Confession With Blue Horses

<b>Confessions with Blue Horses is a beautifully written novel, vivid, thought provoking and engaging. Shortlisted for The Costa book awards 2019. </b> <br /><br />A story of East and West Germany and the devastating impact of political division has on an ordinary family’s life when the quest to find a missing sibling and the truth about a childhood in the GDR becomes an obsession. <br /><br />Beautifully written and a very thought provoking story of a family in Berlin during the dying days of communism, this is a heartbreaking exploration of a family cruelly torn apart, and each in their own way trying to put the past behind them even though memories torture them every day.<br /><br />I really enjoyed this novel and while its not a history of the divide in East WestGermany it certainly does an excellent job of drawing the reader in and giving them an insight into life in the GDR just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a wonderful sense of time and place in this atmospheric novel and you feel the fear and dread of the characters as they remember back to a time when saying the wrong word come could have serious consequences for a whole family.<br /><br />This is a memorable and thought provoking novel that really kept me turning the pages.

| | <a href="https://wishfullyreading.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow noopener"> blog</a> | <a href="https://tragedies-and-dreams.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow noopener"> tumblr</a> | <a href="https://ko-fi.com/wishfullyreading" rel="nofollow noopener">ko-fi</a> | |<br /><br />3.25 stars<br /><br /><blockquote>“A year or so after my mother died, I received an unexpected inheritance.”</blockquote><br /><br />In <i>Confession with Blue Horses</i> Sophie Hardach captures the fraught atmosphere between East and West Germany. <br /><br />When Ella, a rather aimless thirty-something year old, comes across some of her mother's diaries, she's drawn back to her birth city, Berlin, where, assisted by an intern archivist, she will try to uncover who betrayed her parents all those years ago and the fate of her younger brother, Heiko.<br />Moving between past and contemporary Berlin, Hardach's contrasts the stifling climate, as well as fear and suspicion, that pervaded the lives of GDR citizens to the bohemian and artistic Berlin of the 2010s. Yet, as Ella discovers on her trip, few people have forgotten the past.<br /><br />While the 'daughter finds papers/diaries from a female relative and decides to uncover secrets from the past' is a rather tired premise, Hardach focuses on a time that has not received enormous attention in fiction (these type of dual narratives usually take place between now and WWII). Hardach excels in depicting Berlin and its different people, showing us that families, like Ella's, can have divided allegiances. Rather than completely demonising those who worked for or respected the GDR, she gives these characters a chance to express themselves and their views. Her narrative navigates themes such as guilt and culpability with poignancy.<br />Given the nature of this story's subject Hardach touches upon some frankly horrific topics, but she does so with an unsentimental approach. <br /><br />What perhaps kept me from being fully immersed in this novel was the characterisation of certain characters. While those who have only small appearances struck me as believable, Ella and her family lacked...personality. Her parents and Toby in particular seemed somewhat unfinished portraits. While I understood that someone with PTSD could be a difficult character to render, someone like Toby should have had a lot more development. Ella too was very much reduced to her quest to find the truth about her parents failed escape attempt and of what happened to her little brother. Supposedly she is an artist but she never seems to think of her art or artistic process.<br /><br />Not only does the storyline switch between Ella's childhood to her present but there are a few chapters from the third perspective that focus on Aaron. These chapters felt somewhat out of place. Aaron remained a bit of a non-entity, whose only purpose is to assist Ella in her quest.<br /><br />While I really appreciated the way Hardach's handles difficult subjects matters, the wit and sorrow of her prose, and the mentions of <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/61946.Christa_Wolf" title="Christa Wolf" rel="noopener">Christa Wolf</a>, part of me was left wanting more. The storyline treads a familiar and fairly predictable path.<br /><br /><a href="https://wishfullyreading.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow noopener">Read more reviews on my blog</a> / / / <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9429655-anna-luce" rel="nofollow noopener">View all my reviews on Goodreads</a>

