The Blindness of the Heart [Hardcover]

The Blindness of the Heart, a prize-winning novel by Julia Franck, spans the period of the two world wars in Germany, focusing on the effects of these wars on seemingly ordinary German citizens. In the dramatic Prologue, which takes place in 1945, a young boy and Alice, his mother, arrive at a train station hoping to escape the post-war horrors. For the boy, however, the horrors are just beginning. His mother abandons him at the station, without any warning, leaving behind written instructions on where to deliver him.

The theme of abandonment pervades the novel during its thirty-year time span. Many of the characters, abandoned by people they love, abandon others, in turn, avoiding responsibility on many fronts. Part I changes focus and time completely, from the time of the Prologue back to pre-World War I. The personal stories of several members of the Wursich family, often told in flashbacks, form the backbone of the novel, with the focus on Helene, the youngest daughter of Selma, a housewife with a Jewish background, and Ernst, the owner of a printing company. Helene, nine years younger than her sister Martha, is always an outsider in the social action of the family. Her mother has become a voluntary invalid, and her father, drafted to fight in World War I, returns crippled and half-blind.

When Martha and Helene, feeling abandoned by their parents, in turn abandon their home and move to Berlin with their aunt, Martha finds her escape from the troubles of the times by seeking the high life. Helene seeks academic opportunities and eventually falls in love with a philosophy student, familiar with the theories of Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Cassirer. Helene, who has often wondered about the religious differences between between her parents, is now exposed also to the philosophies which her lover is studying, and she has no firm grounding in values which will enable her to deal with the coming Nazi menace.

The economic downturn and the inflation that comes with it, the growing prejudice against the Jews, the increasing search for meaning through theology and philosophy, the difficulties for women who want to achieve highly but have few financial resources on which to draw, and the everyday problems of caring for a child and working full-time make Helene a kind of "Everywoman," but her lack of feeling toward her child makes her a difficult protagonist to like or understand.

Critics have praised this novel for its visions of everyday life in Germany during the most difficult times in its history, but the success of the novel depends on the reader's ability to fully accept that the Wursich family--Helene, Martha, Helene's own lovers and husband, and her son--are, in fact, ordinary, everyday people. While the author carefully establishes the physical circumstances that might lead a character to abandon responsibilities, she is less successful in her ability to show genuine emotional conflicts, and some characters fail to inspire sympathy, their actions challenging credulity. The author has created a family with an almost gothic exaggeration of its many weaknesses, and while these characters certainly wring the heart, they are so twisted and damaged--so ready to abandon responsibility--that they are difficult to see as paradigms of everyday German life. Ultimately, I found myself wondering how much of value an individual may abandon and still be considered human. Mary Whipple

In the original German version, so I've been told, the title of this book is Die Mittagsfrau, or "The Noonday Witch". According to legend, the witch appears in the heat of day to spirit away children from their distracted parents. Those who are able to engage the witch in a short conversation find that her witch-like powers evaporate.

In Julia Franck's brilliant English version (translated by the very talented Anthea Bell), Helene gradually retreats into silence and passivity, losing her ability to communicate effectively. We meet her in the book's prologue as the mother of an eight-year-old boy, leading her son towards a packed train in the direction of Berlin. Before the train arrives she tells him a white lie, abandoning him at a bench, never to return. In the succeeding 400 pages, the reader gains a glimpse as to what drove Helene to this most unnatural act.

Helene is born into a family that defines the word "dysfunction". Her charismatic, morphine-addicted older sister Martha engages her in an incestuous relationship. Her mentally unbalanced "foreign" (i.e., Jewish) mother is unable to connect with her two daughters, totally distancing from them when their father goes off to fight the Great War and becomes grievously injured. When the two sisters gain the chance to flee to Berlin, they grab it and train as nurses, exposing them to the pain of their patients and also giving them ready access to drugs.

Martha fits right into the debauchery and frantic partying of a decaying Berlin with her enlightened free-thinking friend and physician-lover, Leontine, but Helene is far more circumspect and sensitive. Her one enduring love is a philosophy student named Carl who also feels deeply and tells her, "The God principle is built on pain. Only if pain were obliterated from the world could we speak of the death of God." When he is gone from the scene, she is unable to protect herself from victimization, occurring time and time again, with sexual predators and the cruel man she eventually marries.

As readers, we watch helplessly as Helene becomes increasingly detached, her heart becoming cold and numb. So it is no surprise when she concludes of her son, "...she had nothing more for him, her words were all used up long ago, she had neither bread nor an hour's time for him, there was nothing of her left for the child."

