CANR
WORK TITLE: The Granddaughter
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berlin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
LAST VOLUME: CANR 217
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 6, 1944, in Grossdornberg, Germany; son of Edmund (a seminary professor and pastor) and Irmgard Schlink.
EDUCATION:Studied at University of Heidelberg; graduated from Free University of Berlin, 1968; Ruprecht Karl University, J.D., 1975; Albert-Ludwigs University, Privatdozent, 1981.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Judge, legal educator, and writer. Member of German Bar; Constitutional Court, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, justice, 1988-2006. Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University, Bonn, Germany, professor, 1982-91; J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, professor, 1991-92; Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, professor, 1992-2006. Consultant in legal field.
MEMBER:PEN Centre Germany.
AWARDS:Grinzane Cavour Prize, 1997; Prix Laure Bataillon, 1997; Fisk Fiction Prize, Boston Book Review, 1998; Die Welt, 1999; Heinrich Heine Prize, 2000; Chevalier, Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, 2001; Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2004; Park Kyong-ni Prize.
WRITINGS
Abridged and unabridged versions of The Reader were adapted for audiocassette, read by Campbell Scott, Random House AudioBooks, 1999; The Reader was turned into a feature film in 2008 under the direction of Stephen Daldry.
SIDELIGHTS
Bernhard Schlink is a respected judge and professor of constitutional law in his native Germany, but it is as an award-winning writer of mystery novels that he became known to the public. These novels, according to critic Ulf Zimmermann in World Literature Today, are “grounded in the realities of past and present Germany.” Though he continued to write fiction tying together the past and present of various German characters, with his best-selling 1995 novel Der Vorleser the format of his fiction broadened to include stories written outside of the crime genre. Some reviewers noted this change as Schlink’s shift to create more literary work, rather than staying focused on the more formulaic crime publications he previously published.
Der Vorleser, translated as The Reader, was the first of Schlink’s novels to be published in the United States. The novel was received with enthusiasm by New York Times critic Richard Bernstein, among others. The Reader, which is over 200 pages long and sparely written, narrates the first- person story of Michael Berg, a young German born during World War II. As a teenager Michael has a passionate sexual affair with Hanna, a woman twenty years his senior, who has helped him recover after an attack of hepatitis fells him on the street. Some ten years later, Michael, now a law student, is an official observer at the trial of a group of former concentration camp guards, among whom is Hanna. He discovers that Hanna, although guilty of some of the crimes attributed to her, is being used as a scapegoat by her fellow defendants who want to pin on her the entire blame for a particular atrocity, the burning of a church with hundreds of Jewish women sheltering inside it. For mysterious reasons that Michael comes to understand but not reveal publicly, Hanna does not disclose a crucial fact that could free her; instead, she goes to prison. Eighteen years later, she is freed, to Michael’s discomfort. “What he then learns about Hanna’s strivings, the pains she took during her years in prison to achieve moral absolution, is almost unbearably poignant,” declared Bernstein.
Hinting at a possible autobiographical element in the novel, Bernstein praised Schlink for crafting The Reader with “marvelous directness and simplicity, his writing stripped bare of any of the standard gimmicks of dramatization.” The novel, Bernstein wrote, is “a lesson in the mysteriousness of individual lives and in the impossibility for the moral, reflective individual to live free from the entanglements of history.” The reviewer quoted, as evidence of the novel’s quality, a passage in which Michael, trying both to understand Hanna and to condemn her, finds it impossible to do both at the same time. Remarked Bernstein about this dilemma: “It is a mark of Mr. Schlink’s depth and honesty that he makes no effort to resolve it.”
Another appreciative review of The Reader came from Library Journal critic Michael T. O’Pecko, who found the novel “very readable” and the characterization of Hanna “achingly complex.” Zimmermann felt that “Germans of Michael’s age will find themselves in singular empathy with the narrator and his tale”; moreover, the reviewer predicted, “the utter artlessness Schlink has given its telling will … likewise completely take in other readers and compel them to unprecedented reflection. Not much fiction on ‘mastering the past’ has been more powerful and poignant than this unassuming- looking little volume.”
When comparing The Reader to Schlink’s first collection of stories, 2000’s Liebesfluchten: Geschichten, Jeffrey Adams commented in a World Literature Today review of the latter that both works are evidence of Schlink’s transition from writing popular, entertaining mysteries to more literary works of fiction. Nonetheless, noted Adams, both The Reader and the stories in Liebesfluchten, which was published in English in 2001 as Flights of Love, maintain “the twisting plots and surprise endings of the crime genre and the undemanding, straightforward style that makes such an easy read.” In addition, described Adams, in both books Schlink puts “his characters not only in interpersonal relationships, but also in relation to social reality and the political past.” One of the seven stories contained in Flights of Love is “A Little Fling,” which focuses on an East German couple struggling with marital issues that are in part caused by the political actions each has taken: the husband secretly sold intelligence reports to avoid consequences associated with his wife’s earlier political behavior. Later, in anger after learning of her husband’s earlier actions, the wife has a one-night affair with a West German, who is the narrator of the story.
The interplay between past and present, and the continued effect that certain events and psychological issues have on actions and connections to the world, are common elements explored in the Flights of Love. “Girl with Lizard” centers on one man’s long-standing fascination with a painting of a girl and a lizard. The painting is from the man’s less-than-positive childhood, and upon his father’s death, it becomes his most prized inheritance. Through his investigation of the painting and how his father might have acquired it, the man resolves some issues carried from his past. The painting, specifically his fixation on the girl in the painting, also has a significant influence on his real-life relationships with women. New York Times Book Review contributor Jennifer Schuessler named this story as one of the collection’s strongest.
In her review, Schuessler wrote: “Schlink’s tales of botched and betrayed love unfold in a stripped-down prose … that is pleasingly crystalline when viewed from some angles and simply colorless from others. … The strongest stories here—‘Girl with Lizard,’ ‘Sugar Peas,’ ‘The Other Man’—are striking portraits of men waking up belatedly, if incompletely, to the cost of self- deception and the elusive nature of happiness.” “Sugar Peas” was also named by a Kirkus Reviews critic as one of the best stories in an uneven collection. “Sugar Peas” portrays an architect in the midst of a midlife crisis. During the story, the man recalls the political ideals he held before beginning his successful career, he realizes his dream of becoming a painter, and he engages in extramarital affairs. The Kirkus Reviews critic referred to the stories in Flights of Love as “patiently detailed, emotionally complex” and called Schlink “a sober, meticulous craftsman [who offers] plainspoken analyses of the often extraordinary inner dimensions of outwardly ordinary lives.”
Schlink returns to a more explicit examination of history and its implications in Homecoming. The novel focuses on the quest of protagonist Peter Debauer to find out more about his father, whom he does not remember and who reportedly died during World War II. Debauer discovers the fragments of a novel, plotted much like The Odyssey, in which a German soldier makes his way home after being released from a prisoner of war camp. Sensing parallels between this novel’s narrative and his father’s own story, Debauer sets out to learn whether its pseudonymous author could actually be his father. Some reviewers found Homecoming to be less compelling than Schlink’s earlier fiction, particularly The Reader. Booklist reviewer Ian Chipman, for example, felt that the novel’s ambitious themes create “far too much ballast to support [the book’s] own weight.”
A writer for Kirkus Reviews observed that while Homecoming sometimes offers “an absorbing portrayal of a sobering quest for self-knowledge, the novel is redundant, and it drags.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer, on the other hand, considered Homecoming perhaps Schlink’s “most powerful and disquieting” novel to date. Describing the book as “sensitive and disturbing,” New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger praised Schlink’s honesty and courage in so unflinchingly exploring the question of his character’s connection with Nazism.
Schlink’s well-received crime novels feature protagonist Gerhard Self, who had served as a public prosecutor during the Nazi era and now, in his late sixties, works as a private investigator in newly unified Germany. He has managed to come to terms with his past enthusiasm for National Socialism, achieving what he calls, in Self’s Punishment, an “elaborate balance” of “guilt and atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation” that he hopes will allow him to live his life quietly. But this balance is shaken when the detective is hired by a childhood friend to nab a computer hacker who is interfering with operations at Rhineland Chemical Works. Self attempts to trap the criminal, but things go awry and the hacker is murdered. In the aftermath, Self must face his demons once again.
Frank Sennett, reviewing the novel in Booklist, praised it as a “fascinating exploration of how people often manage to carve out normal lives even after being complicit in terrible acts.”
Self uncovers a massive political cover-up in Self’s Deception. After agreeing to investigate the disappearance of Leonore Salger, daughter of the government undersecretary, Self is told that the young woman had been a psychiatric patient and died after falling from a window a week earlier. But the story seems phony. Self keeps looking for more information, only to discover that Leonore has gone into hiding after being connected with a terrorist attack on a U.S. military base on German soil. The government does not want information about the attack getting out; nor is the undersecretary really Leonore’s father.
A writer for Publishers Weekly felt that Self’s Deception lacks narrative drive, but that Self’s eccentricities are so enjoyable that they compensate for a story line that is often “meandering.” Charles Taylor, writing in the New York Times Book Review, made a similar point. “The novel’s mystery is too pokey and convoluted to sustain much suspense or emotional involvement,” commented Taylor, but even so, “Self makes for pretty good company.”
The third novel in the “Gerhard Self” series, Selbs Mord, which was translated into English by Peter Constantine in 2009 as Self’s Murder, was first published in 2001. Self is recruited by Weller & Welker private bank executive Bertram Welker to help uncover the identity of a man who financially boosted the family bank more than a century earlier. With the help of bank archivist Adolf Schuler, Self is put on the correct trail, but one that additionally leads to criminal conspiracies, including money laundering, kidnapping, fraud, and murder with Third Reich historical connections.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that the author “constructs a series of Chinese boxes whose increasingly untidy carpentry … is exactly his point,” and a Midwest Book Review critic called the novel “a choice pick for lovers of mystery.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that “crisp prose and some well-handled plot complications … will keep readers turning the pages.” Tom Zelman, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reasoned that “like Michael, the narrator of The Reader, Self is warily meditative, always considering the part he is playing in the unfolding events, always concerned about whom he may be victimizing.”
