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.
