperative or a consensus across humanity. Attempts to formulate a universal moral code or universal moral principles is an exercise in futility. At best it is self-deception. At worst it is hypocrisy and a legitimization of authoritarianism.
Rachel Seiffert, without being self-conscious about it, does have this predominant religio-Kantian context operating in the background and takes its presumptions for granted. Her book can be seen as an illustration of how this absolutist attitude toward moral principles plays out in the interpersonal relations of a family and the estrangements and antagonisms that result.
The advantage of my point of view over Seiffert’s or the ethics professors’ is that it allows greater openness, greater flexibility, and greater tolerance. The ethics professors who believe in absolute Rights and Wrongs are afraid to let anyone think differently from themselves. They want to feel like their rightness is not limited to themselves and therefore they are justified in imposing their judgments of right and wrong on others and in requiring others to follow their mandates and conform to their standards. It is the instinct of the religious priesthood in a different guise. Instead of being the spokesmen for God, they claim to be speaking for “all humanity.” We don’t need it, and its arrogance and blindness is a potentially dangerous, pathological force in society.
I can like people that I don’t like and the contradiction does not bother me. Seiffert, believing as she does in absolute rights and wrongs, always has to be aligned with the side of right and never with the side of wrong. She is convinced that there is a right and a wrong from which to orient oneself. She can never allow herself to like someone who is evil. Micha thinks he will never get used to it that Kolesnik likes him (p. 259). I do not have these limitations.
As far as war crimes are concerned, you need to keep in mind that it is always the winners who try the losers. The winners define what the crimes are, who the criminals are. They appoint the judges, conduct the trials, pass sentences, and mete out punishments. Victorious armies rarely try their own soldiers, commanders, or political leaders for war crimes. The United States can point to a few well publicized exceptions, but these are always low level soldiers who are portrayed to be rogue. The opportunity to discredit a few low level common soldiers for excess actually masks the larger, more systematic destructiveness being wreaked upon a country and its population that is sanctioned and promoted at much higher levels.
For example, today about 20% of the territory of Vietnam is uninhabitable because of unexploded American munitions. On much of the landscape nothing will grow because of the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the war (Atlantic, June 2012). Is this a war crime? Is anybody being prosecuted for it? Not even the Vietnamese are pursuing it as such. They don’t see it in their political interest to continue the conflict with the Americans despite the lingering effects of the war upon their country.
Charles Anthony Smith (2012) traces the beginnings of the concept of war crime to the trial of King Charles I of England by Oliver Cromwell.
This prosecution came about after the conclusion of a conflict for the nominal purpose of punishing the defeated leader for crimes such as the murder of civilians, torture of captives, and forced conscription. The trial of Charles I was antecedent to modern war crimes trials. (p. 21)
Once the Nazis were defeated and World War II came to a close, however, the Allies institutionalized the concept of war crimes tribunals through the Nuremberg Trials. (p. 22)
The Nuremberg Trials have been judged a success and a role model for future proceedings of this type. A similar series of trials in Tokyo at the end of World War II have not been so favorably judged. The Nuremberg Trials
embraced concerns about substantive due process and procedural process as inherent to a just proceeding, the trials in Tokyo reverted to a show trial model with an almost complete disregard for the concepts of justice. (p. 80)
Smith goes on to present detailed analyses of subsequent war crimes trials in many modern contexts including Argentina, South Africa, the former Soviet States, the former Yugoslav States, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “War on Terror.”
The fundamental question considered here through the historical evolution and development of war crimes tribunals in their various forms is whether human rights tribunals, ad hoc or standing, promote and are the product of concerns about justice or are they more likely to be a manifestation of normal political processes and efforts to consolidate political power. (p. 270)
The cases examined here demonstrate that the purpose of the tribunals has been the consolidation of political power. (p. 271)
I concur with his analysis and evaluation of these processes and their underlying philosophical preconceptions.
Smith contrasts the character of the war crimes tribunals that are the consequence of peace through victory and the peace accord reached in Ireland in 1998, known as the Belfast Agreement, or the Good Friday Agreement.