Schlink published Guilt about the Past in 2009. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, the book combines six essays that look into the concept of collective guilt as embodied in Germans of the author’s generation, which has formed part of the collective understanding of the aftermath of the genocide committed by the Nazis. In addition to the post-Nazi German collective guilt, Schlink also touches on nationalist collective guilt from Rwanda, South Africa, and Stalinist Soviet Union.
Thomas Hurka, writing in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, noted that “many of Schlink’s reflections are independent of his defence of collective guilt; you can be stimulated by the former while rejecting the latter. But a belief in collective guilt has helped Germany avoid repeating its awful past; it has in that way contributed to peace in Europe. A philosophically dubious idea can sometimes have good effects; here an ethical error may have been a political blessing.” Karen Okamoto, writing in Library Journal, pointed out that “his legal analysis complements Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.” In an article in History Today, Joanna Bourke claimed that Guilt about the Past is among “the most important books to be written about guilt.”
(open new)The Weekend takes place over the course of a single weekend in the German countryside just after the events of the September-11 terrorist attacks in the United States. A group of friends and lovers from their university days get together later in life. Most of them have found their lives are far worse than they had been. They come together to welcome Jörg out of prison after having been imprisoned for more than two decades for murdering multiple people.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Amid ongoing revelation, all narrative strands (and there are many) are tied neatly by the end.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Ian Buruma found the characters to be “dead on the page.” Buruma proposed that “Jorg could have been an interesting character, a contemporary Raskolnikov, a revolutionary who steps outside society and its moral constraints because he is made for greater stuff. He could have been a dark believer who does terrible things for honorable reasons. Or something. But we never get much of an idea what he is like inside, or what demons drive him. There are perfunctory hints of childhood fantasies of being a hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. He grew up without a mother and is pampered by a doting sister, who hosts his coming-out-of-jail weekend. But this is not enough to make him interesting.”
Summer Lies is a collection of short fiction. Each story features a character that is forced to make a painful decision. A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “a thoughtful, stimulating collection.” In a review in the New York Times Book Review, Lisa Zeidner reasoned that “stories filled with observations of background details like the weather or birdsong can easily become dull — or, conversely, poetically overwrought. Schlink avoids both pitfalls, and absorbs us with the blow-by-blows of his characters’ reactions, even when the plot is adamantly short on life-changing events.” Zeidner concluded: “Unlike many novelists, who use short fiction as a rest stop on the highway to longer works, Schlink seems to have lingered with these stories. Each story in Summer Lies has heft, solidity — even more of an accomplishment given the delicate, fleeting emotions it captures.”
The Woman on the Stairs centers on the romantic relationship of three men who are linked to the same woman. A Kirkus Reviews contributor lamented that “despite some touching scenes near the end, Schlink doesn’t seem to have the creative wherewithal to bring his characters and themes fully to life.” In a review in Library Journal, Sally Bissell opined that readers “familiar with Schlink’s earlier book, The Reader, will find that this new novel lacks a similar heft.” Writing in BookPage, Lauren Bufferd commented that the author “writes with lawyerly precision, and his protagonist’s midlife search for meaning is thought-provoking and surprisingly tender, though some of the characters never fully come to life.”
With Olga, Olga Rinke was born in a small Polish town in the late nineteenth century. After her parents die, she was raised by her German grandmother in a Pomeranian village. Her grandmother is cold, so she finds warmth and friendship at school and with her best friend, Herbert Schröder. His wealthy family disapproves of Olga as she and Herbert become romantically linked. They stay connected for most of her life with him often overseas. Later in life, she forms a motherly bond with Ferdinand, who narrates the remainder of Olga’s life.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly insisted that “readers who love rich character studies will want to pick this up.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor mentioned that the novel is “strongest when it pauses to explore the intimate texture of [Olga’s] life, but those pauses are too brief.” The same critic concluded by calling it “a historical novel about a mismatched couple spends too little time with its most interesting character.”
In The Granddaughter, septuagenarian bookseller Kaspar Wettner struggles to help his wife Birgit with her depression and alcoholism. After her death, Kaspar discovers she had a daughter named Svenja before they met. He tracks down Svenja, who is a neo-Nazi with a family of her own. Kaspar’s granddaughter, Sigrun, likes him but stubbornly refuses to allow him to help her move away from her hateful views of the world.
A contributor to the Economist remarked that “Schlink’s deft touch—a zippy plot, richly painted characters—keeps his tale from being overwhelmed by history.” The same reviewer noted that “the novel’s description of the peculiar rural milieu in which Sigrun has been raised is convincing; Kaspar’s half-successful attempts to soothe her soul with Mozart , poetry and chess perhaps less so.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Randy Boyagoda reasoned that “Schlink is not as elusive or cerebral a writer about modern Germany as W.G. Sebald, nor as intense or unflinching a storyteller as Jenny Erpenbeck; but he writes instructive tales that adeptly raise difficult questions and propose appealing answers.” Boyagoda summarized that some readers will interpret the novel “as an inspiring fable of intergenerational unity and redemption. Others might find it more like fantasy fiction.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor labelled it “a brilliant dissection of a fragmented nation in which a glimmer of hope relieves a somber but wholly memorable tale.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bloomsbury Review, January 1, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 21.
Booklist, July 1, 1996, review of Der Vorleser, p. 951; August 1, 1999, review of The Reader, p. 2025; September 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Flights of Love, p. 196; March 15, 2005, Frank Sennett, review of Self’s Punishment, p. 1270; December 15, 2007, Ian Chipman, review of Homecoming, p. 25.
BookPage, April 1, 2017, Lauren Bufferd, review of The Woman on the Stairs, p. 22.
Books, June 22, 1998, review of The Reader, p. R5.
Bookseller, December 7, 2001, “Affairs of the Heart,” p. 34.
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2001, Julia M. Klein, review of Flights of Love, pp. 18-19.
Economist, June 13, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 16; April 15, 2000, review of Liebesfluchten: Geschichten, p. 14; October 17, 2024, review of The Granddaughter.
Entertainment Weekly, January 18, 2008, Missy Schwartz, review of Homecoming, p. 86.
Federal Lawyer, January 1, 1999, Richard L. Sippel, review of The Reader, pp. 56- 57.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 17, 1999, review of The Reader, p. D17; June 30, 2010, Thomas Hurka, review of Guilt about the Past.
History Today, June 1, 2010, Joanna Bourke, review of Guilt about the Past and The Other Man: And Other Stories, p. 61.
Independent (London, England), March 19, 2010, Boyd Tonkin, “In the Court of History.”
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 756; September 15, 2001, review of Flights of Love, p. 1319; May 1, 2007, review of Self’s Deception; November 15, 2007, review of Homecoming; July 1, 2009, review of Self’s Murder; August 1, 2010, review of The Weekend; August 1, 2012, review of Summer Lies; January 1, 2017, review of The Woman on the Stairs; August 15, 2021, review of Olga; February 1, 2025, review of The Granddaughter.
Kliatt, May 1, 2008, Nola Theiss, review of Homecoming, p. 51.
Library Journal, June 1, 1997, T. O’Pecko, review of The Reader, p. 153; May 1, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 168; September 15, 2001, Barbara Hoffer, review of Flights of Love, p. 115; December 1, 2007, Barbara Hoffert, review of Homecoming, p. 102; April 15, 2008, Michael Adams, review of Homecoming, p. 126; April 15, 2010, Karen Okamoto, review of Guilt about the Past, p. 95; June 15, 2010, review of The Gordian Knot, p. 17; February 1, 2017, Sally Bissell, review of The Woman on the Stairs, p. 76.
London Review of Books, October 30, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 22; March 21, 2002, review of Flights of Love, p. 32.
Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 10; October 7, 2001, review of Flights of Love, p. 8.
Maclean’s, May 3, 2010, Brian Bethune, “Why Didn’t You Do Something?,” p. 75.
Midwest Book Review, October 1, 2009, review of Self’s Murder.
Modern Language Review, October 1, 2004, Chloe Paver, review of Der Vorleser, p. 1110.
New Republic, March 23, 1998, Eva Hoffman, review of The Reader, p. 33; October 15, 2001, Ruth Franklin, “Immorality Play,” p. 54.
New Statesman, January 9, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 44; January 28, 2002, Martyn Bedford, “A Moral Maze,” p. 54; July 30, 2007, Yo Zushi, “Age and Reason,” p. 60.
Newsweek, November 12, 2001, Andrew Nagorski, “A World in Shades of Gray,” p. 61.
New Yorker, August 18, 1997, Scott L. Malcomson, review of The Reader, p. 72; March 31, 2008, review of Homecoming, p. 113.
New York Review of Books, March 26, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 4; January 17, 2002, Louis Begley, “Lonely in Germany,” review of Flights of Love, pp. 16-17.
New York Times, August 20, 1997, Richard Bernstein, review of The Reader, p. B7; January 19, 2002, Steven Erlanger, “Postwar German Writer a Bard of a Generation,” p. A4.
New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1997, Suzanne Ruta, review of The Reader, p. 8; September 30, 2001, Jennifer Schuessler, review of Flights of Love, p. 6; October 7, 2001, review of Flights of Love, p. 26; November 24, 2002, Scott Veale, review of Flights of Love, p. 36; September 9, 2007, Charles Taylor, review of Self’s Deception, p. 13; January 13, 2008, Liesl Schillinger, “Aptitude for Destruction;” October 17, 2010, Ian Buruma, review of The Weekend, p. 12; September 2, 2012, Lisa Zeidner, review of Summer Lies, p. 14; January 19, 2025, Randy Boyagoda, review of The Granddaughter, p. 7.
Observer (London, England), November 2, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 15; August 16, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 16; November 10, 2002, review of Flights of Love, p. 20; January 20, 2008, Edward Marriott, “On the Moral High Ground.”
Parisian Review, June 22, 1999, Millicent Bell, review of The Reader, p. 417.
