The ordinary choices of ordinary people in post-war Germany

The novel moves between a large cast of characters: German soldiers and civilians, refugees, Polish and Ukrainian foreign workers who have ended up in Germany, and British soldiers trying to sort out the occupation.

The most interesting figures are the Germans. Some are Nazis, including Mayor Paulsen and his family. Others are dissidents, such as the local schoolmaster and his wife, and still others are ordinary Germans struggling to deal with the collapse of the Third Reich as the war enters its final months.

Apart from the Nazis, the least sympathetic figures are local gossips and women complaining bitterly about the behaviour of eastern European children who have ended up in their area.

There are fascinating absences in the novel. There are few references to Jews or the Holocaust and surprisingly few to the Nazis or to the tumultuous events of the previous 12 years.

Once the Deed is Done is more like the famous German TV series Heimat. Refreshingly it is not set in Berlin. Moreover big cities are barely mentioned.

Allied leaders are never discussed. It is about ordinary Germans in an ordinary town and how they cope with the end of the war.

The main soldier, Kurt, is sympathetically depicted and his parents are decent people, desperately hoping he will return alive from the Eastern Front.

When they are confronted, early on, with a huge moral choice, they hardly hesitate. The schoolmaster and his wife don’t make speeches about Hitler. They just do the right thing.

As the novel progresses it increasingly focuses on two places: a camp for foreign workers run by the British occupying army and a refugee Red Cross worker called Ruth, a beacon of decency in a dark world; and the small German town nearby.

The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht

The characters in the camp are mostly Polish and Ukrainian labourers and the novel is full of German, Polish and Ukrainian phrases.

One of the key lines in the novel is “Everyone had their lost”. A baby is abandoned by her young mother. Foreign labourers desperately try to find their lost relatives.

German parents hope against hope to be reunited with their children and increasingly the novel focuses on two kinds of soldiers: those who are missing and those who are among the first to return. Another key image is “the east”. The novel is set in west Germany, not far from Hamburg.

But there are constant references to “the east lands”, the eastern front, of course, and workers from “out east”.

Increasingly, the Poles and Ukrainians worry about whether they will be repatriated to the east, which they know means being under Stalin’s rule.

It will be a catastrophe for them and they are torn between wanting to go home and be reunited with their friends and families, and the certain knowledge that this will mean living under the communists with all that implies.

Borders are being redrawn, but Seiffert is not interested in the statesmen meeting at Yalta or Potsdam. As ever, her interest is in the human consequences for ordinary people of decisions being by the great and the good.

This is what is most powerful about Seiffert’s writing. She is so moving when she writes about people trying to deal with the consequences of the war. There are one or two references to Dachau. One or two to Potsdam.

A few to a portrait of Hitler. But otherwise this is about ordinary choices made by ordinary people.

One of the first lines in the book is, “To be truly alive means having to make choices”.

The patron saint of this gripping novel is Bertolt Brecht. This is a fascinating novel by one of our very best writers.

Once the Deed is Done
By Rachel Seiffert
Virago Press