‘They have built a new stone wall right through Berlin.’
This month we read Confessions with Blue Horses (2020), shortlisted for the Costa Book Award written by Sophie Hardach. It was a book we all enjoyed very much. Born a decade before reunification, Hardach grew up near Frankfurt in West Germany, but her novel focuses on an East German family.
In 2010 Ella and her brother Tobi live in England although their childhoods were spent in East Berlin. In an extended family which included her maternal grandparents (Oma and Opa). They have happy memories despite the grim poverty of the city – poor food, crumbling buildings, only books and pictures which adhere to the Party line. Nevertheless, Ella remembers the warmth and love – her academic impractical parents, her staunch Socialist Oma and the meals she conjures out of very little, and she especially remembers her lovely little brother Haiku aged only two.
Then it all ends, for her parents ill-advisedly attempted to escape over the Hungarian border. They were caught, her father was shot, her mother imprisoned, and little Haiku was taken from them and given to a loyal Communist couple.
Now Ella’s mother has died and Ella given a bundle of papers relating to the past, opening up mysteries which Ella determines to solve and continue the quest to find Haiko. She travels to an almost unrecognisable Berlin and, with the help of Aaron an intern at the newly opened Stasi Centre, finds fragments which show what her mother had to endure with accounts of interrogations and the prisons she was in.
Hannach skilfully handles her plot – weaving past and present together as well as the sub-plot about Aaron. It is a slow burn of a book; the truth is gradually revealed, and the grim details are filtered through Aaron and Ella’s eyes as they piece the shredded archive fragments together.
She makes a vivid comparison between the lively colourful modern city and what it once was – in fact Ella has difficulty in finding her old home. Nevertheless, shades of the past remain – Stasi loyalists infiltrate guided tours of the prison and cause trouble; Stasi members still work in the Stasi Archives sifting and sorting the papers and Ella is able to meet the prison guard and also her mother’s interrogator who are living comfortable lives. I particularly liked the contrast between the bleak repressive regime and the warmth and love of Ella’s family, past and present. It was an enjoyable and readable book on a subject rarely written about. One reviewer called it a ‘life affirming book’ and it is one we would recommend.