Publishers Weekly, June 2, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 51; September 3, 2001, review of Flights of Love, p. 54; April 9, 2007, review of Self’s Deception, p. 31; October 15, 2007, review of Homecoming, p. 37; January 26, 2009, review of The Reader, p. 114; June 15, 2009, review of Self’s Murder, p. 36; July 26, 2021, review of Olga, p. 54.
Quadrant, May 1, 1999, Michelle Haines Thomas, review of The Reader, p. 85.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, March 22, 2002, Brian Evenson, review of Flights of Love, pp. 142-43.
Salmagundi, September 22, 1999, review of The Reader, p. 3.
School Library Journal, October 1, 1997, Jackie Gropman, review of The Reader, p. 161; January 1, 2002, Sheila Shoup, review of Flights of Love, p. 171.
Spectator, October 25, 1997, Carole Angier, review of The Reader, p. 54; February 23, 2002, Carole Angier, review of Flights of Love, pp. 36-37.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), August 16, 2009, Tom Zelman, review of Self’s Murder, p. 11.
Times Higher Education, August 20, 2009, Martin McQuillan, review of Homecoming, p. 45.
Times Literary Supplement, November 28, 1997, Bryan Cheyette, review of The Reader, p. 23; December 4, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 12; February 15, 2002, Kathleen Bogan, “Pressures of Peace,” p. 23.
Translation Review, annual, 2001, review of The Reader, p. 65.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 9, 2003, review of Flights of Love, p. 6.
Tricycle, June 22, 1999, review of The Reader, p. 94.
Utah Bar Journal, October 1, 1999, Betsy Ross, review of The Reader, p. 61.
Variety, September 15, 2008, Robert Koehler, review of The Other Man, p. 20.
Virginia Quarterly Review, December 22, 1998, review of The Reader, p. 22.
Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2001, Gabriella Stern, review ofFlights of Love, p. W13.
Washington Post Book World, September 21, 1997, review of The Reader, p. 10; October 28, 2001, Rick Whitaker, review of Flights of Love, p. 3.
World Literature Today, September 22, 1996, Ulf Zimmermann, review of The Reader, p. 951; December 22, 2001, Jeffrey Adams, review of Liebesfluchten, pp. 147-48.
Zoomer, June 1, 2010, review of Guilt about the Past, p. 110.
ONLINE
Berliner, https://www.the-berliner.com/ (September 20, 2025), Alex Wells, “Bernhard Schlink: ‘The Germans Want Things to Be Grand.'”
DW, https://www.dw.com/ (July 23, 2020), Jochen Kürten, author interview.
Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/ (October 13, 2024), Guy Chazan, author interview.
Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin website, https://literaturfestival.com/ (September 20, 2025), author profile.
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/ (August 6, 2010), author profile.
Tennessean, http:// tennessean.com/ (February 18, 2008), Craig Seligman, review of Homecoming.
Bernhard Schlink
Germany (b.1944)
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor of law at the University of Berlin and a practising judge, he is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.
Genres: Mystery, Literary Fiction, Historical
Series
Gerhard Self
1. Self's Punishment (2004) (with Walter Popp)
2. Self's Deception (2007)
3. Self's Murder (2008)
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Novels
The Reader (1997)
Homecoming (2008)
Guilt about the Past (2009)
The Weekend (2010)
The Gordian Knot (2010)
The Woman on the Stairs (2016)
Olga (2020)
The Granddaughter (2024)
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Collections
Flights of Love (2001)
The Other Man (2010)
Summer Lies (2012)
Bernhard Schlink
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bernhard Schlink
Schlink in 2018
Schlink in 2018
Born Bernhard Schlink
6 July 1944 (age 81)
Bielefeld, Germany
Occupation
Authorprofessorjudge
Alma mater University of Heidelberg (Dr. jur.)
University of Freiburg (Hab.)
Notable works The Reader
Relatives Edmund Schlink (father)
Bernhard Schlink (German: [ˈbɛʁn.haʁt ʃlɪŋk] ⓘ; born 6 July 1944)[1] is a German lawyer, academic, and novelist. He is best known for his novel The Reader, which was first published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. He won the 2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize.
Early life
He was born in Großdornberg, near Bielefeld, to a German father (Edmund Schlink) and a Swiss mother, the youngest of four children. His mother, Irmgard, had been a theology student of his father, whom she married in 1938. (Edmund Schlink's first wife had died in 1936.) Bernhard's father had been a seminary professor and pastor in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. In 1946, he became a professor of dogmatic and ecumenical theology at Heidelberg University, where he would serve until his retirement in 1971. Over the course of four decades, Edmund Schlink became one of the most famous and influential Lutheran theologians in the world and a key participant in the modern Ecumenical Movement.[2] Bernhard Schlink was brought up in Heidelberg from the age of two. He studied law at West Berlin's Free University, graduating in 1968.[3]
Schlink became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and in 1992 a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. Among Schlink's academic students are Stefan Korioth and Ralf Poscher. He retired in January 2006.[4]
Career
Schlink studied law at the University of Heidelberg and at the Free University of Berlin. He worked as a research assistant at the Universities of Darmstadt, Bielefeld and Freiburg.[5] He had been a law professor at the University of Bonn and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main before he started in 1992 at Humboldt University of Berlin. His career as a writer began with several detective novels with the main character named Selb—a play on the German word for "self"—(the first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp [de] being available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize [de] in 1989.
In 1995, he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a novel about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties who suddenly vanishes but whom he meets again as a law student when visiting a trial about war crimes. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to reach the No. 1 position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997, it won the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award, and the Prix Laure Bataillon for works translated into French. In 1999 it was awarded the Welt-Literaturpreis of the newspaper Die Welt.
In 2000, Schlink published a collection of short fiction called Flights of Love [de]. A January 2008 literary tour, including an appearance in San Francisco for City Arts & Lectures, was cancelled due to Schlink's recovery from minor surgery.[citation needed]
In 2008, Stephen Daldry directed a film adaptation of The Reader. In 2010, his non-fiction political history, Guilt About the Past was published by Beautiful Books Limited (UK).
As of 2008, Schlink divides his time between New York and Berlin.[6] He is a member of PEN Centre Germany.[7]
Prizes
1989 Friedrich-Glauser-Preis for Die gordische Schleife[8]
1993 Deutscher Krimi Preis for Selbs Betrug[8]
1995 Stern des Jahres ("Star of the Year") from the Munich newspaper Abendzeitung ("Evening News") for Der Vorleser[8]
1997 Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italian) for Der Vorleser[8]
1997 Prix Laure Bataillon (French) for Der Vorleser[8]
1998 Hans Fallada Prize for Der Vorleser[8]
1999 Welt-Literaturpreis for life works[8]
2000 Heinrich Heine Prize of the "Heinrich-Heine-Gesellschaft" at Hamburg[8]
2000 Evangelischer Buchpreis for Der Vorleser[8]
2000 Cultural prize of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun awarded yearly to a Japanese bestseller, for Der Vorleser[8]
2004 Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany[8][9]
2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize (South Korea)[10]
Bibliography
Literary works in German
1962 Der Andere
1987 Selbstjustiz (Self's Punishment; with Walter Popp)
1988 Die gordische Schleife (The Gordian Knot), Zurich: Diogenes
1992 Selbstbetrug, Zurich: Diogenes
1995 Der Vorleser (The Reader), Zurich: Diogenes
2000 Liebesfluchten (Flights of Love), Zurich: Diogenes
2001 Selbstmord (Self's Murder), Zurich: Diogenes
2006 Die Heimkehr (Homecoming: A Novel), Zurich: Diogenes
2008 Das Wochenende (The Weekend: A Novel), Zurich: Diogenes
2010 Sommerlügen – Geschichten (~ Summer Lies: Stories), Zurich: Diogenes
2011 Gedanken über das Schreiben. Heidelberger Poetikvorlesungen. (Essays) Zurich: Diogenes, ISBN 978-3-257-06783-5
2014 Die Frau auf der Treppe. (Novel) Zurich: Diogenes, ISBN 978-3-257-06909-9
2018 Olga (Novel) Zurich: Diogenes, ISBN 978-3-257-07015-6[11][12]
2020 Abschiedsfarben Zurich: Diogenes ISBN 978-3-257-07137-5
2021 Die Enkelin (Novel) Zurich: Diogenes
Other works in German
1976 Abwägung im Verfassungsrecht, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot
1980 Rechtlicher Wandel durch richterliche Entscheidung: Beitraege zu einer Entscheidungstheorie der richterlichen Innovation, co-edited with Jan Harenburg and Adalbert Podlech, Darmstadt: Toeche-Mittler
1982 Die Amtshilfe: Ein Beitrag zu einer Lehre von der Gewaltenteilung in der Verwaltung, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot
1985 Grundrechte, Staatsrecht II, co-authored with Bodo Pieroth, Heidelberg: C.F. Müller
2002 Polizei- und Ordnungsrecht, co-authored with Bodo Pieroth and Michael Kniesel, Munich: Beck
2005 Vergewisserungen: über Politik, Recht, Schreiben und Glauben, Zurich: Diogenes
2015 Erkundungen zu Geschichte, Moral Recht und Glauben, Zurich: Diogenes[13]
Titles in English
1997 The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, New York: Pantheon Books
2001 Flights of Love: Stories, translated by John E. Woods, New York: Pantheon Books
2005 Self's Punishment, Bernhard Schlink and Walter Popp, translated by Rebecca Morrison, New York: Vintage Books
2007 Self's Deception, translated by Peter Constantine, New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
2007 Homecoming translated by Michael Henry Heim, New York: Pantheon Books
2009 Self's Murder, translated by Peter Constantine, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
2009 Guilt about the Past, University of Queensland Press, 9 January 2009, Beautiful Books Limited (UK) February 2010 ISBN 978-1-905636-77-8[14]
2010 The Weekend: A Novel, translated by Shaun Whiteside – October 2010
2012 Summer Lies (short stories), translated by Carol Brown Janeway, New York: Pantheon Books ISBN 978-0-307-90726-4
2016 The Woman on the Stairs. (Novel), translated by Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmidt. London: Orion ISBN 978-1-474-60065-1
2020 Olga. (Novel), translated by Charlotte Collins, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN 978-1-4746-1114-5
2024 The Granddaughter, translated by Charlotte Collins, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN 978-1-399-61486-3
Bernhard Schlink was born in 1944 in Großdornberg (Bielefeld) and grew up in Heidelberg. He has a doctorate in law and is a professor of public law and the philosophy of law. He taught in Bonn, Frankfurt am Main, and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 1992 to 2009. From 1987 until 2006 he was also a judge at the constitutional court of North Rhine-Westphalia. During the post-reunification period, he was an advisor to the draft constitution of the Central Round Table of the GDR.
