For a brief moment everything seems to be possible, back in May 1964. The spring days at the Germany meeting of young people in East Berlin, because the event is organized by the FDJ as tightly as usual, but still offers some freedom that you can take part can use some creativity. It should be about peace and friendship between peoples, about the radiance of socialism, which is why many young visitors come from the west. Even today, one looks somewhat incredulous at the photos that were taken on that Whitsunday in front of the Berlin Café Warsaw on Karl-Marx-Allee or on Alexanderplatz – pictures of dancers from two German states who have found a common rhythm, of musicians, the ones with their guitar music Beatles emulate, of lovers who want to overcome boundaries and barriers.
Of course it was an illusion. Soon afterwards, the SED leadership tightened the reins again, again relying on repression and suppressing any form of truly free expression. The supporters of the “guitar movement” were soon as suspicious as the critical filmmakers and rebellious writers – that was the end of the beat.
In his new novel “Die Enkelin”, Bernhard Schlink tells of this short spring of lightheartedness. The history student Kaspar is one of the visitors from over there who want to experience the GDR with their own eyes during the Germany meeting. In front of the Humboldt University he meets Birgit, who has received instructions from her FDJ secretary on how to argue with West Germans. But politics soon no longer played a role. In May 1964, when everyone was listening to the radio station DT 64 and dreaming of little freedoms, Birgit and Kaspar moved to their houses. Soon they will be a couple, because the eloquent Birgit doesn’t think much of the GDR anymore, she escapes via Prague and Vienna to the Federal Republic of Germany, to the somewhat clumsy but loving Kaspar, who is so good at quoting poems from German Romanticism.
His books are about the catastrophes in recent German history
But it is not a love story, but, as is so often the case with Schlink, a story about the destructive power of life’s lies and secrets. Because when Birgit fell in love with Kaspar, she was pregnant with another man, an SED functionary. Birgit begins to suppress this affair and its consequences, and Kaspar never hears about it either. During a summer vacation on the Baltic Sea, she has the unwanted child, she thinks that her best friend has given the baby to the orphanage.
Schlink tells the whole drama in retrospect. In contemporary Berlin, Birgit and Kaspar have become one of those childless, cultured couples with whom you never really know when they have forgotten how to laugh. While Kaspar has found fulfillment in his bookstore for decades, Birgit, who secretly writes poetry, has continued to encapsulate herself. It is becoming more and more difficult for her to cover up her alcohol addiction. One evening Kaspar finds his wife drowned in the bathtub. An accident?
Since his worldwide success with “Der Vorleser”, Schlink’s bestsellers have always had a historical component and often something slightly didactic; his books deal with the catastrophes in modern German history from the German Empire to reunification. “The granddaughter” also shows the turmoil of the people who feel at home neither in the east nor in the west of Germany. But in this book there is also a very present narrator figure who has similarities with the author: Schlink also participated in the discussion at the youth meeting in East Berlin in 1964. He even helped a young woman he had fallen in love with to escape from the GDR with forged papers. Because one can easily understand this immediacy of personal experience, the novel develops a great pull here.
The author and lawyer Bernhard Schlink, born in 1944.
(Photo: Regina Schmeken)
After Birgit’s death, Kaspar found a manuscript on her computer’s hard drive – the beginning of an autobiography. In this text he reads for the first time about Birgit’s daughter, who was born shortly after the Whitsun meeting, he also learns a lot about their escapes and their inability to finally go looking for their child. And suddenly Kaspar’s life has a purpose again. The widower, numb from grief and fainting, wants to do what his wife failed to do: dive back into the past and take the right turn.
Schlink sends his Kaspar across the country, to the Mecklenburg province, to the ethnic settlers, where he finally locates the lost daughter. Svenja grew up with her biological father, spent her worst time in the notorious youth work yard in Torgau, where the inmates were deliberately broken, and then ended up on the street. Now she leads a life with her husband and her 14-year-old daughter Sigrun in a parallel world beyond bourgeois society.
How Kaspar woos this unexpected granddaughter, how he wants to free her from the dull, xenophobic milieu: This is what the second part of the book is about, which describes the difficulties of getting into conversation with people who are trapped in their worldview. Schlink has obviously done a lot of research on the right-wing radicals on their isolated farms and the self-sufficient blood-and-soil communities. But in the end he too fails with the attempt to create halfway plausible scene figures that go beyond all Thor Steinar clichés. He is no different from Juli Zeh, who in her bestseller “Unter Menschen” tells of the encounter between a Berlin copywriter and a neo-Nazi neighbor who is built at least as close to water as to beer and, in the end, not from do-gooders, but is struck down by a deadly disease.
Bernhard Schlink: The granddaughter. Novel. Diogenes, Zurich 2021. 368 pages, 25 euros.
Basically, Schlink shows himself to be an old-school romantic in his new book: Kaspar tries to retain his granddaughter with all his education and experience, especially with classical music. There is something touching about the way he lulls her to sleep with a different composition every evening when she finally visits him in Berlin. He wanted to “offer himself” to her, it says in the novel, just as the late Birgit wanted to “offer himself” to her daughter. This humble attitude fits in with Schlink’s deliberately ambivalent figure: Kaspar wants to give a lot, but never look closely. Because he is afraid of losing everything then. But isn’t someone who sings the good old folk songs at the village festival of the would-be Teutons and deliberately ignores the dull Nazi rhetoric, not unprincipled and cowardly? A question that the lawyer and author Schlink does not answer clearly.
Kaspar’s excessive tolerance, understanding everything, wanting to forgive everything and never slamming a door, is a prototype of the attitude of the left-liberal bourgeoisie, which sometimes has more to do with ignorance; one suspects that this is also a reason for Birgit’s desperation. Because her husband never had the courage to go all out and finally bring the truth to light. Some people are downright grateful to be freed from the burden of a secret.
Kaspar knows about his greatest weakness, he consciously fights against it. He would like to be a bolder man. But in the end he cannot get out of his skin. Like the novelist Bernhard Schlink, son of a Protestant theologian, who firmly believes that people can get better if they only get the opportunity – with faith, love, hope.