Bernhard Schlink
Author of The Reader
About the Author
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. He is a professor of law at the University of Berlin and a judge. He is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning detective novels that are now being translated into English. He lives in Bonn show more and Berlin, Germany. (Publisher Fact Sheets) Bernhard Schlink is a German Author, Professor, and Judge, born in 1944 in Bielefeld, Germany. He attended the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He is a law professor at Humbolt University of Berlin. He is the author of Flights of Love, a collection of short fiction. His international bestseller, The Reader, won the Hans Fallada Prize, the Prix Laure Bataillon, and the Welt-Literaturpreis of the newspaper Die Welt. His recent work, The Woman on the Stairs, is an international bestseller. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Bernhard Schlink, in Milano, Italy, on 23rd November 2018
Series
Works by Bernhard Schlink
Gerechtigkeit: Ein Essay 1 copy
Zuckererbsen 1 copy
Người đàn bà trên cầu thang 1 copy
Читачот 1 copy
Na granici 1 copy
1997 1 copy
Liebesfluchten: Drei Geschichten: Der Andere. Die Beschneidung. Die Frau an der Tankstelle. Gelesen vom Autor (2000) 1 copy
Realities of Faith 1 copy
Associated Works
Gefährliche Ferien - Südfrankreich: mit Martin Walker und vielen anderen (detebe) (2016) — Contributor — 3 copies
Hebbes ... : nieuwe smaakmakers voor ... — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1944-07-06
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Heidelberg University
Free University of Berlin - Occupations
- professor of law
judge
author - Organizations
- PEN-Zentrum Deutschland
- Awards and honors
- WELT-Literaturpreis (1999)
Verdienstkreuz (Order of Merit) 1st Class (2004)
Park Kyong-ni Prize (2014) - Relationships
- Schlink, Edmund (father)
Schlink, Wilhelm (brother) - Nationality
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Bielefeld, Germany
- Places of residence
- Bielefeld, Germany
Bonn, Germany
Berlin, Germany
Heidelberg, Germany - Map Location
- Germany
Members
Reviews
The Publisher Says: Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.
When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on show more trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Another read I fastened on as I got my Little Free Library bag ready to go. When I won this from, I think, a website now long gone's giveaway, I was under no obligation to review it. I didn't want to...my ephebeophile mother's long, long, long shadow over my life, her dead hands on my emotional neck still tightening spasmodically should I dare for a moment to forget to be unhappy, gave me a terrible and utter avoidance complex for this story.
There it is, the unvarnished solipsism of Surviving. The truth is we're all young Berg, we're all fucked-up Hanna. We can't make clean breaks with the past because the past is our inner self, our scaffolding. Young Berg learns this before Hanna puts him under the pressure and painful obligation of loving a broken thing.
And the tectonic pressures are too much for him to bear. They always are, he's not weak or defective. He's just...selfish:
One expects this in a boy. But young Berg will only ever be a boy. Hanna did that to him...Hanna enabled that in him.
And there, at the end of the book, was my source of discontent made plain to me: This entire louche passage in Berg's life...has not meaning whatever. Neither did the similar passage in my own life. They just...were...and they don't mean much to anyone but me.
So why'd I read this again? show less
When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on show more trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Another read I fastened on as I got my Little Free Library bag ready to go. When I won this from, I think, a website now long gone's giveaway, I was under no obligation to review it. I didn't want to...my ephebeophile mother's long, long, long shadow over my life, her dead hands on my emotional neck still tightening spasmodically should I dare for a moment to forget to be unhappy, gave me a terrible and utter avoidance complex for this story.
Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success...whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.
–and–
Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.
There it is, the unvarnished solipsism of Surviving. The truth is we're all young Berg, we're all fucked-up Hanna. We can't make clean breaks with the past because the past is our inner self, our scaffolding. Young Berg learns this before Hanna puts him under the pressure and painful obligation of loving a broken thing.
The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.
And the tectonic pressures are too much for him to bear. They always are, he's not weak or defective. He's just...selfish:
I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself.
One expects this in a boy. But young Berg will only ever be a boy. Hanna did that to him...Hanna enabled that in him.
Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
–and–
At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.
And there, at the end of the book, was my source of discontent made plain to me: This entire louche passage in Berg's life...has not meaning whatever. Neither did the similar passage in my own life. They just...were...and they don't mean much to anyone but me.
So why'd I read this again? show less
(Contains spoilers.)
I chose to read this book at a difficult time without knowing enough about it. I had no idea it would effect me this deeply.
I had a very recent loss of a sibling. Just 9 days ago, in fact. He was a "bad person" who left damage behind. I hadn't spoken to him for a year, and didn't reply to a text a few months back where he apologized and told me how much he loved me. I was hardened and thought I was "done." And yet, only now I know I really wasn't. And I know, even before show more reading this book, my brother wasn't an all "bad person." More accurately, he was a struggling, maybe broken person and those people often cause harm to others in addition to themselves. Thus, the themes in this book were more than I bargained for at this particular time. Or maybe, I picked it up to read at this exact time with a subconscious awareness that it would be what I needed.