One of the notable aspects of the case of Northern Ireland is the complete omission of any provision for war crimes trials or tribunals of any sort. The long and violent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland includes multiple tragedies and the killing of non-combatants, indiscriminate bombings in civilian areas, the unlawful imprisonment of opponents, and a variety of other actions that, in other contexts, have led to prosecutions for gross violations of human rights. (p. 278)
Smith points out that this was not simply an omission on the part of the parties to the agreement, but a considered judgment.
The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families. But we can best honor them through a fresh start in which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all. (Belfast Accord 3, quoted in Smith, p. 279)
One important factor influencing the character of this peace settlement was that no side in the conflict was able or likely to accomplish a sustainable military or political victory. In other words, a draw on the battlefield means no war crimes trials will take place. So much for absolute, indelible principles of Right and Wrong.
Micha is carrying out a war crimes tribunal on a personal level within his own family. The story reveals how disingenuous, hypocritical, and destructive it is. In the final pages the pent up rage and vengeance begins to pour forth. Micha seems to care about nothing else but the crimes of his grandfather. The desire for punishment even extends to the grandfather’s wife. He knows she covered it up, so she is also guilty. He fights with his sister, is estranged from his wife, refuses to visit his grandmother, does not speak with his parents. Every relationship he has is poisoned by his obsession with the facts of his grandfather’s Nazi past. (p.261) This orgy of self-castigation is very un-German. It appears to me to be Germans the way Seiffert would like to see them, what she hopes they might be.
At the very end of the book there is a perfunctory, supremely unconvincing gesture toward reconciliation as Micha brings his young daughter to visit her grandmother for the first time, apparently some years after the main subject matter of the story. It doesn’t work as a repudiation of the thrust of the whole narrative, nor does it work as a logical outcome of character and events. This flippant gesture feels like an afterthought, and a rather thoughtless one at that. I think it reflects Seiffert’s utter confusion in the face of the issues she’s struggling with.
As Nietzsche pointed out, if God is dead, then there can be no absolute, timeless basis for moral imperatives. Moral preconceptions and judgments become context dependent subject to variables of culture, social context, and personal psychology. It does not mean, as Dostoevsky mistakenly thought, that all things become permissible. Who grants permission? It means that all moral judgments and all human conduct must be understood within the social, cultural, and psychological context in which they occur. This is not a distressing situation as Jean Paul Sartre lamented in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946, p. 294). It means we are in charge, and we are making the decisions. And those decisions will be made according to the perceptions and values and norms of the times in which we live. There is nothing wrong with this. There never were any gods and there were never any priests speaking with God’s voice. Everything is as it has always been. A clearer understanding of the human condition removes the arrogance and grandiosity from our claims of moral certitude, and with that demise comes an opportunity for greater understanding of even the most evil people and the most despicable actions. It doesn’t mean that we won’t kill them for it. But we will do it on our own authority, not the authority of God or universal Right.
I can condemn the piles of bodies at Belsen and Buchenwald the same as Seiffert can. I can feel the same horror and revulsion at the atrocities and brutality of the war. But I know that my rejection and condemnation of these actions does not go beyond myself and there may be others who feel very differently. I do not speak with the voice of God or for all humanity. At the same time I have the capacity to relate with warmth and congeniality to the perpetrators of the most unspeakable crimes. No matter how bad people are, not everything about them is bad. There is always more to them than their worst manifestations. Windows and bridges are always possible. I believe it is a positive advantage in human relating that surpasses that offered by the perspective displayed in Seiffert’s book and by my ethics professors.
The Dark Room is a book about Rachel Seiffert. It is not about Germans or Germany. Keep that in mind if you decide to read it.
Notes
The BBC has a nice concise summary of the history of the concept of war crimes and their application.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/overview/crimes_1.shtml
Der Spiegel Online May 9, 2005
The Economist, October 30, 2003. http://www.economist.com/node/2179097
Kaplan, Robert D. (2012) The Vietnam Solution. The Atlantic. June 2012.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-vietnam-solution/308969/
Sartre, Jean Paul (1946) Existentialism is a Humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing/Meridian. pp. 287-311.
Smith, Charles Anthony (2012) The Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials: From Charles I to Bush II. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 316 pp.
