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?
Several chapters imagine the wartime experiences of the characters’ grandfathers. As Anna’s marches through the Black Forest, he too associates it with “witches and gingerbread,” an overlap that could be either a lapse in authorial control or an attempt to suggest that the chapters are Anna’s imaginative reconstructions — a way to let the reader see the seams with which historical fiction is patched together. (For an even more rigorously deconstructed version of historical fiction, check out Siobhan Phillips’s remarkable 2022 novel “Benefit.”)
From the start, two of Anna’s former college roommates, who happen to be Jewish, suspect that Christoph is no good, in part because he’s a German who’s only “two generations from Auschwitz,” and in part because he only focuses on Anna when it’s convenient for him. The two grounds are hardly commensurable, and I winced when Anna quoted Plath’s quip that “every woman adores a fascist.” But if you’re willing to wink at the incongruity, the novel does offer a flying tour of literary representations of the Holocaust and its legacy — a lightly annotated reading list that includes fiction writers such as Tadeusz Borowski and W. G. Sebald — as well as a meditation on the cost of political crimes to a nation’s trustworthiness and honor, even generations later.
In an early chapter, Christoph shares with Anna an anecdote that neatly emblematizes the moral stain: To build the camp at Buchenwald, the Nazis razed the beech trees that the location was named for while leaving intact an oak thought to have been dear to the Romantic novelist and naturalist Goethe. Imagine CECOT at Walden Pond.
THE SCRAPBOOK | By Heather Clark | Pantheon | 244 pp. | $28
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