My personal details aside, The Reader was incredibly powerful. I had read some lukewarm reviews here, a number describing it as "flat." I wouldn't describe it as flat, or at least not unintentionally flat. Me, I would describe it as reserved and often cool. That seems appropriate to me in the context of the story. Young Michael Berg had been betrayed by older Hanna Schmitz , but in the face of the utter enormity of the crime committed by her, a numbed reaction seems the best available one, especially for a young person with a secret, inappropriate affair to keep hidden. How to let in so many feelings -- the epic mix of personal, historic, and vastly terrible? So instead he felt numb.
I also watched the very good movie right after reading the book, but it missed the mark in some important ways. It was terribly important but not conveyed in the film that Hanna did feel unspoken guilt, as per the description by the warden about her later years in prison. She was punishing herself. Then of course, committed the ultimate self punishment. It wasn't, though, for the sake of love or shame directed toward Michael as was implied in the movie, but for the sake of the dead and her guilt. It was as if after learning to read, the shame she had concentrated her whole life on keeping hidden, she then was left with the worse shame she had never faced before.
Schlink depicted this time frame -- the second German generation after WWII -- with so much complexity of emotion and the effects on relationships of the second generation toward their parents and others, the culpable previous generation (Michael and Hanna), that such complexity knocked me out of my self-righteousness (as we are when we condemn what happened then and know that we would have acted differently). I felt unsteady in a rolling sea of horror, angry that ordinary people just like me didn't act differently. I admired Schlink's subtle depiction of the Jewish daughter who survived and her reaction to Hanna's will. In contrast, the movie seemed heavy handed to me, but I was frozen with the power of the movie line, where she says the camps were not universities, not places to go to learn. In the book, more nuanced and subtle, she also rejects the responsibility of Hanna's money and withholds atonement but keeps the tin. And that's all. The readers are left to go to the places we needed to go with that simple keeping of the tin.
This isn't a great review. But the book is. It's the most powerful book I've read in a while. It mixed in with my personal revelations of the past days but literature should do that. It should stir us up, make us feel uncertain, make us see things we turned away from before. Important works can shine light into the darker corners, not to give us the answers, but to make us pay attention to important questions we thought we already knew all the answers to. show less
I chose to read this book at a difficult time without knowing enough about it. I had no idea it would effect me this deeply.
I had a very recent loss of a sibling. Just 9 days ago, in fact. He was a "bad person" who left damage behind. I hadn't spoken to him for a year, and didn't reply to a text a few months back where he apologized and told me how much he loved me. I was hardened and thought I was "done." And yet, only now I know I really wasn't. And I know, even before show more reading this book, my brother wasn't an all "bad person." More accurately, he was a struggling, maybe broken person and those people often cause harm to others in addition to themselves. Thus, the themes in this book were more than I bargained for at this particular time. Or maybe, I picked it up to read at this exact time with a subconscious awareness that it would be what I needed.
My personal details aside, The Reader was incredibly powerful. I had read some lukewarm reviews here, a number describing it as "flat." I wouldn't describe it as flat, or at least not unintentionally flat. Me, I would describe it as reserved and often cool. That seems appropriate to me in the context of the story. Young Michael Berg had been betrayed by older Hanna Schmitz , but in the face of the utter enormity of the crime committed by her, a numbed reaction seems the best available one, especially for a young person with a secret, inappropriate affair to keep hidden. How to let in so many feelings -- the epic mix of personal, historic, and vastly terrible? So instead he felt numb.
I also watched the very good movie right after reading the book, but it missed the mark in some important ways. It was terribly important but not conveyed in the film that Hanna did feel unspoken guilt, as per the description by the warden about her later years in prison. She was punishing herself. Then of course, committed the ultimate self punishment. It wasn't, though, for the sake of love or shame directed toward Michael as was implied in the movie, but for the sake of the dead and her guilt. It was as if after learning to read, the shame she had concentrated her whole life on keeping hidden, she then was left with the worse shame she had never faced before.
Schlink depicted this time frame -- the second German generation after WWII -- with so much complexity of emotion and the effects on relationships of the second generation toward their parents and others, the culpable previous generation (Michael and Hanna), that such complexity knocked me out of my self-righteousness (as we are when we condemn what happened then and know that we would have acted differently). I felt unsteady in a rolling sea of horror, angry that ordinary people just like me didn't act differently. I admired Schlink's subtle depiction of the Jewish daughter who survived and her reaction to Hanna's will. In contrast, the movie seemed heavy handed to me, but I was frozen with the power of the movie line, where she says the camps were not universities, not places to go to learn. In the book, more nuanced and subtle, she also rejects the responsibility of Hanna's money and withholds atonement but keeps the tin. And that's all. The readers are left to go to the places we needed to go with that simple keeping of the tin.
