Book Review: ‘The Granddaughter,’ by Bernhard Schlink

THE GRANDDAUGHTER, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated by Charlotte Collins.

When it comes to women revealing what they really think about their families after they die, it’s hard to top Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, reflecting from beyond the grave on the grudges and loathing she lived with as the unwilling matriarch of a dysfunctional Mississippi brood. A century later in Germany, the dead woman at the center of Bernhard Schlink’s new novel, “The Granddaughter,” gives Addie a run for her money.

Birgit grows up in East Germany after the war and dies in her 70s in unified Berlin. Her husband, a bookseller named Kaspar, finds her body drowned in the bathtub of their well-appointed apartment and can’t tell if her overdose was accidental or intentional. Bereft, he receives a postmortem query from a publisher about the manuscript Birgit was writing, which she never showed him. He finds and reads what seems to be an autobiography of Birgit’s thoroughly embittered life, much of which she kept secret from him: from her young love affair with an older Communist Party officer that left her pregnant and alone, to her passionless marriage to Kaspar in Berlin, where she endured years of triumphalist condescension from West Germans. She writes regretfully and searingly about her hopes to someday meet the daughter she abandoned at birth. All that Kaspar knows for certain is that Birgit turned to alcohol and pills to numb her many pains. “I am not a monster,” Birgit reflects, defensively, regarding the freedom she felt in the moments after letting her newborn go.

Instead of disagreeing, Kaspar finds a new purpose in his dead wife’s failures and frustrations: He decides to find Birgit’s daughter. This premise will feel familiar to readers of Schlink’s previous novels — including his best-selling “The Reader” (1995), which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film — many of which use individual relationships as proxies for examining the ongoing legacies of World War II and the Cold War in his native country. Schlink is not as elusive or cerebral a writer about modern Germany as W.G. Sebald, nor as intense or unflinching a storyteller as Jenny Erpenbeck; but he writes instructive tales that adeptly raise difficult questions and propose appealing answers.

In “The Granddaughter,” translated into clear and accessible English by Charlotte Collins, these answers are found along Kaspar’s journey into the former East Germany, where he eventually tracks down Birgit’s daughter, Svenja, who was raised by her birth father and his wife and never knew about Birgit. In and out of reform school as a teenager, Svenja now leads a quiet rural life with her neo-Nazi husband and 14-year-old daughter, surrounded by fellow proponents of a purist Germany who reject national guilt over the “Holocaust lie” and commit themselves to defending “the glory of the Fatherland” from foreign influence. Meeting them, Kaspar exhibits a measured, even respectful curiosity about their enthusiasm for ideas and attitudes that produced the most destructive period of modern world history. His fair-mindedness throughout the novel is so exemplary it becomes wearisome.

What follows is a rather schematic plot turn in which Kaspar persuades Svenja and her husband to let their daughter, Sigrun — whose “heroes” include Irma Grese, an infamously brutal young guard in the women’s sections of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen — visit him in Berlin every few months, in exchange for payments from Birgit’s estate. This they decide after Kaspar has met the couple only twice — a couple who are protective and generally distrusting and knew nothing about Birgit, let alone Kaspar, a week earlier. But the all-too-convenient arrangement allows Schlink do what he really wants to with this novel: stage an intergenerational encounter in contemporary Germany between a responsibly contrite, open-minded, aging postwar German and a rebellious, confidently nationalist post-unification teenager.

And so Sigrun spends more than a year traveling between her home and Kaspar’s, where she has her own bedroom and piano lessons, where the two cook and travel and go to the philharmonic and museums together, and where Kaspar patiently tries to convince her of the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary. Unsurprisingly, this “Pygmalion”-style denazification project involves giving her books to inform and challenge her worldview, which inevitably leads to conflicts back home.

After disappearing from his life without warning, Sigrun shows up again on Kaspar’s doorstep two years later, needing him to hide her from the police. At 18 she has inherited her mother’s stubbornness, which ironically makes her rebel against Svenja’s “Völkisch” politics and Third Reich nostalgia. She’s eager to fight in the streets for her own vision for Germany — especially against her leftist peers — which Schlink shrewdly conveys as a kind of reactionary idealism to what she perceives as the political mushiness of her parents’ generation.

However disappointed and worried he becomes about Sigrun’s situation, Kaspar remains unconditionally supportive, losing his temper only once, on the perfectly calculated occasion of delivering an impassioned speech in defense of moderation — to a Sigrun who proves, also conveniently, more and more open to her step-grandfather’s perspective.

And so this novel, finally too pleasing and affirming for readers who are rightly worried about political violence and radicalized youth, ends with a dignified old man envisioning a stable, cosmopolitan future for a wayward young girl. Some will read Schlink’s latest as an inspiring fable of intergenerational unity and redemption. Others might find it more like fantasy fiction.

THE GRANDDAUGHTER | By Bernhard Schlink | Translated by Charlotte Collins | HarperVia | 326 pp. | $28.99