From the author of the international bestseller The Reader comes this striking and provocative exploration of the legacy of German reunification and the rise of modern populism, witnessed in the story of a grandfather who attempt to connect with his radicalized granddaughter.
May 1964. In East Berlin, at a conference sponsored by the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the youth organization of the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, Birgit meets Kaspar a visiting young scholar from across the wall in West Germany. The pair fall in love, their affair blossoming across bright spring days when anything seems possible. Birgit eventually chooses to flee to West Berlin to Kaspar, choosing love and freedom.
When Birgit dies years later, Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid: leaving East Germany in 1965, Birgit abandoned a baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes his bookshop in Berlin, determined to find Birgit's lost daughter. The search leads him to Mecklenburg, a settlement of the Völkischen, the extreme right-wing German party with dreams of reviving the Drang nach Osten, the eastward settlement of the Nazis into central and Eastern Europe. Among these neo-Nazis Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. The granddaughter?
How can love be born in a climate of mistrust and hatred? This thwarted meeting between a grandfather and his granddaughter is the beginning of a turbulent political journey through German history. More than twenty-five years after The Reader, Bernhard Schlink once again offers a great novel which deconstructs modern Germany, this time from the end of World War II to the years following unification, and the difficulties a riven nation faces as it tries to create a common homeland again.
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
