By Tom Ryan
FICTION
The Granddaughter
Bernhard Schlink (translated by Charlotte Collins)
Hachette, $34.99
Interviewing Bernhard Schlink at the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival, I ventured that he’d worked hard to present Hanna Schmitz, the object of the narrator’s interest in his 1995 novel, The Reader, in a sympathetic light. Politely, firmly and justifiably, he corrected me.
He didn’t want us to feel sympathy for her, a young woman who’d committed horrendous acts as an SS guard during the Holocaust. What he was trying to do, he explained, was examine how an ordinary person like Hanna could be knowingly responsible for the crimes against humanity that she’d committed.
Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz in the 2008 screen adaptation of The Reader.Credit:
It’s a question he’s been pondering ever since, and the dark shadow of Germany’s 20th-century past hangs over everything he’s written: from the trio of detective novels featuring the elderly Gerhard Self (Self’s Punishment, Self’s Deception, Self’s Murder, 1987-2001), to The Odyssey-like Homecoming (2006), The Weekend (2008) and the essay collection Guilt About the Past (2009), and his latest work, The Granddaughter.
His protagonists – including the middle-aged bookseller, Kaspar, in The Granddaughter – are men trying to make sense of themselves, the culture into which they’ve been born, and the particular circumstances in which they’ve become embroiled.
Perhaps inevitably, these characters appear to be at least partially autobiographical – Schlink thinking out loud through them, dealing with issues that have long confronted him. Not only that, their personal histories also occasionally overlap, as is the case again in The Granddaughter. Like Schlink, Kaspar is the son of a Protestant pastor; like Schlink, Kaspar helps his girlfriend escape from behind the Iron Curtain.
Two stories weave their way through this masterful novel, which effectively asks what it means to be German today. One is about the complex aftermath of the 1989 dismantling of the heavily guarded concrete wall that had divided Germany for almost 30 years and that came to symbolise that Iron Curtain.
On the East side was the German Democratic Republic, part of the Soviet bloc; on the West was the so-called “capitalist bloc” with greater freedom of movement and virulent anti-communism. The acerbic British writer Mick Herron tackles the consequences of the ending of this era from a very different perspective in his 2023 thriller, The Secret Hours.
The Granddaughter’s other story is Kaspar’s. After a domestic tragedy leads him to seek out the truth about his wife Birgit’s past, he embarks on a quest to track down the daughter she’d abandoned before they met. He learns that, for Birgit – “a child of East Germany” – life has been about flight, and that it’s weighed her down.
For him, though, it’s about a search, one that takes him from the home they had shared in modern-day Berlin to Litzow and Lohmen in rural Germany. It’s there, about halfway into the novel, that he meets Sigrun, the granddaughter of the title, and comes face-to-face with the neo-Nazi movement’s “mountain of prejudice” – and a profound personal challenge.
The Berlin Wall under construction in 1961. Credit: AP
A former lawyer and university professor, Schlink writes clearly, concisely and occasionally colourfully. Attentive to the incidental details that bring his characters to life, he takes us inside their encounters with their surroundings: the joy of an exquisite sunset, the beauty of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, the intimate pleasure of kneading dough, the enticing smell as it bakes.
But alongside the sensory immediacy of these experiences, he establishes an illuminating framework for their lives. Excavating the routines that, for better or worse, rule his characters’ everyday existence, he scrutinises the impact their country’s reunification has had on them, the values they’ve come to hold, and their fears that they might be doing the wrong thing.
While Germany’s history, its current crises and the novel’s geographical settings are presented as a background to their daily activities, they also serve as a formative influence on all the characters, shaping the contrasting ways in which they think about their relationships with each other and the world.
What binds them together is the troubled humanity they share and the changes that are as inevitable for each of them as the next breath they take. Some adapt to the new circumstances they find themselves facing; others don’t. Some correct the mistakes they’ve made; others can’t.
There are times when Kaspar seems indistinguishable from his creator, Bernard Schlink.Credit: Leonardo Cendamo
Driving the novel is the potent humanist impulse that has been evident throughout Schlink’s career, urging empathy for its central characters. It’s at its evocative and endearing best when Kaspar and Sigrun are sharing the page, their interactions fuelled by a heartfelt appreciation of the experience of grandfathering and embodying a positive life force. And it even offers a reminder that neo-Nazis and their like are only simplistically reduced to the horrendous beliefs they hold.
Schlink’s prose is direct and reflective. And although he writes in the third person, there are times when he and Kaspar seem indistinguishable, the character alert to the themes running through his creator’s mind. “He would have liked to have had children,” Schlink writes of Kaspar. “Now he had a granddaughter. And now that he had her, he had to tend to her soul. He laughed. Sigrun’s soul, the German soul … What am I letting myself in for?”
Like Schlink in his estimable work as a writer, Kaspar’s journey into the past finds him grappling with the issues it raises for the present. Challenged about his beliefs, he again seems to be speaking for the author of his story: “I love my country. I’m glad that I speak its language, that I understand its people, that it’s familiar to me. I don’t have to be proud that I’m German; it’s enough for me that I’m glad of it.”
At its anguished heart, The Granddaughter is a state-of-the-nation story, one which, intriguingly, takes us from Berlin to Brisbane and eventually finds its way through a moral labyrinth to at least a qualified hope.
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