In her elegant, calmly unsettling debut novel, Heather Clark illustrates how the cold shadow of German history bleeds constantly into the present, even in the most intimate spheres. Inspired by the Second World War scrapbook of her grandfather, who fought as an American GI in Germany, The Scrapbook is ostensibly a love story, or, rather, a story of transatlantic obsession. It is also an ethical meditation on memory, complicity and the psychological tremors that can affect our lives decades after the events that prompted them – events that we might not even have been alive to experience.
The novel opens in 1996 at Harvard University, where Anna, an earnest American literature student on the cusp of graduating, has an intense seven-day romance with a visiting German student. Christoph’s chiselled blond beauty and his intense philosophical and historical intellectualism draw her in. Their subsequent long-distance relationship – leaning more towards the cerebral than the sensual – unfolds over just a few visits to Germany. That relationship is strangely fraught with the burden of history. Anna is as obsessed with Germany’s Nazi past as she is with Christoph, and the two seem closely linked. An ambiguous and at times chilly figure, he remains uncommitted and unknowable. When it finally comes, his act of betrayal surprises nobody but Anna. Readers are likely to be astonished only by the fact that it seems so much more banal than expected.
Interwoven with this love story, told from Anna’s point of view, are brief chapters that trace the wartime experiences of their respective grandfathers. Anna’s documented the horrors of Dachau with a camera and preserved his record in a scrapbook. His squadron was also one of the first to raid Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. One of Christoph’s grandfathers helped the Americans as a translator at the very end of the war and was rewarded with a box of American novels. Those books inspired in him a love of literature, America and philosophy, all of which his grandson shares. Christoph’s other grandfather fought for Nazi Germany until the end. He was not, as Christoph believes, a member of the resistance – far from it.
As a biographer of Sylvia Plath (Red Comet, 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize), Clark has long been fascinated by the ways in which trauma can colour every aspect of our lived experience. Anna and Christoph follow her grandfather’s trail, visiting Dachau and the Eagle’s Nest, but they are haunted by the horrors of the past even when they are sitting in beautiful beer gardens or lying around in parks. Clark’s unsentimental yet lyrical prose is infused with a slow-burning, increasingly uncomfortable tension. She excels at rendering the emotional microclimate of discomfort and foreboding – those moments when love turns uncanny, when desire sours, when secrets become oppressive.
Germany itself is a key figure in this book: a landscape of beguiling facades and crimes that cannot quite be buried. The towns that Anna visits are described with a tourist’s sense of awe and a historian’s knowing dread. Pretty market squares mask the deepest abyss of human cruelty; the restored architecture conceals a rupture that cannot be plastered over.
Christoph is a product of this uncanny postwar aesthetic: his cultivated disdain for nationalism coexists uneasily with his evasiveness. He condemns the past eloquently yet abstractly, and obfuscates when asked about his own family’s role in it. He likes to think that he would have resisted, but he is also a member of a dubious fraternity. The beautiful furniture in his family’s Hamburg mansion is probably the looted property of Jews.
The novel’s moral tension arises precisely from this asymmetry. Anna’s inheritance is visual, testimonial, morally unambiguous; Christoph’s is spectral, familial, full of holes. One side has documents, the other narratives that rest on unspoken and untested assumptions. Yet Clark resists the easy binary. Christoph is not simply villainous. His vagueness may be a defence mechanism, a cultural posture learnt over decades of postwar shame management.
There is something Sebaldian in the author’s approach – not simply in the novel’s thematic concern with memory, melancholy and loss, but in its form. Heather Clark suggests that history never arrives as coherent narrative; it lingers instead in buildings and town squares, in images without captions, in lovers’ arguments over who gets to forget, and what. In The Scrapbook, she offers us a novel of beautiful surfaces and uneasy depths, where love becomes a form of collective memory excavation and forgetting a kind of violence.
Anna Katharina Schaffner is a writer and a coach. Her new book, The Story Solution: Change your toxic self-stories and thrive, will be published next year
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