Show 17: the German detective novelist on his new book, Homecoming
Bernhard Schlink is a German writer with a legal background. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and is a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin in January 2006.
His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selb—a play on the German word for ‘self’. The first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp, is available in the UK.
In 1997 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical 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 in both Germany and America and was translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. The Reader is currently in production as a film directed by Stephen Daldry.
Bernhard Schlink is a part of the generation that bears what Germans call 'the second guilt', those who grew up in the shadow of their parents' complicity in the Holocaust. "The theme of collective guilt, of what the first generation did means for the second generation, has been on my mind for a long, long time," says Schlink, and the theme of guilt is something he particularly focussed on in The Reader. The morally complex book, which begins "When I was 15, I got hepatitis," follows a German student, Michael, who collapses and is rescued by a woman more than twice his age. This encounter begins a romantic relationship (she continually asks him to read to her) until the woman suddenly vanishes. Years later, Michael and the older woman reunite when she is charged with war crimes.
His most recent novel, Homecoming, reflects on the secrecy of families, the longing for redemption, and the difficulty of returning home in postwar Germany.
Homecoming
As a child raised by his mother in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story he discovers in the proof pages of a novel edited by his grandparents. It is the tale of a German prisoner of war who escapes from a Russian camp and braves countless dangers to return home to a wife who believes him to be dead. But the novel is incomplete - Peter has inadvertently used the end pages of the proof for his homework - and he becomes obsessed by the question of what happened when the soldier and his wife met again. Years later, the adult Peter remembers the novel and embarks on a search for the missing pages that soon becomes a search for his own father, a German soldier whom he always believed was killed in the war. Peter's quest leads him into a love story of his own, and as he begins to unravel the mystery of his father's disappearance, he is forced to question his own identity. He learns that reality is sometimes a reflection of the expectations of others, and that truth and fiction often intertwine.