As the book progresses, the reader is forced to adapt an omnipotent stance; we know the consequence of some of the characters' decisions and the genocide that will soon follow, but we are powerless to guide the characters through. Julia Franck instructs through omission as much as she does the details. When Helene calls Berlin to speak to Martha and gets no answer, we as readers are reasonably sure what has occurred. But it is never confirmed. As a result, as Helene goes numb, we begin to understand. And we gain some compassion for an act that virtually all mothers would consider unforgiveable.

There is a menacing quality that pervades the book, become more and more pronounced as Hitler rises in power. There is no black-and-white morality or easy outcomes; there are simply all kinds of loss - loss of one's sanity, loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of the natural order of things, loss of hope. The more the characters lose, the more they must abandon. In many ways, we know they are already as good as gone.

It is 1945: the horrors of the war are subsiding, yet devastation, poverty and fear are far from over for a young mother and her child. The urgency to flee west is paramount; all Germans have to leave Stettin ... Helene and her son Peter having finally succeeded in boarding an overcrowded train, leave for Berlin. At a small transfer station, Peter is asked to wait for his mother on the platform... She never returns. Julia Franck's novel, BLINDNESS OF THE HEART (in German: DIE MITTAGSFRAU) could not have started more dramatically with this Prologue. The author, captivated by her own father's childhood experience and trauma, took the search for possible explanations for her grandmother's behaviour, as a starting point for her book. The resulting novel has turned into a fictional, wide-ranging psychological portrait of a complex and emotionally shattered young woman, who lived through two world wars and, for her not less dramatic, the time in between.

Franck's novel is a thought-provoking and, at times, unsettling and disturbing story of one person's deep love and loss, loneliness and rejection, responsibility and neglect, and the desperate, sometimes incomprehensible, will to survive. While primarily focusing on the portrayal of Helene, and her difficult relationships to her family and close surroundings, the author, nevertheless, reaches beyond the private and individual sphere into the depiction of sections of a society in chaos and upheaval. This applies especially to the Berlin's "Golden Twenties". Franck goes into some length in bringing to life the exuberant, careless and, with hindsight, totally naive behaviour of the bourgeois middle class. Any political events or references to changing economic conditions, that give the reader a sense of passing time, are only hinted at obliquely. In her description of individuals and scenarios, the author doesn't shy away from a certain amount of stereotyping. For her, Helene remains the silent observer as she feels increasingly alienated and retreats more and more into herself. Until she meets her great love, Carl, but even in this relationship one can detect certain clichés. While their happiness takes on the shape of a fairytale, the reader knows full well, given the events recounted upfront in the Prologue that some drama will destroy whatever hope Helene had for a happier life...

Why does Helene stand out among the many young women of that time? From her early childhood she had learned that she was different: Walking around town with her father, everybody greeted them, commenting on the girl's pretty blond complexion; when accompanying her mother, the stunningly beautiful dark haired Selma, they were shunned. Selma was treated as a foreigner who one wanted to avoid at all cost. Reality was difficult and Helene didn't know how to formulate her burning questions about the two religions, her parents' deep affection for each other, or her mother's growing remoteness. Instead she retreated into silence, totally rejected by her mother and, eventually, abandoned by her father; she clings closely to Martha, her older sister. "[Selma's] heart is blind from all the pain" explains Martha. Are there parallels to Helene's "heart of stone?

Reading BLINDNESS OF THE HEART as a psychological portrait of one young woman, half-Jewish, intelligent and beautiful, whose circumstances may not have been unique, but were by no means common, I could relate to and empathize with Franck's central character most of the time. As an illustration of the total disintegration of sectors of German society in the twenties and thirties, in particular, I found the novel lacking in depth and specifics. For a German reader, many place names, such as Bautzen, Stettin, Pirna (where Selma is taken for treatment), etc. have strong historical connotations. Bautzen, where Helene grew up, is synonymous with brutal imprisonment, whether during the Nazi regime or later, until the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Stettin (Szczecin), where Helene lived until her flight to the West was, during the Third Reich, a centre for forced labour and prison transports into nearby concentration camps. Pirna is known for its "Sanatorium" where thousands of inmates were murdered during the early 1940s. However, Franck gives no indication as to the realities surrounding Helene, nor that her heroine was to any degree aware of such realities.

BLINDNESS OF THE HEART is Julia Franck's fourth novel and winner of the German Bookprize 2007. It is her first, though, to be translated into English and by the outstanding Anthea Bell. Frank's language is somewhat unusual, not only has it a touch of the old fashioned stories from the Eastern regions of Germany, it is at times, and in contrast with the event described, poetic in its choice of words and expressions. The complete absence of any punctuation in direct speech, is unusual, yet eventually, it makes the text flow and creates immediacy beyond speech. [Friederike Knabe]

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