The granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink

In Post-war East Berlin a young couple meet and fall in love. They come from either side of the East-West divide and it is not yet easy to forsake their separate histories. But the young man, Kaspar, does everything he can to enable his love, Birgit, to escape her austere life and join him in the West. The life and history she leaves behind included a daughter she gave up for adoption, and in her later years she is silently tormented by this secret child that Kaspar only discovers after Birgit’s death. When finally he unravels the notes for the story she was writing for her daughter, he is led to discover the granddaughter that Birgit never knew. Bound up in a Nationalist neo-Nazi world, this child connects to her wise and gentle step-grandfather and is slowly drawn to consider truths that have been hidden by her family’s ideologies. The contemporary world of Germany and the Nationalist blindness, and the neo-Nazi focus is counterposed with the gentle Bookseller’s loving embrace of the granddaughter of his late wife. 

This slow journey of love and pain, secrets and disclosure, openness and a closed heart are all framed within the personal history of one woman from East Germany and her secret and abandoned child. She tells the early part of this narrative through her own writing and attempt to make sense of her life. The generational distress that is recounted in this powerful but slow-moving story is exceptionally potent. The second part of the book shares the insight into the heart of an older man that is incredibly moving. Told over many years and through the social change from the 1960s to the present in Germany, the insights we have of the world of the uber-nationalist movement and neo-nazis are layered alongside the selfless life of one man and his work as a bookseller and his attempt to bring hope and wisdom to one teenager who had been deprived of a balanced view of the world. This book is an absolute gem and although it has a melancholic feel and confronting aspects, it resonates with gentle grace. Slowly working through big issues in Germany, it does so with a deft and incredibly light touch, like a beautiful piece of music might evoke emotions in an unexpected way. Schlink’s book The Reader had a significant impact, and this book too will be one to discuss into the future. The story does not finish with a grand flourishing conclusion, rather it leaves a note of quiet hope in a minor key.

This is book that resonates and would make a brilliant Bookclub book. For readers aged 16-Adult.

Themes: Post-World War II Germany, Right-wing idealism, Neo-Nazism, Family drama, Love, Suicide, Grief.

Carolyn Hull