In 1987, together with Walter Popp, he published his first novel »Selbs Justiz« (Eng. »Self’s Punishment«, 2004), about the aging private detective Gerhard Selb, who is confronted with his own past as a state attorney during the Nazi era. After »Die gordische Schleife« (1988; Eng. »The Gordian Knot«, 2010), which won the 1989 Friedrich Glauser Prize, Schlink expanded his crime series about Self the private detective into a trilogy with »Selbs Betrug« (1992; Eng. »Self’s Deception«, 2007) and »Selbs Mord« (2001; Eng. »Self’s Murder«, 2010). In 1995, Schlink’s most well-known and internationally recognized novel to date was published: »Der Vorleser« (Eng. »The Reader«, 1997), which has been translated into over fifty languages and was made into a film by Stephen Daldry in 2008. In the three-part novel, the jurist Michael Berg narrates flashbacks to the end of the 1950s and his erotic relationship as a 15-year-old student with Hanna Schmitz, who is 21 years his senior. As a student, he watches her be sentenced to life in prison in an Auschwitz court trial and realizes that Hanna is illiterate. Their relationship is rekindled during the prison term, Berg sends cassettes to her in prison which help Hanna learn how to read and write. After he has agreed to help her rejoin society, Hanna hangs herself in her cell on the eve of her release. In addition to the precise style and directness of the narration, critics have praised Schlink’s treatment of the problematics of guilt regarding Holocaust crimes and the handling of the perpetrators in 1960s West Germany, »just when it would seem that everything has been said about Germany and the war« (»The New York Times«). Further important works by Bernhard Schlink include the story collections »Liebesfluchten« (2000; Eng. »Flights of Love«, 2002) and »Sommerlügen« (2010; Eng. »Summer Lies«, 2012) as well as the novels »Die Heimkehr« (2006; Eng. »Homecoming«, 2009) and »Das Wochenende« (2008; Eng. »The Weekend«, 2010). »Olga« (2018) tells the story of the lovers Herbert, a squire’s son who participates in the genocides of Herero and Nama during the German Empire’s delusions of grandeur, and Olga, who despite her modest upbringing becomes a teacher and seems to be the »utopian opposite« of the hundreds of years of German history covered by the novel.
Bernhard Schlink has earned numerous accolades, including the WELT-Literaturpreis (1999) and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Officer’s Cross (2003). He lives in Berlin and New York.
Author Bernard Schlink about his new book
Jochen Kürten sh
07/23/2020July 23, 2020
DW interviews the internationally famous author about relationships, guilt and saying farewell. And his new book, "Abschiedsfarben," won't be his last.
https://p.dw.com/p/3fhVP
A picture of author Bernard Schlink from the neck up. He wears glasses and a blue button-up shirt
One of the most famous living German authors, Bernard Schlink is also a lawyer and writerImage: picture-alliance/dpa/H. Galuschka
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Few living writers in Germany have garnered as much attention worldwide as Bernard Schlink . His 1995 book The Reader, which tells of a romance between a young boy and a concentration camp guard, has been translated into over 50 languages and become a world-wide bestseller. Recommended by US talk show host Oprah Winfrey, it found its way into a movie with Titanic star Kate Winslet in 2008.
A trained lawyer, Schlink taught law and philosophy of law for decades before trying his hand at writing books professionally. As he tells DW, he began to write as a hobby, simply because he has always liked to do so. After publishing several short stories and novels, Schlink quickly saw success. His first fiction work was published in 1987 and was followed by many more.
A hand holds the book "The Reader," which shows the side profile of a boy's facA hand holds the book "The Reader," which shows the side profile of a boy's fac
"The Reader" was a hit in the US and was even recommended by US TV host Oprah WinfreyImage: DW
At 76 and now retired from his law career, Schlink has a new work out in German, a collection of short stories called Abschiedsfarben (Farewell Colors). The pieces touch on the topic of saying goodbye, relationships between men and women, between couples, and also between younger and older characters. DW's Jochen Kürten spoke with Schlink about his latest book and the success of The Reader.
Deutsche Welle: May I call your new collection of stories "Abschiedsfarben" a "late work?"
Bernhard Schlink: (laughs) I don't know what a "late work" is...
I'm thinking of the themes in the book: memories and how to deal with them, conscience, questions like 'Is life dealt with properly?'
These things can also occupy you in middle age or in youth. I once heard Edward Said (Ed: US literary theorist of Palestinian origin) give a lecture on 'late works.' The concept of a 'late work' done late in life is something that sums up everything you have worked on, thought and written about during the course of your life. It is, so to speak, the summation of your own work and life. These are certainly not the stories in Abschiedsfarben.
If you look at some of the themes that run through the stories, the topic of guilt comes up several times. Is that something that especially interests you?
I was interested in the topic of farewells. But with goodbyes there can be injuries, pain and sadness, and guilt also plays a role. So, in some stories the subject of farewell has also become the subject of guilt.
The cover of the book "Abschiedsfarben" which depicts a woman from behind wearing a red shirt sitting on a bedThe cover of the book "Abschiedsfarben" which depicts a woman from behind wearing a red shirt sitting on a bed
The new book "Abschiedsfarben" ("Farewell Colors") is a collection of nine short storiesImage: Diogenes
It's not about saying goodbye to life, but about saying goodbye in life. Farewells from people, farewells from stages of life, farewells from hopes, from expectations, from fears, from painful and liberating farewells. It is about the farewells that take place again and again in life that we deal with over and over.
What makes the relationships in your book so difficult?
It is about relationships between men and women, relationships between friends, between siblings, between parents and children. All these relationships, not only love relationships between man and woman, are central to us. And what is central for us is difficult. It's great and joyful in success and great and destructive in failure.
It is also about the relationship between older men and younger persons. In one story, the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is quoted. What interested you in this topic?
The story in which Lolita appears is about a mother and son. They go on a summer holiday together. She reads the book and he finds it on the beach chair and reads it too. For both, it is a summer of eroticism, but there is no erotic relationship between the mother, the older woman, and the young son.
In a scene from the film "The Reader," actress Kate Winslet sits on a bed next to actor David Kross who is reading a bookIn a scene from the film "The Reader," actress Kate Winslet sits on a bed next to actor David Kross who is reading a book
"The Reader" was also about a relationship where the couple had a large age difference. Pictured is a scene from the 2008 film with Kate Winslet and David KrossImage: imago/Unimedia Images
Melancholy and nostalgia waft through the stories, especially when it comes to relationships between men and woman. To put it bluntly: Are man and woman not meant to be together in the long run?
(laughs) I have no doubt that man and woman are made for each other, and that they can also succeed with each other in the long run. In the past, people used to die younger, and marriages were often shorter. Today's relationships are sometimes difficult simply because we live longer. But even today, relationships can last a lifetime.
You are one of the most successful German-speaking authors, and you live in New York. What is your experience there? Are you often asked about the international success of "The Reader"?
Whenever I'm asked about my writing, The Reader is always mentioned.
Do you feel comfortable with that? Some say 'Oh, I've written so many other things, it's not just about this one book.'
That doesn't bother me. To have such success once in a lifetime is wonderful. You can't and don't have to expect that again with the next book and the one after that. It is enough for me that I write the next book with the same joy.
Schlink sits on a chair with an interviewer in front of an audience in Schloss NeuhardenburgSchlink sits on a chair with an interviewer in front of an audience in Schloss Neuhardenburg
Schlink shares his opinions during a discussion on identity, values and everyday culture in Schloss Neuhardenburg in 2018Image: DW/C. Nurtsch
As a lawyer one must work with precision and accuracy. But as a writer, you have greater freedom. Did this contrast appeal to you?
Even a good lawyer needs imagination. A lawyer who only reproduces what jurisprudence and literature have thought up and decided for him, who does not seek and find new answers to questions of law and justice, is a pitiful lawyer.
Could one say it the other way around: A pitiful writer would then be someone who writes superficially?
Accuracy and credibility are good for both lawyers and writers. I can't imagine my life without writing. But I couldn't and didn't want to give up law either; it's just as important to me. In the end, all creative processes are similar, whether you're writing a story or solving a legal problem or organizing a particularly nice birthday party for your daughter. All of these things make one happy.
"Abschiedsfarben" won't be your last book?
I hope not. I'm writing something new.
Bernhard Schlink's "Abschiedsfarben" was published by Swiss publishing house Diogenes, 232 pages, ISBN 978 3 257 07137.
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Writer Bernhard Schlink on German war guilt and the resurgent far right
The author of ‘The Reader’ on his new east-meets-west novel and the post-reunification grievances fuelling votes for the AfD
Bernhard Schlink, photographed for the FT in Berlin by Tobias Kruse
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When Bernhard Schlink’s home in Bielefeld was destroyed by Allied bombs during the second world war, a wagoner who helped his mother retrieve their furniture from the wreckage expressed an unconventional thought — that the Germans had only themselves to blame.
“We saw the synagogues burn, we know why our cities are burning now,” he told Schlink’s mother as they rode past bombed-out buildings.
“That deeply impressed her,” the writer says, “because very few people felt that at the time”.
Indeed, it took years — decades even — for Germans to assume any responsibility for the Holocaust. “In the 1950s they just saw themselves as victims, not perpetrators,” Schlink says.
