A short life of the author
Bernhard Schlink (b. 6 July 1944) is a German novelist and retired law professor whose The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995) became one of the most widely read and debated German novels of the postwar era — a book that made the question of how the children and grandchildren of the Nazi generation should relate to their parents’ crimes into an intimate, deeply personal narrative that reached millions of readers worldwide. Before The Reader, Schlink was known primarily as a legal scholar and judge, and as the author of a successful series of detective novels featuring the private investigator Georg Selb. The novel’s extraordinary commercial success — over ten million copies sold, translations into more than forty languages, a 2008 film adaptation starring Kate Winslet that won the Academy Award for Best Picture — made Schlink the most internationally visible German novelist since Günter Grass.
Life and Career
Schlink was born in Bielefeld in the Ruhr region, the son of a Protestant theology professor. He grew up in Heidelberg and studied law at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. He became a professor of public law and legal philosophy, and served as a judge on the Constitutional Court of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia — a career that gave him an insider’s understanding of how legal systems process (and fail to process) historical guilt.
His first published fiction was the Selb detective trilogy — Selbs Justiz (1987, with Walter Popp), Selbs Betrug (1992), and Selbs Mord (2001) — featuring Georg Selb, an aging private detective in Mannheim who was a prosecutor during the Third Reich. The series uses the detective genre to explore how Germans of the war generation live with their complicity — Selb is both sympathetic and morally compromised, and each novel forces him to confront crimes (his own and others’) that postwar German society has agreed to forget.
Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995) is a short, deceptively simple novel in three parts. In the first, Michael Berg, a fifteen-year-old boy in Heidelberg in 1958, begins a sexual relationship with Hanna Schmitz, a thirty-six-year-old tram conductor. Before and after sex, she asks him to read aloud to her — Homer, Tolstoy, Chekhov — and the reading becomes as intimate as the sex. In the second part, Michael is a law student attending the trial of women accused of being guards at a Nazi concentration camp sub-camp, and Hanna is among the defendants. In the third, Michael confronts his own complicity: his love for Hanna and his knowledge of her crimes are inseparable, and the novel argues that this inseparability is the condition of every postwar German who inherited an intimate relationship with the perpetrator generation.
The novel’s most discussed formal device is the revelation that Hanna is illiterate — a fact that explains her desire to be read to, her inability to defend herself at trial, and her acceptance of a harsher sentence than she deserves. Critics have debated whether Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for the moral blindness of the perpetrators, an explanation that generates inappropriate sympathy, or a structural device that forces the reader to confront their own desire to find mitigating circumstances for historical evil. Cynthia Ozick and others attacked the novel for aestheticizing Holocaust guilt; defenders argued that Schlink’s achievement was precisely in making the reader feel the seductiveness of forgiveness without endorsing it.
The 2008 film, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress) and Ralph Fiennes, brought the novel to an even wider audience.
Schlink’s subsequent fiction has not matched The Reader’s impact but has continued its themes. Flights of Love (2000) was a story collection about relationships burdened by the past. Homecoming (2006) — about a man searching for his father’s identity through a manuscript from the 1940s — was his most ambitious post-Reader novel. The Woman on the Stairs (2016) and Olga (2018) — about a German woman whose life spans from the Kaiserreich to reunification — continued his examination of how German history shapes private lives.
Themes and Style
Schlink writes about guilt, memory, and the impossibility of clean moral positions — particularly for Germans born after the war who must live with the knowledge that their parents’ generation committed atrocities. His prose is characteristically spare and direct — influenced by the legal writing that was his primary professional mode — and his novels move with a clarity and economy unusual in German literary fiction.
His treatment of sex and power in The Reader — the older woman, the younger boy, the erotics of reading aloud — has generated criticism that he aestheticizes domination, but it has also been defended as an honest rendering of how intimacy complicates moral judgment.
Critical Standing
The Reader is one of the most commercially successful and critically debated German novels since The Tin Drum. Its place in the canon of Holocaust literature remains contested, but its cultural impact — as the book that brought the question of inherited German guilt to tens of millions of non-German readers — is undeniable.
Key Works
- The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995)
- Selbs Justiz (1987)
- Olga (2018)
- Homecoming (2006)
Collecting Schlink
Der Vorleser (1995, Diogenes Verlag, Zurich) — the German first edition is a small, elegant paperback. Fine copies bring $30–$80. The English translation (1997, Pantheon, New York) brings $15–$40 in first edition. Kate Winslet’s Oscar increased demand.