Confessions with Blue Horses

Sophie Hardach

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, August 21st 2019

As a child growing up in West Berlin, author and journalist Sophie Hardach gave little thought to what living in the East meant until she read a novel about a boy wondering what life on her side of the wall was like. The experience of seeing things from another’s perspective has informed her work as a writer ever since, and Confessions with Blue Horses is an extension of her youthful attempts to imagine herself growing up in that other Germany.    

The novel’s central character, Ella Valentin, is only eight when her parents attempt to flee the GDR, an act of quixotic bravery that tears the family apart. Captured on the border, her father is killed, and her mother is detained. Her baby brother Heiko is given up for adoption while she and her other brother are returned to the care of their staunchly communist Grandparents. Although reunited with her older children after the fall of the Berlin wall, Ella’s mother never fully recovers from her experiences at the hands of the authorities and spends the rest of her life looking for her youngest son, a mission that Ella continues upon her death. The search takes her back to Berlin where, with the assistance of Aaron, an intern in the Stasi archives, she recovers the transcripts of her mother’s interrogation and revisits her childhood memories, her adult eyes seeing things her younger self could not. The story that emerges is more complex and nuanced than anything she had imagined, and she begins to wonder whether Heiko needs or wants to be found. Meanwhile, what Aaron discovers through working in the archive leads him to think some truths are better left hidden, an attitude that threatens to derail both his position at the archive and his relationship with Ella.

Although the novel is a relatively light and easy read, Hardach poses some serious and challenging questions, not least about truth being a prerequisite for or an impediment to reconciliation. Throughout the novel, victims are forced by chance or circumstance to live and work beside those who have harmed and betrayed them. At the same time, perpetrators must find a way to live with the memory of their complicity, a selective forgetting as important and necessary as the acknowledgement of guilt. To make sense of such contradictions, Hardach suggests, it is fiction as much as fact that allows us to become (at least temporarily) the Other: in seeing ourselves from the outside, we realise that to them, we, too, are Other. With the numerous social and political rifts emerging around the world, Confessions with Blue Horses is a timely reminder of the devastating effects of such divisions and the potential of storytelling to overcome them.