Guilt — both individual and collective — has been an abiding theme in Schlink’s work. Author of The Reader, the only German book ever to top The New York Times bestseller list, he takes the darkest episodes of German history — colonialism in Africa; Nazi war crimes; the Baader-Meinhof terror of the 1970s — and weaves them into compelling stories that have made him one of Germany’s most celebrated and popular writers.
Our parents or uncles or teachers who committed monstrous acts weren’t monsters — they were loving parents and exemplary doctors
An English translation of his 2021 novel The Granddaughter will appear in the UK later this month and early next year in the US. It is a complex, poignant narrative that plays out in communist East Berlin in the 1960s and the neo-Nazi scene of the present day. Le Figaro called it “the great novel of German reunification”.
Schlink’s literary success is all the more surprising, considering that he started off in an altogether different profession. For decades he was a distinguished law professor and judge, specialising in constitutional law and teaching at some of Germany’s most prestigious universities.
“But I felt like something was missing in my life,” he says. He had written “bad poetry” and “little stories and plays” as a young man, and then, in the late 1980s, decided to “return to writing”. With a colleague, Walter Popp, he concocted a detective novel, Self’s Justice; then in 1995 came The Reader and the rest is history.
We meet at an outdoor café near his home in the hexagon-shaped Viktoria-Luise-Platz, one of Berlin’s most exquisite spots. With a huge fountain gurgling in the background, I ask Schlink, a sprightly 80-year-old with a disarming smile, how he chooses his subjects. “It’s not like I’m interested in something and then think up a story about it,” he says. “I have the feeling that the stories come to me.”
While he has published 11 novels and three collections of short stories, none of his books has done as well as The Reader, which was translated into 45 languages and turned into a Hollywood film starring Kate Winslet. It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy, Michael Berg, who discovers that the love of his life — an illiterate tram conductor called Hanna Schmitz, who is 21 years his senior — was a camp guard in Auschwitz.
The Reader captures the anguish of a whole swath of young Germans gradually discovering the terrible things their parents did during the war. It is not, Schlink insists, a Holocaust novel. “It’s more about my generation’s relationship to the Third Reich than about the Third Reich itself,” he says.
The book didn’t go down well in Germany, at least not at first. “People said my depiction of Hanna Schmitz was too human,” he says. But that, he insists, missed the point.
“Our parents or uncles or teachers who committed monstrous acts weren’t monsters — they were wonderful teachers, loving parents and exemplary doctors,” he says. That was, in a way, one of the hardest aspects of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung or “coming to terms with the past”. “Of my generation there were a few who utterly, radically, broke with their parents, but most kept loving them . . . and became enmeshed in their guilt.”
The Granddaughter also touches on recent historical trauma. It centres on the figure of Kaspar, a West German who goes to study in Berlin in the 1960s and falls in love with an East German woman. The secrets of her early years, buried deep and concealed from Kaspar, end up poisoning her life.
Like Kaspar, Schlink also attended university in West Berlin, which at the time was a tiny island of freedom in the middle of the communist GDR. He had long been drawn to the east: “As the son of a Protestant pastor, I grew up with Luther and Bach . . . I was always interested in Prussian history and I felt the east was just as much my Germany as the Catholic Rhineland or the Bavarian south,” he says. “And I just wanted to get to know it.”
Like Kaspar, he took part in the “Whitsun Meeting of Youth”, a 1964 communist-organised festival in East Berlin when The Beatles were played publicly for the first time and young people from the socialist east and the capitalist west argued passionately about politics and danced together in the streets.
In West Germany people wanted to be Europeans and Atlanticists first. In the GDR people were always much less self-conscious about being German
And like the hero of The Granddaughter, Schlink also fell in love with an East German woman and helped her escape to the west. It was an intervention that caused frictions with his parents. “They felt I couldn’t take responsibility for ripping a young person out of her world, away from her mother and two sisters,” he says. “But Margit, my girlfriend, never regretted it.”
Schlink uses his novel to explore the strange, disturbing world of Germany’s far right. His vehicle is Kaspar’s teenage granddaughter Sigrun, who has grown up in an extremist “liberated zone” in rural eastern Germany, denies the Holocaust and admires Nazi war criminals. Kaspar’s failed attempts to get through to her, delivered in Schlink’s spare, dispassionate style, are the most unsettling parts of the novel.
The author knows East Germany better than most of his contemporaries. He was the first West German professor to be invited to teach at East Berlin’s Humboldt University in 1990, just after the Wall fell, and also advised a roundtable of democracy activists who were trying to come up with a new constitution for East Germany.
He witnessed the euphoria after the end of communism, but also the disappointments. “There was lots of injustice,” Schlink says. “In the military, in the civil service, in government, and in business, an entire elite was forced to go and was replaced by elites from the west.”
In addition, the “more earnest” easterners also grew disillusioned with the “hedonism and unseriousness” of the west. “They had this idea of democracy that came from a picture book, where politicians are responsible, care about their voters’ concerns and deal with them,” he says. “They were good democrats — almost too good. And then came disappointment with the ‘system’, and the ‘systemic parties’. And then the flight into protest.”
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He is speaking just days after elections in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has made spectacular gains, an outcome that prompted pained editorials about the growing divide between east and west, 34 years after reunification.
Schlink is unsurprised that such an unapologetically ethno-nationalist party should do so well in the former communist east. “In West Germany people wanted to be Europeans and Atlanticists first,” he says. “In the GDR people were always much less self-conscious about being German.”
It is one of many moments when the turbulence of Germany’s history comes to dominate the conversation. Schlink recalls childhood holidays spent with his Swiss grandfather, a history nut: “With his walking stick he could draw battle plans from Sempach to Waterloo on the forest floor,” he says.
From then on, “I always felt that German history is my history,” he says. “I am German and it’s part of me. And I realise more and more how much I am shaped by it.”
The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20/HarperCollins $28.99, 336 pages
Bernhard Schlink: “The Germans want things to be grand.”
The bestselling author and Berlin local discusses his novel, Olga, which travels through decades of modern history to ask: is it time to stop focussing on victims and villains?
Image for Bernhard Schlink: “The Germans want things to be grand.”
Bestselling author and Berlin local Bernhard Schlink. Photo: Gaby Gerster Diogenes Verlag
The bestselling author and Berlin local discusses his novel, Olga, which travels through decades of modern history to ask: is it time to stop focussing on victims and villains?
Book editor Alex Wells called Schlink to celebrate Olga’s new translation into English.
Olga is this remarkable autodidact who witnesses decades of German history. How did you come up with the character?
I actually was first interested in Herbert. I was inspired by a real-life officer turned explorer named Herbert Schröder-Stranz. He was a young man who enrolled to join the war against the Herero in German Southwest Africa – now Namibia – and fell in love with the desert. He would eventually lead a poorly prepared expedition to the Arctic, the desert of snow and ice, which cost him his life. I was drawn to his longing for the emptiness of the desert, a kind of nihilism, which made young Germans rush to their deaths in World War I.
But then, I increasingly wondered what sort of woman might have loved and lived with such a man. So that’s how I got to Olga. She’s not modelled on one person, but in her lies a generation of women – of my grandmothers and aunts – who experienced similar things – women who had to live below their intellectual capabilities, often alongside men who lived above theirs.
There is this central contradiction in Olga’s character, that she loves a man like Herbert while having such different principles herself.
What Olga finds fascinating about Herbert, and what she loves in him, is how excited and exciting he is. He is spirited and joyful and lively and daring; he sets his sights high. That has a certain appeal for Olga, particularly because her own opportunities are so limited. The fact that there was a danger in it – a danger for Herbert and for others – was something she only came to terms with later.
Olga is no dissident, not even in the Nazi period. But she does still seem like a good person.
She has a clear vision – a sober view of an era in which many were drunk from the excitement of war, or drunk from the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. She could question the masculinity of her time, and its developing nationalism.
Germans like to tell others what is right and wrong. I don’t like it.
Do you think Olga shows that not everyone in history is either victim or villain?
The division of people into victims and villains is ridiculously simplistic. Some people are both, and many people are neither victims nor villains: they are simply living their lives.
Was it important for the story to bring together many different eras of German history, from colonialism to the Nazis and beyond?
Yes. Olga even develops a little theory, which she connects with Heinrich Heine. She says that for so long the Germans – unlike their neighbours – could only have their own nation in fantasy. And then, once they finally got their Reich, they couldn’t stop fantasising. So, before World War I, they fantasised a colonial empire on which the sun never sets, and the Nazis fantasised an empire from the Atlantic to the Ural.
Olga’s other theory is that Germans always want everything to be too big and grand. She says this about Bismarck and the Nazis, but also about the postwar boom and the 1968 generation. Do you believe that yourself?
I do think there is a German tendency to think of things in grand terms. These days, this is not expressing itself through a wish to conquer or to dominate politically. But there is a tendency to feel morally superior. Germans like to tell others what is right and wrong. I don’t like it, but it is not creating any major damage.
Schlink, Bernhard THE GRANDDAUGHTER HarperVia (Fiction None) $28.99 1, 7 ISBN: 9780063295230
Germany is reunited, but a family is starkly divided.
Kaspar Wettner, a septuagenarian bookseller in Berlin, has been married for years to Birgit, whom he deeply loves although he can do nothing to ease her depression and addiction to alcohol. She is "a child of East Germany, of the GDR, of the proletarian world that, with Prussian socialist fervor, yearned to be bourgeois and took culture and politics seriously, as the bourgeoisie had once done and had forgotten how to do." When Birgit dies, Kaspar sorts through her papers, finding reference to a child he knew nothing about. Kaspar is nothing if not diligent, and he hunts down the whereabouts of the father--who understandably isn't thrilled to meet him, but who points the way to the long-lost daughter all the same. The problem is, Svenja is völkisch: that is to say, having connected long ago with "a skinhead in a bomber jacket and combat boots," she once amused herself by "taking drugs, beating up gays and foreigners [and] doing stuff that people don't always survive." Svenja now lives in a cramped house with her husband and daughter, dreaming of the day when they can fulfill the neo-Nazi dream of living on a farm far away from the city. Sigrun, the daughter, takes to her new grandfather, who dotes on her even as he tries to sway her from her hateful views. Sigrun proves a harder case than Kaspar can imagine. Schlink avoids stereotyping while making it clear that his characters' fascist views can yield nothing but disaster--but also that, in the end, at least some of those characters aren't hopelessly irredeemable.
