In the spring of 1945, Hanne has a dream. As she sleeps, she hears “a confusion of works guards and munitions workers and voices on the radio. Of town boys and town woods, and English at the border. Of wide heath and winter trees, and runaways among the high trunks.” Almost immediately after waking, her dream is revealed to be a premonition: when a pair of unspeaking strangers appears in her yard, she inherits a strange burden.
Once the Deed is Done begins in a small town in the hinterland of Hamburg, where parents huddle over radio dispatches from Berlin and Britain, eager for news of their relatives and friends. Their children alternate between exploring the heath and watching the transport vehicles en route to the munitions factory on the outskirts of town, carrying materials and foreign workers. Boys from the local Hitler Youth chapter, too young to fight, whisper about the Endsieg, the end of days.
This novel is Rachel Seiffert’s sixth book, a work of historical fiction told from the perspective of characters stationed near a collapsing Western Front. Central to its story are the insidious after-effects of war which separate neighbours and starve what remains of their conscience. I say their conscience because, like The Virgin Suicides or In Cold Blood, Seiffert’s narrative approach – using multiple viewpoints and interconnecting storylines – examines how individual impulses are magnified and warped by community.
With Once the Deed is Done, Seiffert, a Booker Prize finalist and EM Forster awardee, returns to her preoccupation with the second World War. Her previous works The Dark Room and A Boy in Winter explore similar territory, drawing from deep historical study and her family’s own roots in Germany and Austria.
Seiffert’s prose is straightforward and clear, if not a bit milquetoast. The novel’s style is dramatic in the true sense of the word: it’s threaded with conversation and packed with scenes. Thanks to an in-depth foreword and epilogue, the novel’s historical context is omnipresent. As a result, the stakes are so high that Seiffert trusts they speak for themselves – occasionally, they do not. However, Seiffert resists the urge to turn any character into a motif or psychological study; the result is a powerful panorama of postwar Germany.
