The Blindness of the Heart

Starred review from July 19, 2010
Why would a mother abandon her seven-year-old son at a train station in 1945 Germany just as the fighting ends? In her powerful first novel to be translated into English, Franck poses the question before tracking back to the woman's WWI childhood. As the story progresses from one war to the next, Franck wrestles with a much broader question—why did so many Germans appear blind to the horrors on their horizon? Helene is the younger of two daughters of an Aryan father who survives the battlefield to die a pitiful death at home, and a Jewish mother who is something of a 20th-century Cassandra. The sisters flee rural life (and their mother) and are taken in by a relative in Berlin, where they are engulfed by the city's interwar debauchery. But as the economy deteriorates and the political situation heats up, Helene and her sister make do with fewer resources and dwindling freedoms. Helene finds love with a Jewish philosophy student, but succumbs, after a cruel twist, to another, colder man. Franck's insights are profound and alarming, and her storytelling makes the familiar material read fresh.

August 15, 2010

Darkness engulfs a family and a nation, in a psychologically acute addition to the literature of Germany's downfall; the book was an international bestseller and won the German Book Prize.

In her first work of fiction to be translated into English, Franck combines an intense female perspective with the ability to spotlight scenes of domestic unhappiness and hectic urban decadence in memorable detail. Her central character, Helene Würsich, is the daughter of a printer who returns maimed and ruined from the battlefields of World War I, leaving Helene and her older sister Martha in the power of their mentally unstable mother Selma, "the foreign woman"—meaning Jewish, in the disapproving view of the local community. Martha, a nurse, develops a taste for drugs while clever but introverted Helen, unsympathetically treated by Selma, never fulfills her potential. A legacy saves the family's fortunes, the girls move to Berlin to live with a racy aunt and Helene falls in love with a student, only to lose him. As the political mood darkens and Selma is incarcerated for possible hereditary disorders, Helene's future is shaped by another man, Wilhelm, a keen supporter of the new regime who nevertheless agrees to risk "racial disgrace" and arrange false papers certifying her Aryan descent. But their marriage brings no happiness and a prologue and epilogue expose the emotional damage arising from a long sequence of disasters. 

Franck's impressionistic style and empathy encourage fresh responses to familiar subject matter—fine, disturbing, memorable work.

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August 1, 2010

This powerful novel opens with Helene, a nurse in Germany throughout World War II, abandoning her seven-year-old son at a train station at the end of the war; the following chapters detail how she came to this point. Faced with the countless horrors of war, we realize, it is sometimes easier to care for strangers than for one's own son. Like the German people collectively during this time and like her Jewish mother before her, Helene is emotionally blinded by her own pain. Franck's writing is deliberately understated, deadened emotionally to reflect the state of the characters. Events are flatly reported without exploring their impact, and what is not said weighs heavily on the narrative. VERDICT Not surprisingly, this book won the German Book Prize and has received international acclaim. Book groups will find plenty to discuss in this gripping novel, but it is not for the fainthearted or anyone who needs books to end on a happy note. There are no easy answers or pat resolutions in this dark novel, just a compelling narrative and solid writing.--Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA

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