German in the UK

Translated by Anthea Bell
Published by Harvill Secker

The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck, in a wonderful translation by Anthea Bell, was deservedly shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize this year, and is a truly great read that traverses fascinating periods of German history. The novel begins where one story ends: with Helene abandoning her seven-year-old son Peter at a train station in the far north-east of Germany. It is 1945, the war has just ended, and Franck paints this devastating moment not as the deed of a heartless mother but as the desperate act of a woman crushed by a lifetime of suffering. The Blind Side of the Heart is Helene's story, and the narrative then shuttles back to Helene's own childhood and begins her tale.

Helene's Jewish mother never recovered from the death of her baby son and rejects Helene, who is mainly brought up by her sister Martha, nine years older. When their father goes off to fight in the First World War his wife begins a descent into madness from which she will never recover. Martha's training as a nurse is put to good use when the two girls have to tend their stricken father on his deathbed, but unfortunately she also takes the morphine intended for her patient and becomes a long-term addict, and Helene her nurse. Helene's treatment of her sister is passionate and sorrowful, and at times their relationship tips over into the incestuous, such is the intensity of Martha’s loneliness.

Later the two girls manage to escape the family confines and go to Berlin to lodge with their aunt Fanny, who is wealthy as well as socially and sexually liberal a complete change of lifestyle. Although Helene's story is firmly defined by the two world wars, the highlight for me lay in these depictions of a swinging 1920s Berlin, of flapper girls and wild nights at the cabaret fuelled by alcohol and drugs, where each apartment had its fleet of domestic staff and where days were passed reading, listening to the gramophone and sleeping off the night’s excesses. It is a face of Berlin that almost completely disappeared with Hitler's regime and the Cold War, and yet Franck succeeds brilliantly in bringing it to life. Quiet Helene's take on this whirlwind lifestyle gives us a slightly off-centre view of it, more listening behind doors and crying herself to sleep, breathing a sigh of relief when everybody leaves for the next party and avoiding the unwelcome attentions of her aunt's lovers, than throwing herself into the fun as her older sister does. It is not until Helene lets herself into this world that she begins to experience real love but as things start to look up, the storm clouds of 1930s Germany gather, and the trajectory towards that final abandonment begins.

This is a profound though melancholy story, brilliantly brought alive, which captures the pathos and paradoxes of its principal character with sympathy and understanding against the sombre background of her time. It is hard to put down, even harder to forget.