Using thrillers and novels, the German novelist Bernhard Schlink never ceases to explore the transmission of his country’s memory, to exhume secrets and lies, with his own way of mixing the intimate and the policy.
the reader (Gallimard, 1996, Prix des libraires du Québec), which made this former law professor known to a wide audience, thus recounted the love affair between a student and a former Nazi camp guard. The weekend (Gallimard, 2010) focused on a former Red Army Faction terrorist on his release from prison.
The girlhis new novel, borrows some of the same traces.
After the accidental death of his wife, Kaspar, 71, owner of a small bookstore in Berlin, will discover that the one with whom he shared his life for forty years had given birth a few months after their meeting in East Germany (GDR ), in 1965, of a daughter she immediately gave up for adoption.
Birgit, a vindictive and alcoholic woman, left among her papers the unfinished manuscript of a book in which she returned to these heartbreaking events, expressing her desire to find the child. And maybe also, who knows, to be forgiven.
It’s Kaspar, grieving and still in love with his wife — “It belonged to the dead Birgit. —, who will take over this quest based on the meager clues at his disposal. Research that will lead him to a village in the former GDR, to the friend who had helped her give birth. He will eventually find the girl, in a relationship with a far-right small farmer and mother of a fourteen-year-old teenager, Sigrun.
The subtle re-education of this intelligent and gentle teenager will go through music, Sigrun proving to be particularly gifted for the piano, to the great displeasure of her parents.
In the family kitchen is a photograph of the Nazi Rudolf Hess. The family is close to the German Autonomous Nationalists and the movement volkischa pagan current that has sought to revive since the end of the 19e century a mythical Germanic past and the maintenance of German traditions, certain ideas of which were taken over by Nazism.
By offering the couple a part of Birgit’s inheritance, exploiting their greed, the bookseller will impose his conditions and convince them to let him spend time with the teenager, at his home in Berlin.
This is how he will tame it and deconstruct, through concerts, visits to museums, readings, travels and conversations, the radical conceptions of the world of Sigrun – who denies the Holocaust, believes that “Muslims want to conquer Germany” and devotes a blind cult to Irma Grese, a particularly sadistic camp guard nicknamed “the hyena of Auschwitz”.
The subtle re-education of this intelligent and gentle teenager will go through music, Sigrun proving to be particularly gifted for the piano, to the great displeasure of her parents. And, with small touches of culture, Kaspar will gradually manage to sow doubt in the mind of the teenager.
It is also the way Bernhard Schlink, 78, who infuses his novels with fractures and ethical questions, taking history head on and confronting irreconcilable versions of the truth each time. There is only one truth, Kaspar will explain to his granddaughter. “She’s just there. Like the Sun and the Moon. And like the Moon, it is sometimes only half visible and yet it is round and beautiful. »