
John Green reviews a novel fitting nicely into the mainstream ideological narrative, showing
how an aesthetically satisfying cultural experience can nevertheless convey reactionary political meanings
Schlink’s novel, The Reader, was made into an acclaimed film, starring Kate Winslet. In that novel, he dealt with Germany’s Nazi legacy. In this novel, he takes the legacy of the GDR as his subject. It plays out in East Berlin during the 1960s and takes us up to the present and the rise of neo-Nazi activity.
It begins with the death of the protagonist’s wife, Birgit, by drowning in her bath; was it suicide or an alcohol-induced accident? Her partner, Kaspar, remains none the wiser. As young students, in 1964, he and Birgit had met at the GDR Whitsun youth festival in East Berlin and fallen in love. He was from the West but was willing to move to the GDR to be with her. She rejects this idea however and so he organises her flight, using false identity documents. She leaves behind a newly born baby girl, whose father is a Party district secretary and already married. After her death, and intrigued by finding an unfinished autobiographical novel his wife had been writing, Kaspar is determined to discover details of her life in the East, and embarks on a journey to piece together the fragments of her life before they met.
Like a great number other books written about life in the GDR by (West-) German authors, this one, too, is replete with the usual tropes, reiterating the usual cliches of what life was like there. Tellingly, the author is one of the many West Germans who were parachuted into leading positions in East Germany after unification, becoming a professor of law at Berlin’s Humboldt University.
Schlink creates a story that echoes the mainstream historical narrative: Germany has suffered two consecutive dictatorships, and the GDR was merely a predictable mutation of Nazism, totally ignoring the fact that West Germany itself never really overcame its Nazi past and restored old Nazis to their old positions in the post-war society. It is little wonder that Schlink’s novels have garnered approbation in the mainstream press.
Early on in the narrative, he quotes from Birgit’s typescript of an unfinished biographical novel:
In the forty years of its existence, the GDR locked up 120,000 juveniles in state-run homes: ordinary children’s homes, homes for difficult children, special homes reformatories, re-education and labour camps, transition homes. On admission their bodies were searched, their body cavities inspected, and heads shaved … Young people were raised and broken in GDR children’s homes as they had been before 1945 and continued to be so long after 1945 …
I can imagine that in the immediate post-war years, faced with the many war orphans and brutalised, traumatised youngsters, that treatment in such facilities by the authorities would not have been particularly sensitive or psychologically appropriate. But to characterise the GDR’s young people’s institutions throughout the whole of its history in this blanket way, is not only over-simplistic but deliberately defamatory.
As usual in narratives written by (West-) Germans, parallels drawn between Nazi Germany and the GDR are par for the course. “If I had understood,” he writes patronisingly, “that the GDR economy was stagnating, that the culture was stifling imagination and creativity, that the politicians were infantilizing the people …”. And again, later, describes how a dog is kept on a tight lead and disciplined to do as ordered, asking: “Isn’t that what a district secretary [of the ruling party] does? The citizens and comrades are his companions, in a way, but he has power over them.”
GDR citizens are seen solely through this distorting and narrow-focus lens. They are condemned to lead double lives, outwardly demonstrating loyalty and obedience to the SED regime, under which they are disciplined and regimented, while in their own domestic environment they pursue a different, parallel life. Social relationships are based on hypocrisy and dissimulation.
Leo Weise, a district party secretary was Birgit’s first boyfriend and she bore his child before fleeing to the West and leaving the baby behind. Kaspar visits Weise and finds a bitter man. He is also described as a martinet and wife-beater who had his wayward daughter placed in a young people’s reformatory, as described above. She later disappeared from his life.
In his search for his dead wife’s daughter, Kaspar discovers her living in a north-eastern village in the former GDR, with her own daughter, and where neo-Nazis have firmly established themselves. There, they hold village festivals, celebrating the Nazi and Teutonic past, looking forward to a glorious nationalist rebirth. Such a village did indeed exist and gained much media publicity, but how far the inhabitants were ex-GDR citizens or incomers from elsewhere was not mentioned.
Kaspar himself embodies the “good German” – a paragon of Western values – a loving father manqué, tolerant, and cultured. It is he, who introduces his village stepdaughter, Sigrun, from the wilds of the east German countryside to city life and the high culture of Bach and Mozart, art galleries and a wide range of books.
His mother, he says, was of strong religious and moral convictions and introduced him to books, concerts and opera and left him to decide for himself on contentious issues (implicit here is that GDR mothers, in contrast, were uncultured and lacked a moral compass).
Schlink’s characters remain two dimensional as he attempts to clothe them in his own ideological narrative at the expense of a more rounded portrayal.
In an increasingly romantic and didactic latter half of the novel, Kaspar persuades his step-granddaughter’s parents to let her visit him in Berlin. During these short visits, she takes a few hours of piano lessons and is clearly a musical prodigy, soon playing Bach and Schumann with ease (even though the author himself fails to distinguish between Schumann and Schubert when introducing her to Scenes from Childhood!).
He slowly weans her away from her parents’ ideology, but she only leaves them to join another extremist right-wing group in Berlin and is party to the killing of a left-wing activist. After he helps extricate herself from this group, she departs for Australia after taking his money and credit card. There she intends attending a music academy and becoming a professional pianist.
Le Figaro called it “the great novel of German reunification” and it has received similar accolades elsewhere. Schlink does indeed write well, grabbing your attention easily, and the novel is well translated, despite the occasional faux pas. He has confected the perfect Gothic fairytale to slot comfortably into the mainstream narrative, alongside Stasi horror stories and tales of privation and a humourless, monochrome life.
The Granddaughter, by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins, Hdbck. £20, Pubs. Weidenfeld & Nicolson