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was still a child in 1989 and could hardly grasp the implications of what was happening. Yet, even as a little boy watching events on television thousands of miles away, I could feel that something momentous was taking place. Of course, the fall of the Wall was symbolic not just of a new era for Germany, but also of a more widespread collapse of communist regimes in Europe, and a thawing of relations between East and West. <br /><br />It was, perhaps, inevitable that, given the weight of expectations created by this occasion, a sense of disappointment and frustration would soon set in. After all, new-found liberty and democracy, however strongly desired, would not and could not solve all political problems. New realities also presented tough challenges to many people, who had lived for decades – possibly tolerably well – under different rules and now had to adapt to what seemed an alien lifestyle. This might explain the appetite for books and movies such as Good Bye, Lenin! which seem to feed on a sense of yearning for life under the GDR, or at least, for some of its less unsavoury aspects. This feeling was widespread enough to justify the coining of a word for it – “Ostalgie”. Now, many would surely agree that “nostalgia for the East” is misplaced and uncalled for – an apology for en evil regime. One could also argue that Ostalgie is not directed at the GDR, but that it is a longing for a “construct”, a fantasy world which never really existed. <br /><br />In any case, however, it is hardly surprising that even some ex-citizens of the GDR subscribe to a romanticised view of East Germany. After all, despite the suffering occasioned by the GDR’s dictatorial leaders, the suffocating political atmosphere and the privations, many people still managed to go on their daily life: people went to work, fell in love, got married, built families. As the past recedes, it becomes more of a foreign country and its increasing exoticism smudges and rubs off its darker corners. <br /><br />Memory, memories and the way they articulate the past are an important theme in Sophie Hardach’s Confession with Blue Horses. The novel follows two intertwining timelines. One is set in the final years of the GDR, and introduces us to the Valentin family: art historians Regine and Jochen, and their children Ella, Tobi and Heiko. The Valentins live in East Berlin, in an apartment block very close to the Wall. Both Regine and Valentin have managed to carve out a respectable academic career under the regime, publishing books which have been granted state approval. But they both are becoming restless, and with the help and influence dissident artist friends, they attempt to defect to the West. Their plan goes horribly wrong. This brings us to the novel’s present – the year 2010. Ella who is now in her early thirties and, like her brother Tobi, is settled in London, comes across some documents belonging to her mother. They rekindle her curiosity as to what really happened to her family – particularly her mother and her brother Heiko – after the abortive defection attempt. Ella returns to a changed East Berlin and, with the help of an intern at the Stasi archives, conducts her own investigation, with some startling and unexpected results.<br /><br />Confession with Blue Horses is a brilliant book. First of all, Hardach has a good story, and she knows how to tell it well. The changes from first-person (when Ella is speaking in the “present”), to third-person narrative, highlight Ella’s central role in the novel, but also bring an element of stylistic variety which keeps the reader interested, as does the alternation of timelines. There are several nail-biting key scenes (such as the night-time escape to the West) which convey very graphically the sense of danger engendered by the regime and its Stasi watchdogs. Hardach never tries to turn her novel into a thriller or spy story – she is more interested in her characters and their motivations than in exciting plot twists. Yet, she does give attention to plot, and the way she gradually reveals salient elements of her story turn this novel into an unlikely page-turner. <br /><br />More importantly, however, the novel addresses potentially controversial themes with a great sense of balance. Hardach does not flinch from portraying the cruelty of the regime, the harsh punishments meted out to its prisoners and the daily privations of the GDR citizens (queueing for ages for basic goods). And yet, we are also given the points of view of people such as Regine’s mother, a Nazi concentration camp survivor who genuinely believes in the Communist ideal and views the West with suspicion, even as her daughter lies in jail. We even get to hear the point of view of two ex-Stasi guards, who see themselves as having been upright citizens defending the state and the law – they are despicable characters but they are still afforded the chance to defend themselves. <br /><br />The book also raises related thorny issues. For instance, does knowing the full truth about the dark times of the GDR really lead to healing, or does it just reopen old wounds? Is “remembering” always the best way of honouring the past and its victims, or is it, sometimes, too large a price to pay?