With his novel “The reader” was a doctorate jurist Bernhard Schlink is a world success. Now of the literary career changers is 75 years old.
A lawyer who writes books, this is nothing out of the ordinary. Amazing but the success is born, by Bernhard Schlink, on 6. July 1944 in Bielefeld, over the decades, both professions mastered.
Since his legal images for a book career: Schlink studied in Heidelberg and Berlin, after his graduation, he taught in Bonn and Frankfurt, and later at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 1987 to 2006, Schlink worked as a constitutional judge for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. After the fall of the Berlin wall, he also worked on a transitional Constitution for the GDR.
Central themes: morality and blame
Parallel to this, Schlink began Writing and tried his hand first as a crime writer. In 1987, his debut novel, “self-justice”, the first part of the trilogy around the gnarled private detective Gerhard Selb appeared. This is how, later also other Schlink-characters, as a morally dubious character. Because during the third Reich, it is said, the Same was an ambitious Prosecutor, who did not flinch even before the death sentences against opponents of the regime.
Pulled of a great Coup the writer is a law Professor Schlink but then, in 1995, with its first, non-criminalistic novel “The reader”. It goes back to the culpable involvement in the Nazi Regime, this time, however, was considerably more drastic, namely in the Form of a love story between a Teenager and a mass murderer.
Often translated and Oscar-awarded
The high school student Michael Berg is 15 years old, 20 years older, illiterate Hanna seduces him. At the Meeting of the “young Chen pleased” with his beloved, with readings from the classics of world literature, until Hanna disappears suddenly. After years, however, the affair Michael a holt: The law student learns that, of all things, his Hanna was a ruthless concentration camp guard and in front of court.
A success: The German-American film adaptation of “The reader” with Kate Winslet and David Kross in the lead roles
“The reader” was a worldwide success and ended up as the first book of a German at all at # 1 on the bestseller list of the New York Times. In the meantime, the novel has been translated into 52 languages, and successfully filmed. The Hollywood actress Kate Winslet got for her leading role of Hanna an Oscar.
Voice of the ‘ 68-Generation
But Schlink is renowned for its history of the former SS-Schergin, the enthusiasm for Homer, and Theodor Fontane, not just benevolence. Some, especially Jewish intellectuals, found the figure as a tasteless provocation, because Schlinks illiterate to the reader to call forth more sympathy than revulsion. You accused the “narrator” of “cultural pornography”, the Kitsch and the trivialization of Nazi atrocities.
Bernhard Schlink was able to understand the outrage over his “reader” but never quite. “If the perpetrators were monsters, the world would be easy,” he said in a 2009 Interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Instead of a literary justification for the offender, so Schlink, was to him the illumination of the moral Dilemmas in which his Generation would be: on the one Hand, should parents differentiate against your Nazi, on the other hand, they wanted to understand their behavior but also.
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“The reader” by Bernhard Schlink
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DW-literature-expert Sabine Kieselbach about “The reader” by Bernhard Schlink
A quandary, in which the heroes of the later Schlink-novels “The return” (2006) and “The weekend” (2008) remain trapped. In “The homecoming” seeks out the fatherless grew up with Peter, although his Nazi father, but this still represents a “gospel of hardness”. In “The weekend” is a meeting of friends of the RAF-terrorists, comes after a long detention, and to recognize not more disillusioned that their fight against “the killer generation” is acceptable.
In Schlinks the latest novel “Olga” (2018) falls in love with the eponymous protagonist, a deaf teacher from a modest background, in Herbert, the son of a landowner from the neighborhood. Later, occurs, similar to the “reader”, a younger man in the novel to happen. Schlink Olgas followed entire life and touches on different eras of German history in fast-forward.
Schlink political position
In Schlinks books, it often goes to some questions around the themes of love, guilt, and responsibility. The author is writing a Moralist, who knows his message to pack less artistic because craftsmanship-solid. And like to escape to his heroes, even in self-deception, as in the narrative volumes of the “love escapes” (2009) and “summer lies” (2010): At the end you have to see, but always an uncomfortable truth in the face.
Otherwise, the lawyer and author in real life it holds. Again and again, Schlink, of the between his two residences in New York and Berlin refers commutes, political position. For 45 years, he is a member of the social democratic SPD. In terms of the right-wing populist “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) is his appeal, the citizen should not “indulge in hatred and hostility, discord and exclusion,” in fact. The most Important thing, says Schlink, was resigning “to”.