The good bits: Terrific sense of time and place, and an excellent depiction of how families splinter when values and loyalties are tested.

The not-as-good-bits: Much of the plot relies on the deviousness of an archive employee and although this makes an interesting parallel (to informers and the Stasi), I wasn’t fully convinced about the character’s motivations.

When should you read it?: As soon as your mind turns to your ‘next Berlin book’ (because that’s a thing, right?).

3/5

I received my copy of Confession With Blue Horses from the publisher, Head of Zeus, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, I'd given no thought to the archival information that would be out there. As a volunteer in our local archives I found it fascinating as well as the research that would have bean involved in writing the book. The piecing together of snippets of family history kept me interested to the end. Definitely an author to watch. Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

An emotional and thought-provoking tale of heartbreak and betrayal in a divided Germany


Ella is an artist living in London, but her childhood was spent growing up in East Berlin. She and her brother Tobi are still haunted by the memories of her family’s daring escape attempt that ended in tragedy, and how their younger brother Heiko was taken away from them afterwards, never to be seen again. When Ella finds a stash of notebooks written by her mother, she decides to travel back to Berlin to try and use the information contained within them to find out what happened to Heiko. With the help of English archivist Aaron, she begins to unravel the secrets of her past and the heartbreak that befell her family all those years ago.


This was a well-written and intriguing story with an original and fascinating setting. Post-war Germany is a very dark and interesting period in history in which to set a novel and yet not one I have encountered many times before, which gave the book an original feel.


The narrative alternates between Ella and Aaron in the present and the Valentin family in the past, including the three children and their art historian parents Jochen and Regine. The adults are trying to continue their careers by publishing books that are' state-approved' but becoming restless and frustrated at the limitations their government is putting on creativity. The build-up to their decision to make a break for freedom feels both understandable and yet also doomed to failure by the reader's knowledge of Ella's present situation. The controlling nature of the Stasi regime in East Berlin and the cruelty of their interrogation processes are all the more potent for being based on real and relatively recent events, and the author manages to expertly convey the atmosphere of control and fear felt by Ella’s parents alongside the slightly naïve nature of Ella herself. The two timelines merge together to paint a picture of what happened to the Valentin family, and as Ella uncovers this in the present, we learn about it in the past.


Although exciting and suspenseful, the story never really turns into a 'thriller' and as a result, the pace does slow a bit at times. Additionally, none of the specific characters is particularly memorable, and it is the experiences they go through rather than their personalities that keep you turning pages. Despite this, the nature of the story and its basis in historical fact keeps the reader engrossed and wanting to find out what happened.


Overall, this was an intriguing and touching story of family and betrayal, and although it lacked punchiness, it was still moving and readable. I would recommend it for fans of historical fiction.


Daenerys


Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of this book to review.

Completely gripping, fascinating, emotive- this is such a good read! Highly, highly recommend this book.
The Valentin family are East Berliners, who decide to try and reach a better life in the West. This is before 1989 and the fall of the wall. The impact and consequences of this decision are beautifully described in this fantastic book. The fallout of their decision and the impact on their family.
This novel has a dual timeline of 1987 and 2010. In 2010 Ella (the daughter) has returned to Berlin to try to find out exactly what happened, and the story takes you through her research into the archives and her conversations with witnesses of this time.
The descriptions of East Berlin, and life there in 1987, evoke a very different time. One that existed fairly recently but has all but disappeared today. This story is fiction but it could so easily be true. The events described are very similar to the experiences of real people during this time, which gives this book such a big impact. It is hard to believe now that these things really happened, that people were treated in this way, is shocking.
I could not put this book down, I desperately wanted to know how things would turn out. Such a good book! If I could award 10 stars I would!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

(a fuller review is available on my blog at https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/06/confession-with-blue-horses-Sophie-Hardach.html

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.

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?

A passage that struck me particularly:

‘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.’

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.