This isn't a great review. But the book is. It's the most powerful book I've read in a while. It mixed in with my personal revelations of the past days but literature should do that. It should stir us up, make us feel uncertain, make us see things we turned away from before. Important works can shine light into the darker corners, not to give us the answers, but to make us pay attention to important questions we thought we already knew all the answers to. show less
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink was originally published in Germany in 1995 and is a beautifully written story of love, compassion and secrets as Michael, a young German boy becomes involved with Hanna, a woman twice his age.
They become lovers until she suddenly moves on, leaving him wondering if he had done something to drive her away. A number of years pass by and now, as a young law student, he sees Hanna again. This time she is a defendant in a war crimes trial. Michael is concerned as show more he watches her refuse to defend herself and he gradually realizes that she is covering up something that she considers more shameful than the things she is being accused of.
The Reader is a disturbing story made all the more devastating by it’s heart-felt simplicity. It is both a coming-of-age tale and the story of a second generation German coming to terms with the Holocaust. The story makes a strong impact and I know that I will be thinking about this haunting story of guilt and longing for some time. show less
They become lovers until she suddenly moves on, leaving him wondering if he had done something to drive her away. A number of years pass by and now, as a young law student, he sees Hanna again. This time she is a defendant in a war crimes trial. Michael is concerned as show more he watches her refuse to defend herself and he gradually realizes that she is covering up something that she considers more shameful than the things she is being accused of.
The Reader is a disturbing story made all the more devastating by it’s heart-felt simplicity. It is both a coming-of-age tale and the story of a second generation German coming to terms with the Holocaust. The story makes a strong impact and I know that I will be thinking about this haunting story of guilt and longing for some time. show less
Even today, physical differences persist between the former East and West Germany. Schlink is sensitive not only to those differences, but also to the broader cultural and human legacies of the war, its aftermath, and reunification. His focus in this novel is on those legacies in contemporary Germany. He explores his themes through conflict between an ageing bookstore owner and a rebellious teen. His protagonist is Kaspar Wettner, a septuagenarian who came of age in post-war West Germany. show more Kaspar is a cultured intellectual with decidedly progressive views. He is cognizant of his country’s troubled past and is somewhat remotely aware of persistent nationalistic elements fragmenting Germany today. He comes face-to-face with those elements when he develops a loving relationship with his foster granddaughter. Sigrun is a teenager who grew up in post-unification Germany. Her parents raised her as a far-right nationalist. Sigrun is confident in her nationalism, which is characterized by revisionist historical beliefs and a strong sense of grievance.
Schlink’s intricate plot seems contrived as a means to air challenging questions surrounding Germany’s past and present unrest. Kaspar’s drunken wife drowns during a bath (suicide?). Reading her unfinished memoir, Kaspar discovers that she abandoned her newborn child when she escaped East Germany in the 60’s. He sets out to find his deceased wife’s daughter only to learn that she lived a checkered life as a skinhead and neo-Nazi. He discovers her now living a quiet life in a far-right community with a neo-Nazi husband and a teenage daughter. Taking advantage of her husband’s greed, Kaspar produces a bogus will that stipulates payments to his wife’s daughter in exchange for regular visit with Sigrun. The remainder of the book chronicles Kaspar’s efforts to denazify Sigrun by introducing her to world culture and travel while correcting her delusions about Germany’s behavior in the war.
The story reads like an intergenerational fable about unity and redemption. Schlink’s approach seems balanced while taking a clear-eyed look at the contemporary neo-Nazi movement in Germany. Notwithstanding its convoluted and obviously contrived plot, the novel is a readable exploration of issues surrounding Germany’s struggle with its past and its present unrest. To his credit, Schlink avoids easy answers. Yet his ending seems rushed and strains credulity. show less
Schlink’s intricate plot seems contrived as a means to air challenging questions surrounding Germany’s past and present unrest. Kaspar’s drunken wife drowns during a bath (suicide?). Reading her unfinished memoir, Kaspar discovers that she abandoned her newborn child when she escaped East Germany in the 60’s. He sets out to find his deceased wife’s daughter only to learn that she lived a checkered life as a skinhead and neo-Nazi. He discovers her now living a quiet life in a far-right community with a neo-Nazi husband and a teenage daughter. Taking advantage of her husband’s greed, Kaspar produces a bogus will that stipulates payments to his wife’s daughter in exchange for regular visit with Sigrun. The remainder of the book chronicles Kaspar’s efforts to denazify Sigrun by introducing her to world culture and travel while correcting her delusions about Germany’s behavior in the war.
The story reads like an intergenerational fable about unity and redemption. Schlink’s approach seems balanced while taking a clear-eyed look at the contemporary neo-Nazi movement in Germany. Notwithstanding its convoluted and obviously contrived plot, the novel is a readable exploration of issues surrounding Germany’s struggle with its past and its present unrest. To his credit, Schlink avoids easy answers. Yet his ending seems rushed and strains credulity. show less
Lists
Short and Sweet (1)
Women in War (1)
Holocaust (1)
World Books (1)
Unread books (1)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 50
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 19,251
- Popularity
- #1,131
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 545
- ISBNs
- 553
- Languages
- 32
- Favorited
- 16