<br /><br />Amongst critically-trumpeted new novels, it might be easy to miss Sophie Hardach’s Confession with Blue Horses. That would be a shame. Look out for it.<br /><br />(for a fuller version of this review, including music by East German composers, visit <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/06/confession-with-blue-horses-Sophie-Hardach.html">https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/20...</a> )

<b>(4.5)</b> Alas that I read this too late for it to make it onto my Best of 2019 rundown. I’m grateful to the Costa Awards shortlist for making me aware of a book I might never have heard of otherwise – and would probably have discounted for superficial reasons like an unknown author, a weird title, a twee cover and my lack of interest in East German history. (Come on, we all judge books like this sometimes, don’t we?)<br /><br />In 2010 Ella, a faltering artist living on a boat in London, receives a parcel of her late mother’s belongings: some art books, a notebook, a letter to a German archive, and a photograph of a painting of three blue horses. Ella remembers a family story that grew up around this painting done by a friend: there once were three children (Ella and her younger brothers, Tobi and Heiko) who lived in a bathtub, but a sorcerer took them away to his castle and turned them into blue horses. When her parents, East German art historians who came under Stasi surveillance, were caught trying to defect during a ‘vacation’ in Hungary in the summer of 1987, the children were taken away from them. Ella and Tobi were returned to their grandmother while their mother served a prison sentence, but Heiko was adopted by loyalists.<br /><br />Ella is determined to find her brother, whom they’ve had no word of since, and to resume her mother’s correspondence with the Stasi archive to find out more about why she was arrested and who betrayed them. Interspersed with her first-person sections are chapters from the perspective of Aaron, an English intern at the archive who helps Ella by literally piecing together her family’s records from a bag of shredded paper.<br /><br />I soon realized I’d had no idea of what went on in the divided Germany. You don’t think of propaganda, spying and state oppression as things that could still happen in the West in the late 1980s. So I felt that I learned a lot by reading this, but it’s never worthy or didactic. Mostly I found it very emotionally involving as you trace this one ordinary family’s losses and reconstruction. Ella, like so many others who make the pilgrimage to the archive, comes to wonder whether the truth is all it’s cracked up to be – can it ever bring about the desired justice and peace of mind? I could see this being a good book club book as well.<br /><br /><b>Two favorite lines:</b><br /><br />“I’m working on a topography of memory.”<br />“History is written by adults, isn’t it?”<br /><br /><b>Readalikes:</b><br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2470836072" rel="nofollow noopener">Everything Under</a> by Daisy Johnson<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3036278135" rel="nofollow noopener">Testament</a> by Kim Sherwood<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2737684150" rel="nofollow noopener">Bottled Goods</a> by Sophie van Llewyn<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2917592450" rel="nofollow noopener">The Hiding Game</a> by Naomi Wood

This book had me hooked from the very beginning - such a strong story with a really satisfying ending. When Tobi's and Ella's German mother dies in 2010, Ella decides to follow the trail her mother took back to the former East Berlin to search for their missing brother Heiko. The family lived in East Germany, but only a year before the wall comes down they try to escape to the West with terrible consequences. Ella visits the old Stasi archive where Aaron, an English intern, is piecing together histories and confessions from the bags of shredded paper. <br />I found it especially interesting because my German mother remembers fleeing from East Germany to the West in 1949 when she was six. Her mother and two sisters crossed a bridge at night with some of the family silver hidden under the mattress in the pram where my mother sat. She remembers being frightened by gunfire.