A brilliant dissection of a fragmented nation in which a glimmer of hope relieves a somber but wholly memorable tale.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Schlink, Bernhard: THE GRANDDAUGHTER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825128236/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7fb703f5. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
The new novel by Bernhard Schlink, the author of ''The Reader,'' explores the legacies of World War II and reunification in contemporary Germany.
THE GRANDDAUGHTER, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Charlotte Collins.
When it comes to women revealing what they really think about their families after they die, it's hard to top Faulkner's Addie Bundren, reflecting from beyond the grave on the grudges and loathing she lived with as the unwilling matriarch of a dysfunctional Mississippi brood. A century later in Germany, the dead woman at the center of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, ''The Granddaughter,'' gives Addie a run for her money.
Birgit grows up in East Germany after the war and dies in her 70s in unified Berlin. Her husband, a bookseller named Kaspar, finds her body drowned in the bathtub of their well-appointed apartment and can't tell if her overdose was accidental or intentional. Bereft, he receives a postmortem query from a publisher about the manuscript Birgit was writing, which she never showed him. He finds and reads what seems to be an autobiography of Birgit's thoroughly embittered life, much of which she kept secret from him: from her young love affair with an older Communist Party officer that left her pregnant and alone, to her passionless marriage to Kaspar in Berlin, where she endured years of triumphalist condescension from West Germans. She writes regretfully and searingly about her hopes to someday meet the daughter she abandoned at birth. All that Kaspar knows for certain is that Birgit turned to alcohol and pills to numb her many pains. ''I am not a monster,'' Birgit reflects, defensively, regarding the freedom she felt in the moments after letting her newborn go.
Instead of disagreeing, Kaspar finds a new purpose in his dead wife's failures and frustrations: He decides to find Birgit's daughter. This premise will feel familiar to readers of Schlink's previous novels -- including his best-selling ''The Reader'' (1995), which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film -- many of which use individual relationships as proxies for examining the ongoing legacies of World War II and the Cold War in his native country. Schlink is not as elusive or cerebral a writer about modern Germany as W.G. Sebald, nor as intense or unflinching a storyteller as Jenny Erpenbeck; but he writes instructive tales that adeptly raise difficult questions and propose appealing answers.
In ''The Granddaughter,'' translated into clear and accessible English by Charlotte Collins, these answers are found along Kaspar's journey into the former East Germany, where he eventually tracks down Birgit's daughter, Svenja, who was raised by her birth father and his wife and never knew about Birgit. In and out of reform school as a teenager, Svenja now leads a quiet rural life with her neo-Nazi husband and 14-year-old daughter, surrounded by fellow proponents of a purist Germany who reject national guilt over the ''Holocaust lie'' and commit themselves to defending ''the glory of the Fatherland'' from foreign influence. Meeting them, Kaspar exhibits a measured, even respectful curiosity about their enthusiasm for ideas and attitudes that produced the most destructive period of modern world history. His fair-mindedness throughout the novel is so exemplary it becomes wearisome.
What follows is a rather schematic plot turn in which Kaspar persuades Svenja and her husband to let their daughter, Sigrun -- whose ''heroes'' include Irma Grese, an infamously brutal young guard in the women's sections of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen -- visit him in Berlin every few months, in exchange for payments from Birgit's estate. This they decide after Kaspar has met the couple only twice -- a couple who are protective and generally distrusting and knew nothing about Birgit, let alone Kaspar, a week earlier. But the all-too-convenient arrangement allows Schlink do what he really wants to with this novel: stage an intergenerational encounter in contemporary Germany between a responsibly contrite, open-minded, aging postwar German and a rebellious, confidently nationalist post-unification teenager.
And so Sigrun spends more than a year traveling between her home and Kaspar's, where she has her own bedroom and piano lessons, where the two cook and travel and go to the philharmonic and museums together, and where Kaspar patiently tries to convince her of the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary. Unsurprisingly, this ''Pygmalion''-style denazification project involves giving her books to inform and challenge her worldview, which inevitably leads to conflicts back home.
After disappearing from his life without warning, Sigrun shows up again on Kaspar's doorstep two years later, needing him to hide her from the police. At 18 she has inherited her mother's stubbornness, which ironically makes her rebel against Svenja's ''Völkisch'' politics and Third Reich nostalgia. She's eager to fight in the streets for her own vision for Germany -- especially against her leftist peers -- which Schlink shrewdly conveys as a kind of reactionary idealism to what she perceives as the political mushiness of her parents' generation.
However disappointed and worried he becomes about Sigrun's situation, Kaspar remains unconditionally supportive, losing his temper only once, on the perfectly calculated occasion of delivering an impassioned speech in defense of moderation -- to a Sigrun who proves, also conveniently, more and more open to her step-grandfather's perspective.
And so this novel, finally too pleasing and affirming for readers who are rightly worried about political violence and radicalized youth, ends with a dignified old man envisioning a stable, cosmopolitan future for a wayward young girl. Some will read Schlink's latest as an inspiring fable of intergenerational unity and redemption. Others might find it more like fantasy fiction.
THE GRANDDAUGHTER | By Bernhard Schlink | Translated by Charlotte Collins | HarperVia | 326 pp. | $28.99
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto.
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This article appeared in print on page BR7.
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Boyagoda, Randy. "Reunification." The New York Times Book Review, 19 Jan. 2025, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824056990/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d58e6ffc. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Schlink, Bernhard OLGA HarperVia/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $24.99 9, 21 ISBN: 978-0-06-311292-6
In a story that sweeps across a century, a woman who stays home is more engaging that her lover who explores the world.
Born near the end of the 19th century in a small town in Poland, Olga Rinke endures a childhood marked by poverty and loneliness. After her parents’ deaths, she’s raised by her cold German grandmother in a village in Pomerania. A bright and curious student, Olga finds solace in school and in her friendship and, later, more with Herbert Schröder, son of the richest man in the village. When they fall in love, his family disapproves, so they pursue their affair in secret. Restless and self-centered (and none too bright), Herbert is colonialism on the hoof. As a soldier in South West Africa during Germany’s genocide against the Herero people, he feels an occasional twitch of empathy: “But they had perished with their cattle and like cattle; they had been lying on the ground, and he had been on horseback.” Herbert, obsessed with travel and exploration, is often gone for months or years, but Olga remains faithful to him. Her instincts for community and stability run counter to his—she becomes a teacher, forms friendships, joins unions and churches, and creates a comfortable home for herself. She waits uncomplainingly for Herbert’s visits and, even after he leaves her life for good, carries a torch. Later in life, working as a seamstress, she grows close to Ferdinand, the young son of an employer. He takes over the book’s narration, recounting Olga as a mother figure and an intellectual equal with whom he remains friends for the rest of her life. The novel covers more than a century, and its swathes of historical exposition take the reader away from Olga; it’s strongest when it pauses to explore the intimate texture of her life, but those pauses are too brief. She’s an intriguing character, but Herbert isn’t, making her devotion to him a puzzle. A couple of big reveals about Olga are telegraphed so early and so broadly that they lack punch when they come.
A historical novel about a mismatched couple spends too little time with its most interesting character.
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"Schlink, Bernhard: OLGA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671783181/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d8fec93. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Olga
Bernhard Schlink. trans, from the German by Charlotte Collins. HarperVia, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-311292-6
Schlink (The Reader) returns with a nuanced portrait of an ordinary German woman who comes of age at the turn of the 20th century. Orphaned as a young girl, Olga Rinke is taken in reluctantly by her chilly paternal grandmother in Prussia. She becomes friends with Herbert Schroder, and by the time they're in secondary school, she falls in love with him. Olga becomes a teacher and Herbert joins the army, serving in the Battle of Waterberg in 1904 Africa, and in 1914 he sets off to explote the Atctic. Olga continues teaching through both world wars, and in her 60s, at the end of WWII, she flees eastern Germany for Heidelberg, where she takes up work as a seamstress and befriends Ferdinand, the young son of the primary family for whom she works. In the 1950s, Olga supports Ferdinand's teen rebellion--he reads Brecht and wears American-style blue jeans--and she tells him stories about Herbert's adventures. The final section features passionate, undelivered letters Olga wrote to Herbert decades earlier, while he was off in the Arctic. While the two big reveals in the final section are strongly telegraphed, the more quotidien mysteries of Olga's life will keep readers engaged. Readers who love rich character studies will want to pick this up. (Sept.)
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"Olga." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 30, 26 July 2021, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A670530896/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5127823e. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
LITERARY FICTION
THE WOMAN ON THE STAIRS
By Bernhard Schlink
Pantheon
$25.95, 240 pages
ISBN 9781101870716
Audio, eBook available
Bernhard Schlink is best known for his internationally successful novel The Reader (1997), and he returns to the themes of passion and loss in The Woman on the Stairs, about a German lawyer who stumbles onto a nude painting of a woman for whom he once risked his career and who then mysteriously disappeared from his life.
When the nameless protagonist is in Sydney working on a case, he comes across a familiar painting in a local museum. Decades earlier, as a young lawyer in Frankfurt, he became entangled in an affair involving an artist, a woman named Irene and her art collector husband, who commissioned the aforementioned painting of the unfaithful Irene. Hired to mediate a series of conflicts involving damage and restoration of the canvas, the lawyer fell in love with Irene, who in turn convinced him to help her steal the painting, promising she would run away with him if they were successful. The day he helped her was the last day he saw her.
The lawyer is able to locate Irene with the help of a local detective. Living in a remote area outside of Sydney, Irene is now leading a quiet life, assisting her elderly neighbors and growing her own food. It also becomes apparent that she is quite ill. Irene's life of passion forces the lawyer to come to terms with his own losses and to understand that many of his choices were merely reactions to the coldness that he experienced as a child.
