by Bernhard Schlink
I spotted this book in the station bookshop at Goslar railway station. This has long been a good source of German books for me – they have a smallish selection, but this includes literary fiction, non-fiction as well as more lightweight novels.
I knew Schlink as the author of Der Vorleser (The Reader) and I also have a collection of his short stories, both of which I have read in the past, nearer to their publication. This book is a recent publication, and I read the first one or two chapters in the bookstore while Martin was just outside, train-spotting. The story sounded interesting from the start: a man comes home to find his alcoholic wife lying, this time, dead rather than passed out.
Over the course of the next few chapters the wife’s past story is gradually uncovered. The couple met at an “East meets West” youth conference before the Wende (the “turning point” when the two parts of Germany were reunited in 1990, after the Cold War). She grew up in the GDR, he is from West Germany. Kaspar, now 70, gradually pieces together his wife’s great secret, after her death. He travels to places she knew, meets up with an old friend and eventually tracks down the daughter she gave up as a baby.
The title of the novel, The Granddaughter, already gives away that the main person in the story, apart from Kaspar, is someone from the next generation but one. 14-year-old Sigrun is at the rebellious stage of life – and she has plenty to rebel against. Her parents belong to a community of far-right activists seeking to restore the “real Germany” while living a lifestyle based on core values of agriculture, clean living and purity.
The book is really Sigrun’s story: an adolescent dealing with the problems of growing up, questioning her parents’ values and those of the community around her, at the same time knowing little else. She is given a glimpse of a different life when her grandfather befriends her and persuades her parents to let her come on extended visits to his house in Berlin. Here, he puts great energy into advancing her education, particularly in music and literature, but also showing her alternative values to those she has grown up with. She displays a great aptitude for music, and he arranges for her to take piano lessons whenever she is in town.
Sigrun’s and Kaspar’s cross-generational relationship is a delight to discover. They can relate as only grandparents and grandchildren cab do, without the interfering presence of the generation in between. Troubled as Kaspar is by the new society promised by Sigrun’s home community in the village, her escape into drugs in the company of anarchist friends is at least as disturbing.
This novel had me as interested in the background (there really do exist such extreme right communities building a “new Germany”, mainly in the former GDR but also a few in remote areas of Lower Saxony) as in the characters themselves and their relationship to each other. I think this is a book I may re-read. It’s going to stay on the shelf for now.
A rug and a book 