Are you old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? As a child growing up near the (then) Czechoslovakian border, a line of barbed wire that, according to my grandmother, gave way to a minefield, with watchtowers casting beams of light into the night, I had always been aware of the divide between East and West. We grew up with stories of people trying to flee across borders, concealed in cars, swimming across dark waters or running through dense forests, and getting shot by border guards. There was a song that used to make me cry, of someone imagining freedom on the other side of the wall. So when I read the premise of this book, it was very much close to my heart! <br /><br />CONFESSION WITH BLUE HORSES is a heart-breaking story of the Valentin family living in East Berlin in the former GDR, in a small apartment close to the Wall. Regine and Jochen Valentin may have well-respected positions in academia and have a reasonably good life in the East, but feel stifled by the restrictions of the Socialist government. In a country where everyone is always watching you, and an informer and traitor could be living in your own home, it is dangerous to have dreams. So it is no surprise that tragedy soon follows in their wake.<br /><br />Twenty years later, Ella Valentin and her brother Tobi are adults living in London. Whilst Tobi has left their childhood trauma behind and has made a good life for himself, Ella still lives in the shadow of her mother’s past and the disappearance of their little brother Heiko. Now that her mother is dead, it is up to her to continue searching for him, and she decides to go to Berlin to find some information in the old GDR archives that may give her some clues as to where to look for him.<br /><br />Did you know that the East German state took children from politically undesirable parents and gave them up for adoption to punish them for their “unruly behaviour"? This was also supposed to ensure that the children would receive a good socialist upbringing from their adoptive parents, who were chosen amongst those loyal to the party line. This policy targeted parents who had been trying to escape and had been caught, and whose children were forcibly removed from them, as was the case with the Valentin children. Whilst Ella and Tobi, as the older children, were allowed to remain in their grandmother’s care, the baby Heiko – a much more desirable child for adoption – was taken away and never heard from again. How utterly heartbreaking! I could not imagine many worse things than having your child taken from you, and never knowing his fate, and I shed many a tear over this when reading Sophie Hardach’s touching story.<br /><br />Hardach does a great job in describing life in the former GDR both through adults’ as well as a child’s eyes. Whilst Ella remembers her childhood before their attempt to escape fondly, her mother’s view is a very different one. I loved the way the painting of the blue horses had a double meaning in the story – it also meant something very personal to me, as I have special childhood memories attached to Frank Marc’s painting of his blue horses. Hardach’s story really touched my heart, maybe because my childhood was coloured by living close to the iron curtain and I related to many of her descriptions of the era. I also really enjoyed the reactions of various characters to life after the fall of the wall – what an eye opener!<br /><br />All in all, CONFESSION WITH BLUE HORSES was a heart-breaking snapshot of life in the former GDR, taken both through a child’s and adult eyes. Lovers of historical fiction will appreciate Hardach’s eye for detail when describing East Berlin and her account of living under the ever-watchful eye of an unforgiving socialist government. Very highly recommended, even though the title may seem a bit strange ....<br /><br /><b>4.5 stars</b><br /><br /><i>Thank you to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.</i><br /><br /><a href="http://butbooksarebetter.blogspot.com.au" rel="nofollow noopener"> *blog*</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/butbooksarebetter/" rel="nofollow noopener"> *facebook*</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/butbooksarebetter2/" rel="nofollow noopener"> *instagram*</a> <br /><br /><br />

<blockquote> <i>‘Once upon a time, there were three children who lived in a bathtub. Then one day, the sorcerer came and…’ His voice was half drowned by the noise of the creek, but it did not matter, I knew the story so well. ‘… and took the children away,’ I continued. ‘And he carried them off to his castle, and there he turned them into three horses, into three blue horses.’ ‘But their grandmother went after them. She killed the sorcerer, she lifted the spell, and she brought the children home.’ ‘Except she didn’t bring all three of them home, did she?’ I reached down and dipped my hand into the water. ‘She only brought two.’