The Dark Room tells three stories that between them trace the legacy of the Nazi period on the lives of ordinary Germans. Helmut is a young photographer in Berlin in the 30's, who lives with a withered arm in a Nazi state that has little tolerance of the less than physically perfect. Finally called up in the closing months of the war, Helmut eventually has the chance to show his patriotic fervour. Lore is twelve as the war comes to an end. As both her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies, Lore crosses Germany, shepherding her three young siblings to eventual safety at the home of her grandmother. Half a century later, Micha, a young schoolteacher, becomes obsesses with the war record of his much loved, and now dead, grandfather, who was in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front during the war. He eventually travels to Byelorussia, in his grandfather's footsteps, but returns with more questions and fewer answers, as he struggles to love his grandparents and deal with his country in the shadow of their pasts.