Schlink, a professor of law in both Germany and the United States, writes with lawyerly precision, and his protagonist's midlife search for meaning is thought-provoking and surprisingly tender, though some of the characters never fully come to life. The Woman on the Stairs will appeal to readers as an exploration of the moral ambiguities of blame and guilt and the ethical issues of ownership.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
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Bufferd, Lauren. "The Woman on the Stairs." BookPage, Apr. 2017, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490551630/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a4e5552c. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Schlink, Bernhard. The Woman on the Stairs. Knopf. Mar. 2017. 240p. tr. from German by Joyce Hackett & Bradley Schmidt. ISBN 9781101870716. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781101870723. F
Karl Schwind was an unknown German artist when he painted Woman on Staircase, running off with the model, Irene Gundlach, and leaving the artwork to her husband, who had commissioned it. Not satisfied with winning the woman, Karl wants his painting returned. He and Irene hire our narrator, a naive lawyer in thrall to Irene's beauty, to begin litigation against Gundlach. In the hapless attorney Irene sees an opportunity to outwit all three of these men, who want to claim her body and soul. Decades later, while in Sydney for business, the lawyer spots the long-missing painting on display in a museum. Although Irene used and humiliated him, he has never stopped imagining what might have been. Could she be here in Australia? In a fever of hope, he puts his legal skills to work, determined to find Irene and coerce an explanation for her disappearance from his life. VERDICT This poignant meditation on recrimination and regret explores the nature of unrequited love and the gift of redemption. Too often though, it's bogged down by stilted, inauthentic conversations that emphasize the self absorption of all four main characters. Those familiar with Schlink's earlier book The Reader will find that this new novel lacks a similar heft. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Bissell, Sally. "Schlink, Bernhard. The Woman on the Stairs." Library Journal, vol. 142, no. 2, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 76. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A479301223/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d1760759. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
The Grand-daughter. By Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Charlotte Collins. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 336 pages; £20. To be published in America by HarperVia in January; $28.99
BERNHARD SCHLINK is probably the world's most famous living German novelist. His book "The Reader" (1995), a harrowing tale of a teenage boy's affair with an older woman he later learns had been a concentration-camp guard, sold millions of copies and spawned a Hollywood adaptation with an Academy Award-winning performance from Kate Winslet . Now Mr Schlink has turned his attention to a different German catastrophe in the 20th century: its post-war cleavage and the shadow it continues to cast over the country, 34 years after its halves were reunified .
Like "The Reader", which many felt was a literary expression of the German process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), "The Grand-daughter" serves as a parable of sorts. Kaspar, a cultured, kindly bookseller, learns soon after Birgit, his alcoholic wife, dies, that he understood far less about her than he had thought. His investigation into her life in communist East Berlin reveals long-concealed secrets, including an abandoned baby daughter. Like so many of her East German compatriots, Birgit was never able to reconcile her past and present; she did not act on her longing to find her daughter. Kaspar, grief-stricken but less burdened by history, hopes for better luck.
The gulf of misunderstanding between this Ossi and Wessi couple will resonate with Germans worried about their country's enduring east-west divide, as demonstrated in recent state elections . Yet Mr Schlink's deft touch—a zippy plot, richly painted characters—keeps his tale from being overwhelmed by history.
He skilfully renders long-forgotten events like the Germany Youth Meeting in East Berlin in 1964, an optimistic attempt to help students from West and East Berlin find common ideological ground. (Much of this material is based on Mr Schlink's own experiences as a West German student.) As in "The Reader", few characters escape the burden of secrets and lies: theirs and others'.
Kaspar eventually finds Birgit's daughter, Svenja, living in a forgotten part of East Germany and married to a thuggish adherent of a far-right völkisch ideology. The couple is interested only in Kaspar's money, but he is able to form a bond with their adolescent daughter, Sigrun, who begins to spend time with him in Berlin. Kaspar's quiet attempts to wean Sigrun (who keeps a photo of Rudolf Hess, a Nazi politician, in her bedroom) from the toxic worldview of her parents form the crux of the book. The novel's description of the peculiar rural milieu in which Sigrun has been raised is convincing; Kaspar's half-successful attempts to soothe her soul with Mozart , poetry and chess perhaps less so.
If Kaspar's well-meaning hopes for his grand-daughter never quite work out, they do not leave her untouched. "It's nice here with you. Even if it always has to be your truth, and it's never allowed to be mine," Sigrun tells Kaspar. She voices the ambiguous sentiment of countless East Germans left disillusioned by a reunification they came to see as less a merger of equals than a friendly takeover of East by West.
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"What don't you know about your partner?" The Economist, 17 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812552661/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c97f6fdb. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Schlink, Bernhard THE WOMAN ON THE STAIRS Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $25.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-101-87071-6
At two points in time, three men find themselves involved with the same woman in this latest by the bestselling author of The Reader (1997).While in Sydney for work, a lawyer, who narrates the story, sees a painting in a gallery that stirs up 40-year-old memories of one of his first cases back in Frankfurt. It involved a tug of war between an industrialist who commissioned a life-size nude of his wife and the artist who did the work and then ran off with the model. A conflict involving damage to and restoration of the canvas escalates to where the lawyer is asked to draw up a contract under which the artist regains ownership of the painting but returns the wife. Meanwhile, the lawyer, whose ethics prove increasingly elastic, has fallen in love with the woman and agrees to help her steal the painting and flee from both her beaux. He also assumes he will become her new paramour. Foolish man. She absconds altogether with her nude canvas self. Back in present-day Sydney, the lawyer surmises the woman is living nearby and hires a detective to find her, hoping to satisfy a surge of nostalgia and answer some old questions. In no time at all, Schlink (Summer Lies, 2012, etc.) has lawyer, industrialist, and artist all gathered in a remote area of Australia, where the woman has been living a kind of hippie life for many years. The painter and tycoon remain acquisitive and two-dimensional, while the woman's post-flight life is dabbed with suggestions of color. The lawyer is revealed as a lifelong cold fish warming up to his one old flame. But who wins the hand of a once-fair maiden known for her fine birthday suit? Alas, that would be revealing one of the book's few surprises. Despite some touching scenes near the end, Schlink doesn't seem to have the creative wherewithal to bring his characters and themes fully to life.
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"Schlink, Bernhard: THE WOMAN ON THE STAIRS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A475357461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ace08ea. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
SUMMER LIES
By Bernhard Schlink
Translated by Carol Brown Janeway
229 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.95.
Since the success of ''The Reader,'' Bernhard Schlink has been firmly established as the voice of German guilt and conscience. Not all of his characters are as complicit as Nazi prison guards or the people who unwittingly love them, but it's difficult for this German writer to use his country as a neutral background for private lives. With his mournful, meditative new collection of stories, translated (like ''The Reader'') by Carol Brown Janeway, Schlink comes closer than ever to putting the war behind him. His characters could live anywhere, and in fact many do -- in Amsterdam, in New York. They're still haunted by the past, but the failures they confront are smaller, quieter and adamantly personal.
Many of the seven stories in ''Summer Lies'' concern diffident middle-aged men who love their routines, love their jobs as second flutists in symphony orchestras or as traffic engineers, and are deeply mistrustful of the women who threaten to pull them out of their comfort zones. Forget passionate sex. ''It was years since he'd slept with a woman,'' Schlink remarks of one character. ''He didn't feel he was someone who was easily aroused.'' Another man whose commuting relationship has disintegrated admits relief: ''He would often have been happier if he'd stayed home and read and listened to music instead of meeting her.''
The opening story, ''After the Season,'' has the sparest possible plot. Richard and Susan, who've each been alone for a long time, meet at a beach resort in the off-season and fall in love. Richard frets about how he can reorder his life to include Susan -- especially since she's an heiress and, as he insists, he ''didn't like rich people.'' Through Richard and Susan, Schlink examines the moments that give texture to our days, and how those moments begin to accrete to change the course of a life. Susan could be discussing the stories themselves when she marvels, ''Nothing happens for a long time, then suddenly we get a surprise, have an encounter, reach a decision point, and we're no longer the same as we were before.''
Like the setting for ''After the Season,'' Cape Cod at the end of summer, these stories are broodingly atmospheric, ''mist-shrouded, mysterious.'' Elsewhere in the collection, another man terrified of being uprooted wants to preserve the fairy-tale safety of his domestic life so badly that he cuts the phone lines and blockades the road to his house, hoping to keep his novelist wife from discovering that she has won a major literary prize. The story reveals how he rationalizes this act. As a character in another story notes, ''The hard thing in life is to know when to hold fast to one's principles and when it's acceptable to bend them a little.''
Some characters' deceptions are larger, more troubling. A philosophy professor, dying of cancer, has declined to tell his wife or his extended family that he plans to kill himself as soon as his pain becomes unbearable. When she discovers his intentions, his wife becomes enraged and leaves him. The sinuous twists of the plot involve his hidden, glimmering vial of morphine, but the story ends without revealing whether he wins his wife back. The focus remains on his aching awareness of his last days -- his pleasure in watching his grandchildren play; his fumbling attempts to reconnect physically with a woman he has barely touched in decades.
Stories filled with observations of background details like the weather or birdsong can easily become dull -- or, conversely, poetically overwrought. Schlink avoids both pitfalls, and absorbs us with the blow-by-blows of his characters' reactions, even when the plot is adamantly short on life-changing events. In one story, a son takes his 82-year-old father to a music festival near a beach, desperate to squeeze something more out of this stone of a man than ''measured behavior and silent distance.'' He doesn't get it. Bach makes the father cry, and the son cries at ''the tiny miracle'' of a movie's ending, but in real life father and son share no new closeness and are treated to no epiphanies -- unless the awareness that real life rarely affords them counts as an epiphany of sorts.
The writing workshop edict is that characters in short stories should grow and change, and Schlink's decidedly do -- but they're not sure they want to. People may pursue novelty, but these stories also stress the pesky paradox that we crave the familiar just as deeply. And so one of Schlink's characters is ''suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful longing for another life, a life with winter in the city by the sea and summer in the village in the mountains, a life with its own unchanging, reliable rhythm, in which one always drove the same routes, slept in the same bed, met the same people.''