</i> </blockquote><br /><br />Shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Book awards Best Novel Prize this Is a slowly paced and moving exploration of late communist East Berlin in the period immediately preceding the fall of the wall (and the East German regime), of a family ripped apart after an unsuccessful escape attempt (via the Hungarian/Austrian border) in 1987, and of a family and a society still coming to terms with the past and its repercussions. <br /><br />Ella is living in London in 2010 as a struggling artist. Her brother Tobi is a landscape gardener. The failed escape attempt, when both were young children, lead to the death of their father, the imprisonment of their mother (and later exile to West Berlin in a prisoner purchase by the West), leaving them to live with their grandmother (a Buchenwald survivor who sees herself as one of the builders of the new socialist country from the rubble of the war) and the disappearance of their baby brother Heiko. <br /><br />Ella receives a small bundle of her mother’s books after her death including her trigger book (a list of things of which she is afraid as they bring back memories of her arrest, inter-gagging and detention), a picture of three blue horses (painted by the artist whose footsteps they attempted to follow on their escape, and which took on symbolism afterwards) and evidence that her mother had visited the Stasi archives to try and find out the truth about her arrest and Heiko’s fate. <br /><br />Most of the book is set in modern day Berlin as Ella decides to retrace her mother’s steps and is unofficially aided by an English intern at the archives Aaron with whom she forms a deepening attachment. The book moves fluidly between first party accounts by Ella (some in 2010, others in 1987-1989) and third party sections by Aaron in 2010 as well as parts of the Stasi files on Ella’s mother (particularly her interrogation). <br /><br />This is a gentle and affecting account, but one which never quite came to life for me. <br /><br />The insight into the East German regime is interesting if not really revelatory for anyone with knowledge of that time. The writing is competent but for all the emotional resonance of the story, a little functional and told as it is by Ella (and Aaron) we are always distanced from her mother’s true thoughts and experiences. Even Tobi, whose relationship with the past is more ambiguous than `Ella’s desire to uncover the truth, remains a bit of a cypher. <br /><br />As a result I ended the book thinking that I would rather have read a non-fictional account, because I did not feel that the imaginative advantages granted by the novel format (the greater scope to use language, the opportunities to inhabit the minds of others) were exploited to a sufficient extent to counter the loss of the fidelity that would have been present with a factual account of actual historical events and individuals.

I am drawn to stories set in the divided Germany of the decades after WWII and people’s experiences when reunification began in the 1990s. In this one, Ella’s journey to Berlin to look for her youngest brother, separated from the family as an infant when their attempt to escape over the border went catastrophically wrong, leads her to the Stasi archive. Here she meets an English intern, employed in the task of painstakingly piecing together shredded documents, who helps her to identify people who knew the family in the old days and to discover what happened. It’s a slow process but a fascinating one.<br /><br />The author introduces several interesting strands of thought and these remind me of Jenny Erpenbeck’s insights in ‘Visitation’ and ‘Go, Went, Gone’, for example the ambivalence of some Germans, in this case Ella’s grandmother, to reunification and how people returning felt like foreigners in their own country (street names changed, whole areas unrecognisable). The idea, too, that uncovering hard facts so long after the event might not be what everyone wants. Is it going to be helpful to rake over old coals and apportion blame? Will Heiko be happy to be found?<br /><br />A passage that struck me particularly:<br /><br /><i>It was something he had noticed before in East Germans, in the ones who were children when the Berlin wall fell. Nothing surprised them. They seemed to have no expectation of the world being any particular way: they knew that anything could happen, and when it did, they simply adjusted to it. He found it a slightly unsettling but somehow admirable quality, this absence of surprise. It made you realise how naive you were to take the current state of things for granted, to think you knew what might happen next, to be taken aback when things turned out differently.</i><br /><br />Much food for thought here. I enjoyed this book very much, both the story and the characters. High quality writing and a well-measured, non-judgemental view on people’s behaviour during really quite recent events. I’ve no hesitation in recommending it.<br /><br />With thanks to Head of Zeus via NetGalley for an ARC.

What I like about this book is that the prose is written with great clarity, and that it offers a measured, non-judgmental approach to the GDR: characters, for example, who had suffered under the Nazi regime return from the camps and wholeheartedly embrace communism as an alternative. <br /><br />That said, the story is told is a fashion which has been well-used: the daughter in the near-present (2010) uncovers papers that belonged to her mother, travels to Berlin and with the help of an archivist pieces together the secrets of her family's past - there are many, many books which follow exactly the same trajectory and this over-familiarity of structure and plot took away from the story for me.<br /><br />Hardach asks important questions about how we today come to terms with Europe's turbulent past, and in the character of Heiko shows that trying to undo what has happened, unpicking history, isn't always best for the people involved. So an intelligent engagement with the legacies of post-war Germany but it would have been better for me if the plotting had been fresher.

