At the onset of World War II, a young photographer's assistant is kept out of the war due to a physical disability, and instead spends his time capturing on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. Just weeks after Germany's surrender, a teenage girl whose parents have been taken into allied custody leads her siblings on a harrowing journey to find their grandmother. And two generations after the war, a teacher searches for the reason why the Russians imprisoned his beloved grandfather. Evoking the experiences of the individual with astonishing emotional depth and psychological acuity, The Dark Room develops a portrait of the twentieth century in all its drama and complexity.
"Ambitious and powerful. . . . Seiffert writes lean, clean prose. Deftly, she hangs large ideas on the vivid private experiences of her principal characters [to] form an allegory of the German soul in its passage over eighty years." --The New York Times Book Review
"[A] probing novel. . . . Seiffert gives us pictures as evocative as they are ghostly...." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Lyrical . . . explores the experience of 'ordinary' Germans-the descendents of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers-and poses questions about the country's psychological and political inheritance with rare insight and humanity." --The New Yorker