Starred Review. Why would a mother abandon her seven-year-old son at a train station in 1945 Germany just as the fighting ends? In her powerful first novel to be translated into English, Franck poses the question before tracking back to the woman's WWI childhood. As the story progresses from one war to the next, Franck wrestles with a much broader question--why did so many Germans appear blind to the horrors on their horizon? Helene is the younger of two daughters of an Aryan father who survives the battlefield to die a pitiful death at home, and a Jewish mother who is something of a 20th-century Cassandra. The sisters flee rural life (and their mother) and are taken in by a relative in Berlin, where they are engulfed by the city's interwar debauchery. But as the economy deteriorates and the political situation heats up, Helene and her sister make do with fewer resources and dwindling freedoms. Helene finds love with a Jewish philosophy student, but succumbs, after a cruel twist, to another, colder man. Franck's insights are profound and alarming, and her storytelling makes the familiar material read fresh.
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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
