They Were Enemies in War. Now Their Grandkids Are in Love.
THE SCRAPBOOK, by Heather Clark
Germany's cultural identity was spoiled by fascism. Some of its most transcendent contributions to literature, music and the arts are mistrusted now, as coming from a country that, for a dozen years, was led by a ranting authoritarian who scapegoated a socially vulnerable group, locked up its members in slave labor camps without due process (much as America is locking up undocumented immigrants today in CECOT, a forced-labor prison in El Salvador), and went on to organize their deaths.
'The Scrapbook,' the first novel by Heather Clark, the author of a well-received biography of Sylvia Plath, imagines a love affair shadowed by the Holocaust two generations later. It's 1996, and Anna, an American senior at Harvard, falls for Christoph, a blond German with an archaic torso, a fencing scar on his left temple and a somewhat flickering attentiveness.
Early on, Anna and Christoph realize that their grandfathers had fought on opposite sides in World War II: Hers was one of the first Allied soldiers to help liberate the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, and to arrive at Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. She treasures a scrapbook of his photos. In an author's note, Clark writes that her own grandfather's wartime photos are collected in a similar scrapbook. Christoph's two grandfathers, meanwhile, served in the German Army (the Wehrmacht, not the S.S., he emphasizes), though one was a teenager drafted in the war's final days and the other deserted and joined the Resistance in 1943 — or so Christoph claims to believe.
After an initial idyll in Anna's Harvard dorm, the romance shifts to Germany, where Christoph shows Anna not only Dachau and Berchtesgaden but also Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, where Nazi officials were tried after the war; the Black Forest, which makes her think of 'witches and gingerbread'; and the Christmas market in Hamburg, where the glühwein inspires her to wonder, 'What had I done to deserve such happiness?'
As Christoph tutors her in German history and philosophy ('Have you read Habermas?' he quizzes), she low-key tries to figure out how complicit his family was with Nazi crimes. Were the impressive 19th-century antiques in his parents' music room plundered from Jewish families?
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