The only story told from a female point of view could serve as the collection's ars poetica. A beloved grandmother in a retirement home finds herself suddenly alienated from her dutiful children and 13 grandchildren. Her perplexity and frustration about the choices she has made in her life -- she divorced her philandering husband only after their children were grown -- overtake her as unpredictably as her back pain. When a granddaughter escorts her to the college town where she lost her true love, she confronts the man, now widowed. They don't share a soulful reunion. Instead, he forces her to admit that she has deceived herself about why they separated, and offers a new way to come to terms with her stubborn feeling of loss.
Unlike many novelists, who use short fiction as a rest stop on the highway to longer works, Schlink seems to have lingered with these stories. Each story in ''Summer Lies'' has heft, solidity -- even more of an accomplishment given the delicate, fleeting emotions it captures.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY MSMDNYC)
By LISA ZEIDNER
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The New York Times Company
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Zeidner, Lisa. "The Lonely Middle." The New York Times Book Review, 2 Sept. 2012, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A301397106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=24567d05. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Schlink, Bernhard SUMMER LIES Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $25.95 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-307-90726-4
Painful choices confront Schlink's characters in the second story collection from the German author (The Weekend, 2010, etc.). They meet on vacation on Cape Cod. In "After the Season," the first of seven stories, Richard is a German immigrant, a flautist; Susan works for a foundation. He's shocked to discover she's filthy rich; Richard doesn't like rich folks, but head-over-heels love sweeps him into a commitment to move in with her, though he's loath to leave his gritty Manhattan neighborhood; these are his people. Richard is a plausible but not fully autonomous character in a very well-crafted story. Not quite so plausible is the protagonist of "The House in the Forest"; he too is a German immigrant, a novelist like his American wife. She's successful, he's not. They find an idyllic country hideaway in which to raise their little girl, away from the distractions of Manhattan; but how can the husband make their seclusion total? Credibility dissolves as his first act of vandalism propels him into madness. The most painful choice is faced by Thomas in "The Last Summer." The retired philosopher has inoperable bone cancer. Thomas will treat himself to a last summer with his family; when the pain becomes unbearable, he will take a lethal cocktail. His plan goes awry when his wife finds the bottle. Again, credibility suffers when she goes ballistic at a family gathering. Nina's painful choice came during her youth ("The Journey to the South"). Should she leave her bourgeois family and prospective husband for the happy-go-lucky student she's fallen for? She chose wrongly and now, a cranky old woman, is eaten up by regret. The fun story is "Stranger in the Night." The very proper Jakob is transfixed by the wild odyssey of his seatmate on a trans-Atlantic flight. Who could resist the story of a beautiful girlfriend, a swaggering sheikh, a suspicious death and five million euros? And now the stranger wants to borrow Jakob's passport! A thoughtful, stimulating collection.
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"Schlink, Bernhard: SUMMER LIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2012. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A298256008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6f966d39. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
THE WEEKEND
By Bernhard Schlink
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
215 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95
It cannot always be easy to be a German. How does one deal with a recent national history drenched in so much innocent blood? How does a German writer find the right tone to describe it, without escaping into mawkish self-flagellation or nervous apologetics? Whether Bernhard Schlink, a lawyer as well as a novelist, found the right tone in ''The Reader,'' his best-selling 1995 novel about the love affair between an illiterate war criminal and an adolescent boy, is open to question. But the combination of erotic allure and earnest moral soul-searching, about sex, growing up and the German past, made the book a worldwide hit.
Schlink's latest novel, about a pardoned German political terrorist and his old friends and comrades discussing life, sex, growing up and the German past, during a country house weekend, is again an earnest effort to combine high seriousness with literary appeal. It is a good subject. The brutal 1970s activities of German ultraleftists, often trained in Palestinian refugee camps, were linked to (and said to be justified by) the Nazi past.
It was not for nothing that the most ferocious left-wing revolutionaries in the developed world after World War II were Germans, Japanese and Italians. They felt they had to make up for what had happened before. In the words of Jorg, the pardoned ex-terrorist in ''The Weekend'': ''We had to fight. Our parents conformed and shirked resistance -- we couldn't repeat that.'' To the German Rote Armee Fraktion, the Japanese Sekigun and the Italian Brigate Rosse, it was as if the war had to be fought all over again, this time on the right side, the side of the oppressed and persecuted: the Vietnamese, the Palestinians or indeed the entire third world. Once again, young Germans were engaged in acts of grotesque violence, not just against German officials and American ''imperialists'' but even against Israeli Jews, to show that they, unlike their parents, would resist ''fascism'' wherever they saw it.
Enough moral complexity, then, for a good novel. One can see why Schlink chose a terrorist as his subject: he is of the same '68 generation as the Rote Armee revolutionaries. And the theme fits into his preoccupation with past legacies haunting the living, like some Wagnerian ring. As one of the terrorist's friends says, after Jorg is accused by his own son of being as bad as the Nazis: ''Isn't it a curse, what's being passed on from the generation before Jorg to Jorg and from Jorg to his son?''
Yes, it is indeed hard to be a German. The idea, long espoused by German intellectuals, of a cursed people or culture or society, ''a community bound by fate,'' is enough to make anybody feel gloomy. In Wagner's operas, at least, it resulted in some glorious music. In the case of ''The Weekend,'' it makes for a very dull novel.
This is a shame, for Schlink is clearly an intelligent, well-intentioned, reflective, sensitive man. The problem with the book is not intellectual. Although he is far too skillful to preside as judge and jury over his invented characters, it is plain where Schlink's own sentiments lie: on the side of decency, of muddling along as best we can, and of incremental social and political change rather than violent action inspired by grandiose dreams. Just as ''The Reader'' cannot be read as a justification of Nazi atrocities, there is nothing in ''The Weekend'' that condones the behavior of antifascist agents of terror.
What makes this a bad novel is that the characters are dead on the page. They are cutout types to whom the author has tacked arguments and opinions to keep the conversation going, but nothing more than that, despite the sexual couplings that go on when people run out of things to say. The sex, too, one feels, is there for the sake of argument.
Jorg could have been an interesting character, a contemporary Raskolnikov, a revolutionary who steps outside society and its moral constraints because he is made for greater stuff. He could have been a dark believer who does terrible things for honorable reasons. Or something. But we never get much of an idea what he is like inside, or what demons drive him. There are perfunctory hints of childhood fantasies of being a hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. He grew up without a mother and is pampered by a doting sister, who hosts his coming-out-of-jail weekend. But this is not enough to make him interesting, or even plausible.
Like the others, Jorg functions as a figure in the conversation, but in a passive role. He is not so much a character as a catalyst for talk, talk about or inspired by him. And the talk is less political than existential. The only one who talks politics is a cardboard young comrade called Marko, who spouts the old jargon about ''the struggle'' and the betrayal of ''the revolution'' by former leftists. He even goes on an incoherent rant about joining forces ''with our Muslim comrades,'' without explaining why this would be such a good thing. This seems as contrived as the scenes from 9/11 injected in the novel-in-progress written by one of the weekenders.
The other talkers, apart from the aspiring novelist, are a cleric, a lawyer, a journalist, a dental technician, and various spouses and children. Unlike Marko, who hopes Jorg will carry on with the armed struggle, they want their old friend to rejoin ''the social contract,'' settle down, get a decent job and muddle along as they do. Being a good middle-aged citizen comes at a price, of course. Youthful dreams of heroism, changing the world or just being a huge success, in love or work, have had to be abandoned, and adults must cope with their sense of failure and loss. Living ''in exile'' is how one of the weekenders puts it, exile from our old expectations about life. ''Perhaps,'' this same person, a woman named Margarete, says, ''that's what makes a terrorist. He can't bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way to his dream of home.''
This ponderous statement shows up the main fault in Schlink's novel: the tendency to lecture, without humor or much element of surprise. Metaphors come down with a heavy thump. The weekend ends with a rainstorm, after which all the guests line up in the cellar to scoop out the water. That we can survive only in society, and that for society to survive we must help one another, is a thoroughly decent conclusion. But good intentions are not sufficient to create an interesting story.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY ULLA PUGGAARD)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 The New York Times Company
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Buruma, Ian. "Living Down the Past." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Oct. 2010, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A239563272/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6b185be6. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Schlink, Bernhard THE WEEKEND Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $24.95 10, 12 ISBN: 978-0-307-37815-6
A tight literary contrivance by the novelist best known for The Reader (1997).
Imagine The Big Chill transplanted to the German countryside in the wake of 9/11 terrorism. As the title suggests, this narrative encompasses a single weekend, Friday through Sunday, which represents a reunion of those who were close (even lovers) during their university days, but who have seen their lives take significantly different paths. The impetus for the gathering is the pardon of Jörg, a convicted terrorist who has been imprisoned for more than two decades for the murder of at least four victims. His older sister, Christiane, has been like a mother to him (though some suspect a lover as well), and she has arranged for the gathering of former friends (and spouses and a few interlopers) to welcome her brother back to the world at the country house she shares with Margarete. Christiane and Margarete may or may not be lovers, though the romantic alliances that begin the novel are likely to shift before its end (or there would be no novel). Among the guests is a noted journalist who might be able to help Jörg make his case with the public. He was once Jörg's best friend, later (and briefly) became the lover of Christiane and is suspected by Jörg of the tip to authorities that led to his arrest. There is also a back story, a gathering from some 30 years earlier, at a funeral for a friend to them all who mysteriously committed suicide. At least one of the friends believes that the suicide was a fake, that the purported suicide was also a terrorist who may still be alive. She spends the weekend writing a novel within the novel concerning this possibility, constructing a narrative that "she couldn't research, but had to fantasize." Jörg finds himself in a tug of war between a younger radical who wants him to issue an unrepentant proclamation and a lawyer who wants Jörg to cut ties with his terrorist past.
Amid ongoing revelation, all narrative strands (and there are many) are tied neatly by the end.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC
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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Schlink, Bernhard: THE WEEKEND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2010. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256560693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6e1e00cf. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.