On the fringes of his career as a lawyer, Bernhard Schlink has crafted a novel that gradually traces a complex fresco of the historical and sociological nodes of modern Germany. Between the lines, there is also a stubborn reflection on the disappointing evolution of men in relation to women.
His latest book, The Granddaughter, confirms his importance. We follow a widowed bookseller who discovers that his partner, an East German who moved to the West during the Cold War, had a daughter who rebelled against her father, a senior communist official, then joined the extreme right after the reunification of Germany. This secret child now has a teenage daughter, whom the hero tries to re-educate.
The Granddaughter is a powerful echo of Schlink’s last book, Olga, which explored the connections between 19th-century Bismarckian Germany, Nazism, and 1970s Red terrorism. One of Schlink’s early novels, The Reader , brought to the screen with Kate Winslet, was a disturbing testimony to the banality of Nazi evil.
Initially, Bernhard Schlink made a name for himself with the detective series Gerhard Selb. This character of a good man, but for whom the woman is an impenetrable enigma, is at the heart of the plot in The Granddaughter and Olga. The author’s humility in the face of German demons and the social limits of certain men of his generation is touching.
