My favourite German language novel of all time is ‘Der Vorleser’ by Bernhard Schlink. Perhaps I am slightly biased in my choice, because it was also the first German language novel I have ever read, sent to me as a Christmas gift by a penfriend about 15 months after I had first started learning. At this stage, my language skills were probably about GCSE sort of level, and the idea of reading a book had never occurred to me. As a present, I felt obliged to read it, but I approached it with a fair amount of trepidation, as well as a dictionary. That was actually the first and last time in my life that I have ever used a dictionary to help read a non-English book. I could make a long an intelligent argument as to why I don’t think dictionaries aid beginners in reading foreign literature, or I could just state that after the novelty value had worn off, I became too lazy to look words up

Expecting to understand nothing, I was actually pleasantly surprised The book is divided into several sections, and the first was particularly easy to understand which gave me a nice confidence boost. Meanwhile the storyline was so captivating, that by the time I got to the second part which involved some more complicated legal jargon I was totally hooked.

‘Der Vorleser’ is Bernhard Schlink’s most famous book, and has been translated and widely read in English as ‘The Reader’. Having fallen in love with the German original, I later read the English translation and thought it was an Americanised abomination, but I’m probably prejudiced and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to other people Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young boy who, aged 15, begins a steamy affair with a woman in her 30s. She is rather mysterious, and all the time he sleeps with her he never discovers very much about her. He is totally infatuated with her. How she feels is less clear and she has one particularly strange peculiarity; after they have had sex, she always asks him to read aloud to her. Hence the name; vorlesen = to read aloud.

One day the woman abruptly disappears, and the boy next sees her years later. He is a student, studying law at a local university. She is on trial as a Nazi war criminal. His shock is overwhelming. Here is the woman who he loved, a woman who seemed neither evil or violent, standing trial in a court of law on the charge of causing the deaths of a group of Jewish women whilst serving as a female concentration camp guard during the war. He has been in love with a female member of the SS.

The woman spends life in jail for what she has done, during which time the boy remains in sporadic contact with her, and the reader is left to judge for themself as to her true culpability. It emerges that she is in fact illiterate. On the one hand this calls into question her guilt; she has accepted full responsibilty for the crime with which she was charged, but cannot possibly have read and the signed the papers on which the conviction hinges. On the other hand, we learn she used to invite Jewish women to her room to read aloud to her in the camp. All the women were later executed; was she trying to make their last days more bearable, or liquidating them before they told anyone else her shameful secret? No answer is ultimately given.

It’s a very sad book, and for me a fascinating one because it deals with a period of history we so often neglect. Our study of Germany so often ends with the declaration of peace in 1945, and picks up again in 1989 to look at the fall of the Berlin Wall. What happened in between? How did a nation of people who had been conditioned to think like Nazis rehabilite themselves to cope with normality? What was it like growing up in a world where you couldn’t tell how many people the man sitting next to you on the bus might have ordered to their deaths?!

‘Der Vorleser’ was, in any case, award-winning. Schlink has written other books, amongst them detective fiction which isn’t bad, but nevertheless doesn’t stand out as anything special. I therefore approached ‘Die Heimkehr’, another novel which deals with recent German history, with interest

The book tells the story of a guy called Peter Debauer, who grew up in post-war Germany. His single mother tells him that his Swiss father died in the war, and he spends idyllic summers in the Alps with his Swiss grandparents. From them he learns everything he knows about his father, his mother being strangely unwilling to talk about him. His grandparents earn extra money by editing a magazine, and one day a story published in it catches the eye of the young Peter. It tells of a young man who has escaped from a prisoner camp in Russia and is trying to get back home to his wife in Germany. His adventures captivate the young Peter.

Years pass, Peter is grown up and his grandparents dead. One day he comes across some old sheets of the grandparent’s magazine lining packing cases, and discovers the story afresh. He is particularly struck by the ending, which describes the soldier finally returning home, only to find that his wife has married another man and has a second child by him. Peter is peculiarly drawn to the story, and realises that the house described actually exists in his own town. He begins to suspect that the author may not have been writing fiction, and also that the story might in some way be connected with his own mysterious family history.

So begins a quest to track down the author of the story, which leads him all over Germany and eventually to New York. In the middle of the tangled web he is trying to unravel is his father; he is not dead, was never married to his mother, and is a most unsavoury character who had multiple aliases during the war and appears to have been close to some very big Nazis. Peter is determined to meet his father face to face. He finds him in New York, where he is lecturing on law with a dubious morality and involving students in sadistic experiments. It never comes to a father-son confrontation. Peter attempts to expose him and ruin his life, but nobody is terribly interested in listening.

This is a strange book, and I’m not sure I fully understood it. The theme of heimkehr (homecoming) is present on several levels, and there are frequent classical references to the Odessey which go over my head because I have never read it. Some of the legal and political theory was also a bit beyond me. Perhaps partly because it was in German, but predominantly because Schlink is a trained lawyer. It’s a compulsive book which I definitely wanted to get to the end of, and it does raise some interesting questions, but the end was somehow unsatisfying. I might read it again *once*, but that would probably be it.