Bernhard Schlink has never shied away from the awkward, existential questions about what it means to be ‘German’. In this moving story, Schlink explores a post-war Germany divided physically and ideologically. His superbly drawn characters are similarly divided, representing the spectrum of German politics, from communist East Germans to far-right neo-Nazis.

In Berlin in the early 1960s, a young West German man meets a young East German woman, and they form an unlikely but immediate bond. Kaspar soon works to smuggle Birgit out of the country. Forty years later, Birgit, who’d struggled with alcohol-dependency, has died, and a grief-stricken Kaspar searches for the novel Birgit was writing. On her computer, he finds secrets she’s kept from him for 40 years. After they’d met, but before she’d escaped, Birgit had a child with another man. She wrote that she would like to find her but was scared to start. Kaspar vows to find her … her life may help him to understand Birgit’s.

Kaspar eventually tracks down the daughter, Svenja, who is living in a völkisch clan – a far-right, Holocaust-denying community. Kaspar focuses on Svenja’s teenage daughter, Sigrun, wanting her to experience the more liberal world in which he lives. She’s resistant but discovers she shares Kaspar’s love of music.
This commonality binds them and offers Sigrun a different future. To accept it, however, she will need to leave her present life behind.

Schlink places Kaspar in the stable centre, then mirrors Sigrun’s alienating life journey with Birgit’s, but from opposite sides of the political pendulum. Schlink superbly uses narrative structure, character and dialogue to examine the long-term effects of being uprooted from one world after being shown an attractive alternative.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor emeritus of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the internationally bestselling novels The Reader, which became an Oscar-winning film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, and The Woman on the Stairs. His novel, Olga, was a no.1 international bestseller. He lives in Berlin and New York. The Granddaughter was published in 2024.

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