#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews THE GRANDDAUGHTER by Bernhard Schlink

The German writer Bernhard Schlink, a former judge and professor of law, has again tackled one of Germany’s most dramatic periods of history and delivered another major and magnificent novel (in an equally magnificent translation by Charlotte Collins). It can only deepen our understanding of Germany. In The Granddaughter, he examines the impact of the division of Germany, reunification, its aftermath and the far right. Previously, in his most famous novel The Reader (1995), he sensitively exposed the impact on individuals of the Holocaust and here again his protagonists are ordinary Germans confronting or coming to terms with their past – or not. Bernhard Schlink is now 80 years old and has the maturity and wisdom of many short stories and 11 novels on Germany, and a lifetime of professional engagement with the country. He is unflinching, unjudgmental, kind and courageous as he places German life under his literary microscope to examine the motivations, the personal and political stories, which make these historical upheavals so complex, mysterious and endlessly interesting, however many times you read about them.

Our protagonist, the bookseller Kaspar is in his seventies, gentle and content with his life. We meet him in modern-day Berlin returning home from his bookshop to the flat he shares with his beloved wife of several decades, Birgit. As so often, the flat is in a mess, shopping not unpacked, laundry unwashed, and he stoically clears up. Birgit had obviously been drinking again and fallen asleep drunk. He muses on their life, their love. As we read we are lulled by the beautiful slow and stately pace of the prose, and even when the first shock occurs and Kaspar finds his wife drowned in the bath, there’s no change in pace. The closely observed detail, the clear and uncluttered writing, continues. The police arrive and pronounce Birgit’s death accidental. The grief-stricken Kaspar is alone and recalls their extraordinary story.

It began at a youth festival in 1964 in divided Berlin, just after the Wall had been erected. Two students, Kaspar, who’d crossed over from the west and Birgit, living in the east, join half a million other young people in a rare event organised by the communist regime to bring Germany’s youth together to engage in debate and exchange. Kaspar is an idealistic, open-minded history student, who believes in unity and overcoming divisions. He longs to experience Germany – all of Germany, not just the West, where he had lived up until then, in the stolid, Catholic Rhineland. This goal, to understand “all of Germany,” sets the tone and direction for Kaspar’s life. He and Birgit fall in love, she is quickly disillusioned by GDR ideology and when Kaspar offers to help her escape (in the most daring act of his whole life) she agrees, I want the world, she declares.

After escaping the east, Birgit embraced life in the west, she rarely spoke about the GDR, never revisited, even after unification, and never saw her family again. She and Kaspar had a good, comfortable marriage, but she was often withdrawn and secretive. Only after her death did Kaspar discover what these secrets were. Not only had she been writing a novel for ten years but also a lengthy memoir – all of which Kaspar reads for the first time – describing her complex feelings about the GDR, then and now, 50 years after she left:

The GDR makes me sad. The enthusiasm for the new era, the hope of a new country and a new kind of person, the readiness, in the early years, to take action and make sacrifices – even if there is nothing left of that beginning, it was still a beginning … it did exist, once upon a time, and it was real, and it was good, unlike the bad reality of actual socialism … The GDR will never be the country of which we dreamt. It no longer exists. Those who stayed cannot enjoy it again. Those who left cannot return; our exile never ends. Hence the emptiness. The country and the dream are irretrievably lost.

And the biggest secret of all, as Kaspar discovers, is that Birgit had given birth to a baby girl, abandoning her in the GDR when she escaped to join him:

The GDR was my life for the first twenty years of it. How can I see myself, understand myself, prove myself, without accepting that time as part of me? How can I write about myself; how can I write about my daughter? It’s not true, either, that I’m not interested in the GDR. I’m researching how orphans in the GDR grew up, the problems difficult teenagers faced, the homes where they were locked up. But I don’t want to go there …

It would feel as if I were right back where I was before my escape.

Birgit’s secret confessions occupy one long section of the novel. They form an important document of German history narrated by an insightful insider. However, as an explanatory narrative, it drags. Even so, Bernhard Schlink cleverly turns what might have been “just another East meets West love story” into a gripping tale of twists and turns.

As Kaspar recovers from his anger, guilt and frustration over Birgit’s secrets (had their life been a lie?), he determines to find her daughter – and it transpires, her granddaughter. The pace picks up as though a switch had been flicked and for the rest of the novel I turned the pages breathlessly. The real genius in this book is the story of Sigrun, the granddaughter. Here your expectations of a novel are turned upside down and your own prejudices tested to the core. Liberal and reasonable Kaspar becomes engaged in a battle of wits with the teenage Holocaust-denying, racist granddaughter who has been brought up in a neo-Nazi rural community of white supremacists in the former east.

There is no winner or loser in this novel, no prescription given for how Germany should deal with its past, but there’s lots to digest. The Granddaughter is about Kaspar’s journey – and I suspect, reflects Bernhard Schlink’s own attempts to understand his country. We follow how Kaspar reacts, acts, is challenged and changed by the twists in his life. Perhaps the closest we get to a conclusion is Kaspar’s comment:

I’m not proud of Germany. Why should I be proud of something that isn’t my doing? But I can’t imagine being anything other than German. Is that enough?

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

THE GRANDDAUGHTER

Written by Bernhard Schlink

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2024)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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