Book: THE GRANDDAUGHTER
Author: Bernhard Schlink
Published by: HarperVia
Price: $28.99
Bernhard Schlink’s female protagonists are often passionate, troubled, assertive but, at the same time, cautious, withdrawn and secretive. In his 1995 best-selling novel, The Reader, a compelling narrative about the post-War generation in Germany coming to terms with the culpability of their elders in the Holocaust, 15-year-old Michael had fallen in love with the 36-year-old Hanna, who had turned out to be a former Auschwitz guard who conceals her identity as well as her illiteracy during their relationship. The Granddaughter, the German author’s latest work translated by Charlotte Collins, employs a similar narrative trope: the septuagenarian, Kaspar, discovers on the death of his beloved wife, Birgit, that she had kept secret the birth of her daughter with her former lover before fleeing with Kaspar from the erstwhile German Democratic Republic to have a life in the West. That is not all; Birgit, it turns out, was also a writer. Kaspar tracks down her unfinished manuscript in which she narrates the political upheavals of East Germany that served as an evocative backdrop for the events in her personal life. Kaspar’s attempts to understand Birgit’s elusiveness from her writings, email trails and obscure postcards, locate Birgit’s daughter in the East and, eventually, get united with their teenaged step-granddaughter, Sigrun, serve as an effective metaphor for Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Germany’s ‘coming to terms with the past’).
Two distinct themes influence — at times overpower — Schlink’s narrative. First, there is the theme of German reunification. He meditates deeply on such subjects as the Cold War and the German reunification, the divisions between the socialist East and the capitalist West — Kaspar is considered a “class enemy” when he first crosses over to the East where he meets Birgit, “a child of East Germany, of the GDR, of the proletarian world” — and the establishment of a united Germany after 1990, reducing the GDR to a “terra incognita”, which then provided a fertile ground for the rise of neo-Nazism, mirrored in the nationalist and racist opinions of Birgit’s lost daughter and her family.
Second, The Granddaughter is also a poignant exploration of the immigrant identity. Schlink meticulously explores Birgit’s in-between status. Her beyond-the-grave narration stitches together vignettes to reveal Birgit as a person who fled the East to escape the betrayal by her former lover, found Kaspar’s love to be “the great comfort” of her life and, yet, never felt at ease in the West. This is discernible from her furtiveness, her affairs, and her latent desire to find her daughter, a reflection of her yearning for her homeland.
The theme of unity is confronted by challenges, manifest in the ideological differences between Kaspar and Sigrun. Kaspar’s moral superiority owing to his life in West Berlin makes him engage in a battle of wits to rid Sigrun of her far-Right sentiments. The echoes of this intergenerational clash resonate at a time when the far-Right is ascendant in Germany. Schlink’s keennessto present the stories on both sidesis a bid to bridge the present withthe past.