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The Scrapbook by Heather Clark review: ‘I wanted to know what his grandfather had done in the war’
This is a beautiful and powerful debut novel examining intergenerational trauma, inherited guilt and all-consuming love
July 11, 2025 17:11
This is a beautiful and powerful debut novel examining intergenerational trauma, inherited guilt and all-consuming love
July 11, 2025 17:11After his death aged 91 in 2015, Heather Clark discovered that her grandfather had kept a scrapbook of his wartime experiences as a GI.
Clark, whose biography of Sylvia Plath was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, had always known he had been part of a unit that helped liberate Dachau. Yet nothing prepared her for what she found inside the book.
Lining the pages were shocking pictures that her grandfather had taken at the notorious concentration camp, among them those showing death trains from Buchenwald and corpses outside the gas chamber and crematorium.
The haunting discovery provided the inspiration for Clark’s debut novel, The Scrapbook. And what a novel it is.
The story starts in May 1996 as narrator Anna is about to graduate from Harvard. There she meets Christoph, a visiting German student, with whom she falls hopelessly in love after a heady week discussing art, music and history. Despite her Jewish roommates urging her to forget him, Anna follows her heart and books a flight to Germany.
Once there, she finds herself not only overwhelmed by the extreme highs and lows of this long-distance relationship, but also the shadow of history and her grandfather’s wartime experiences.
She is weighed down by her memories of the pictures she has seen in his scrapbook, as well as the Nazi flag her grandfather took from the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat – somewhere Clark’s own grandfather had also been. Meanwhile, she cannot help but question Christoph’s own family background.
“I thought to myself how strange it was that our grandfathers had fought on opposite sides in the war. Had they encountered each other in the killing fields east of the Rhine?”
Christoph takes Anna to bars and parties but also takes her on a tour of Germany’s wartime sites, among them Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Munich and Dachau. Seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunified Germany is still grappling with the past and Christoph is no exception.
He struggles to come to terms with this legacy, something their conversation returns to again and again.
Anna is all consumed by emotion and wants to believe they have a future together, and yet nagging doubts persist.
“He wasn’t a Nazi,” she said. “He was a 23-year-old German man wrestling with questions of evil and guilt and responsibility, questions that would probably haunt him all his life.
“But I wanted to know what his grandfather had done in the war.”
Clark has achieved an impressive feat in this beautiful and powerful novel examining the nature of intergenerational trauma, inherited guilt and all-consuming love.
The Scrapbook by Heather Clark
Jonathan Cape
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