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Germany in Class: German Language March 11, 2008 Bernhard Schlink Speaks about His New Book: Homecoming
When Bernhard Schlink began writing fiction well into a successful career as a law professor and judge, he wrote mysteries. His protagonist, Gerhard Selb, followed his nose through cases that kept readers turning the pages but also explored Germany’s complicated relationship to its own past. When Schlink published The Reader, his first work of fiction that was not a detective novel, many German critics thought he had crossed the Rubicon thought to flow between popular fiction and serious literature. The story of a boy who begins an affair with a much older woman whose involvement with the Nazis leads to war crimes charges skyrocketed to international success, especially in America, where it was featured as an Oprah book club selection. In truth though, The Reader was as much a slowly unraveling mystery as its hardboiled predecessors, and it expanded those books’ exploration of theories of justice and West German society’s unplumbed relationship to the Nazi regime. Schlink’s latest book, Homecoming, which appeared in English translation in January, follows in the same vein. Peter Debauer, an editor of legal texts and journals, follows his gut on a search for the identity of his father, who he believed died as a soldier in World War II. If this mystery is more literary than others, it may be because the clues to this mystery are all in texts. Rather than bits of hair or gunpowder, close readings of a pulp novel about a German POW who escaped from the Soviets and a treatise by an American legal scholar who posits a post-modern “iron rule” as an alternative to the “golden rule” are what advance the plot. The facts uncovered in this crime lab of letters are just as harrowing as in any whodunit, however, and they lead Peter to confront an American stranger whose refined pedigree belies a dark past that rivals that of a shape shifting incubus. As Schlink explained to us in the following interview, writing fiction allows him to express the full complexity of human relationships and moral problems that reductive legal reasoning precludes. We spoke to Schlink about teaching law, writing and the difference between art and entertainment. You still work as a law professor, even after massive worldwide success as a writer– why? I think that it’s good for a writer to have one leg out in the real world. I know writers whose whole lives revolve around what they think and the tasks they set themselves. The ideal of a life devoted to just one thing is not always as productive as it seems. It might also be because I am the child of a protestant pastor and theologian. I enjoy writing so much, and you cannot only have joy in life – you also have to work. On the other hand, I do get a lot of satisfaction out of my work as a law professor. As I get older though, I think I can let go more and more. I laid down my work as a constitutional judge a few years ago and I’ve reduced teaching at university to focus more on writing. A lot of the issues you deal with in your scholarly work also find their way into your fiction. Do you find that some questions are better answered in one form or another? In my scholarly work – I have to find answers and want to find answers. Even the right answers, however, cannot hold the whole complexity of real life. They reduce the complexity. There are better and worse ways to reduce the complexity of real life, and that’s what I mean by the right answers. What I enjoy about fiction is that you can bring all this complexity into it. Fiction lives on many things, but especially on making us understand the complexity of people and their situations and problems. A lot of German critics place you in an Anglo-Saxon storytelling tradition. What do English and American Literature mean to you and how have they influenced your writing? I think that what those critics mean is that I try to transcend a certain divide that is drawn in German literature. That is the distinction between “U” and “E” – U for Unterhaltung, or entertainment, and E for ernsthaft or serious. To be frank, I always thought that was one of the dumbest distinctions you could come up with. Either something describes peoples’ lives and problems in a believable and engaging way, or it doesn’t. I had a teacher who encouraged us to read English literature for our own joy, not to learn the language, but just for fun. I started doing that in school, reading [Raymond] Chandler, [Dashiell] Hammett, and James M. Cain. I loved detective novels the most, and I read all the American mystery writers, but also the British and the French. When I started writing my first books, they were mysteries. In my later writing, I always enjoy an element of mystery as well. Do you plan to continue to deal with the Third Reich in your upcoming books? My latest book, The Weekend is about to be released in Germany, and it has almost nothing to do with the Holocaust. It is about a Baader-Meinhof terrorist who gets out of prison in after 20 years. His sister doesn’t think it is a good idea to go to the city so she invites all of his friends to a country house in Brandenburg. The entire plot takes place over one weekend at the country house. Some of the ideas I have for my next books and stories are historical, but they take place before the Third Reich even, and many others are not really history-related at all. Like Peter Debauer in Homecoming, you began teaching at the Humboldt University in East Berlin shortly after the wall fell. Based on your experience there, what progress do you think Germany has made in terms of overcoming psychological barriers and dealing with the history of the division? Getting back together has mainly meant East Germans melting into the West German mainstream. They have done that easily where the economic situation is somewhat ok. I sometimes thought of the cold war between East and West as a cold Civil War. And how long did it take the US to grow back together? Maybe you haven’t even finished yet. If the economic revival reaches these parts of eastern Germany, I think it will speed things along. You mean, when the material conditions of peoples lives improve? No, it’s not the material conditions. People can afford a higher standard of living now on their pensions than they could have by working in East Germany. What people need is a functioning community. It’s not poverty; it’s the social infrastructure. Do you think there is more reckoning with the crimes of the SED regime to come? When I was younger, I blamed my parents generation for not dealing with the third Reich. Now I understand that after an event like WWII, or the fall of the Wall, for that matter, restarting your life just takes some time. You don’t have time to deal with these things because you are just picking up the pieces. I think that is beginning now, though. Your novel The Reader is being filmed by Steven Daldry (The Hours) with Kate Winslet and Ralph Feinnes in the lead roles. Have you been involved? A little bit. I have discussed the screenplay many times with Steven Daldry. I also keep getting phone calls with questions like, “What is a plausible dinner in a German professor’s household in the 50’s”. Do you worry about handing your work off to other people to interpret it? I find it exciting, especially since the writer and the director and the actors and actresses are all so good. Will there be a movie based on Homecoming? Yes, there will be a German film based on Homecoming. I am working on the screenplay, and I’ve found it fun to get to the point where you are not just trying to retell your story in another format. You can focus on what it is really about, and then translate that into the language of a movie. The story will definitely be told differently. I do not want to become a screenplay writer, but I always wanted to try it once. My short story, “The Other Man” from Liebesfluchten
(Flights of Love)will also be made into a film starring Liam
Neeson.
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