“The Reader” author Bernhard Schlink turns 80 years old
Published: Monday, Jul 1st 2024, 10:00
Volver a Live Feed
With his global bestseller "The Reader", German author Bernhard Schlink gave the memory of the Holocaust its own twist in the minds of millions of people - by focusing on a female perpetrator. It was the first German book to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list. In addition to his work as an author, Schlink also worked as a lawyer, constitutional judge and university lecturer. He will be 80 years old on Saturday (July 6).
Translated into over 50 languages, "The Reader" made Schlink world-famous. The novel was published in 1995 and is about the love between 15-year-old high school student Michael Berg and 36-year-old illiterate tram conductor Hanna Schmitz. Schmitz, who suddenly disappears without a trace, later reappears in a trial that Berg attends as a law student. She is unmasked as a former concentration camp guard.
Accusation of trivialization
Schlink was widely praised for the novel, but was also accused of trivializing it because of its human view of a Nazi perpetrator. Schlink himself always emphasized that the world cannot be divided into good and evil. "If perpetrators were always monsters, the world would be simple," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2009.
Schlink never wanted the novel to be understood as a Holocaust book: "I wrote a book about my generation in relation to my parents' generation and to what my parents' generation did," he said in the interview.
Schlink was born on July 6, 1944 in Bielefeld. He grew up in Heidelberg, where his father was a Protestant professor of theology. After studying law, Schlink completed his doctorate in constitutional law in 1975, followed by his habilitation a few years later. After his first professorships, he became a professor of law at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1990, where he retired in 2009.
Between 1987 and 2006, Schlink was also a judge at the North Rhine-Westphalian Constitutional Court in Münster. After reunification, the constitutional lawyer worked on the transitional constitution for the GDR. In the legal dispute over the dissolution of the Bundestag in 2005, Schlink also acted as legal representative for the Federal Government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD).
From specialist author to man of letters
After Schlink had already made a name for himself as a legal author, he moved into literature in 1987. Together with a friend, he published the crime novel "Selbs Justiz", in which a detective is confronted with his Nazi past. The book was made into a film by ZDF in 1991 under the title "Der Tod kam als Freund".
After further crime novels, "The Reader" was finally published in 1995. The book also made Schlink famous in the USA, where US talk show host Oprah Winfrey named it book of the month in 1999. The book found more than one million readers in the USA. The book became more widely known not least thanks to the multi-Oscar-nominated 2008 film adaptation starring British actress Kate Winslet in the role of Schmitz.
Happy" while writing
Schlink is praised for his clear and precise language. After "The Reader", Schlink wrote further novels - including "Die Heimkehr" (2006), "Die Frau auf der Treppe" (2014) and "Die Enkelin" (2021). His work is published by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich and regularly tops the bestseller lists in German-speaking Switzerland. Critics have occasionally accused him of kitsch and clichés. His most recent novel, "Das späte Leben", was published last year and was praised as a "quiet, great and important text".
Schlink himself always emphasized that he feels happy when writing. "I am completely with myself when I write," he recently said on Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio. "Writing is an escape for me, because nowhere am I more with myself than when I'm writing." In his private life, Schlink commutes between New York and Berlin. He has a partner from the USA and an adult son from a divorced marriage.
©Keystone/SDA
Spanish 
English 
German 
French 
Arabic