I had had my eye on Sophie Hardach's novel, <i>Confession with Blue Horses</i>, for some time before I borrowed a copy from my local library's app.  The novel revolves around a family living in East Germany, who are affected in myriad ways when the wall dividing East and West Berlin is raised, and when it finally comes down.  I am fascinated by German history, and have read surprisingly little set within the relatively modern period.  The Times writes that Hardach's 'unsentimental novel gives a nuanced picture of East Germany', and it thus felt like a good starting point.<br /><br />Siblings Tobi and Ella grew up in East Berlin; their childhood is 'shrouded in mystery'.  As adults, both live in London, but wonder frequently about their past.  Both 'remember their family's daring and terrifying attempt to escape, which ended in tragedy; but the fall-out from that single event remains elusive.'  Ella particularly wonders where her parents went when they disappeared, and what happened to their younger brother, Heiko.  Ella also asks herself whether there was 'ever a painting of three blue horses', something which lives vividly in her memory, but which she has no proof of.<br /><br />The prologue of <i>Confession with Blue Horses</i> begins in 1987.  Here, Ella speaks of the 'jagged nervousness that was typical of both my parents, who were never quite sure how to handle us.'  We are soon catapulted into the action of the family making their escape attempt from East Berlin, trying to get over the border into the west of the city to regain their freedom.  They are not allowed to take anything with them; Ella recalls: 'My two little brothers were all they carried.  We did not need suitcases, tickets, passports, keys.'<br /><br />The story then moves forward in time to 2010, where Ella is living in an 'old fishing boat that had been dumped into Deptford Creek'.  There are, perhaps, some unlikely elements within this story.  On her deathbed, Ella's mother begged her not to try to find their younger brother, who went missing during their escape attempt: 'We had been looking for him for years, it was our only real activity together, and I had expected her last request to be the exact opposite: that I would spend the rest of my days searching for him.'<br /><br />Alongside Ella and Tobi's childhood, and their present in London, a parallel story takes place in contemporary Berlin.  Here, an English PhD student named Aaron is working as an archivist, 'piecing together the tragic history of thousands of families' during the tumultuous period of divisions within Germany: 'With a faint pang of guilt he realised that he was treating his internship as a thriller.  Which was probably inappropriate given how much suffering these millions of pages documented, but then again, it was thrilling; certainly more thrilling than attending post-graduate research seminars at his university back in London.'   Aaron becomes obsessed with one particular file - that of Ella's family.  Of course, his path collides with hers when she visits Berlin, armed with a stack of notebooks given to her by her mother, and on a mission to unravel her history.<br /><br />Overall, Hardach handles the sweep of tumultuous history well, and her research feels impeccable.  She focuses on Ella's place within it, but also comments on how her parents and grandparents fared.  The way in which the story moves back and forth in time is controlled and well plotted.  I appreciated the differences which Hardach drew between the Berlin of the Wall era, and the novel's present day, which she describes in the following way: 'It was all rather fun and uplifting and yet it unsettled me because I could not find myself, or my family, in any of this.  It was not just the yoga studios and the restored facades and the ivy winding in and out of the balconies.  It was the people.  Everyone was so young and healthy looking.'  Hardach shows throughout that she understands how difficult it must be to come to terms with, and to reconcile, such a past.<br /><br />I very much enjoy the technique of using different stories set in differing time periods in novels.  I found there to be a lot of convenient coincidences within the modern day story, some of which did not quite sit right with me as a reader, but I understand that they were necessary in the grand scheme of things.   Both storylines kept me engaged throughout, and whilst I did feel detached from some of the characters, I still found it rather a compelling read.  I must admit, though, that I did not really warm to our protagonist, Ella; it felt as though she was continually holding things back, and she never felt entirely realistic to me.