The Granddaughter
Bernhard Schlink, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20

SCHLINK’s novel, The Reader, was made into an acclaimed film, starring Kate Winslet. In that novel, he dealt with Germany’s Nazi legacy. In this novel, he takes the legacy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as his subject. 

Schlink concocts a story to illustrate the mainstream narrative of Germany having lived through two dictatorships and of a continuous timeline of development between Nazism and the GDR. It is little wonder that his novels have garnered approbation in the mainstream press.

Like virtually all books written about life in the GDR by (West-) German authors, this one is replete with the usual tropes. The author is also one of those who was parachuted into a leading position in East Germany after unification — or “annexation” as many former GDR citizens call it — becoming a professor of law at Berlin’s Humboldt university.

It begins with the death of his wife Birgit by drowning in her bath; was it suicide or an alcohol-induced accident? Her partner, Kaspar, remains none the wiser. 

As young students, in 1964, he and Birgit had met at the GDR Whitsun youth festival in East Berlin and fallen in love. He was from the West but willing to move to the GDR to be with her. She rejects this idea and he organises her flight, using false identity documents. She leaves behind a newly born baby girl, whose father is a Party district secretary and already married. 

After her death, and intrigued by finding an unfinished autobiographical novel she had been writing, Kaspar is determined to discover details of her life in the East.

Early on, he quotes from Birgit’s text: “In the 40 years of its existence, the GDR locked up 120,000 juveniles in state-run homes: ordinary children’s homes, homes for difficult children, special homes reformatories, re-education and labour camps, transition homes. On admission their bodies were searched, their body cavities inspected, and heads shaved... Young people were raised and broken in GDR children’s homes as they had been before 1945 and continued to be so long after 1945...” 

As usual in narratives written by (West) Germans, parallels drawn between Nazi Germany and the GDR are par for the course. “If I had understood,” he writes patronisingly, “that the GDR economy was stagnating, that the culture was stifling imagination and creativity, that the politicians were infantalising the people...”. And again, later, describes how a dog is kept on a tight lead and disciplined to do as ordered, asking: “Isn’t that what a district secretary [of the ruling party] does? The citizens and comrades are his companions, in a way, but he has power over them.” 

Seen solely through this distorting and narrow-focus lens, GDR citizens lead double lives: outwardly demonstrating loyalty and obedience to the SED regime, under which they are disciplined and regimented, while in their own domestic environment they pursue a different, parallel life. Social relationships are based on hypocrisy and dissimulation. In addition — surprise, surprise — the party secretary is also a martinet and wife-beater.

Searching for his dead wife’s daughter, he discovers her living in a north-eastern village in the former GDR with her own daughter, where neonazis have firmly established themselves. There, they hold village festivals, celebrating the Nazi and Teutonic past, looking forward to a glorious nationalist rebirth.

Kaspar himself embodies the “good German” – a paragon of Western values – a would-be loving father, tolerant, and cultured. It is he who introduces his village stepdaughter to city life and the high culture of Bach and Mozart, art galleries and a wide range of books.

His mother, he says, had strong religious and moral convictions and introduced him to books, concerts and opera, and left him to decide for himself on contentious issues, implying that GDR mothers, in contrast, were uncultured and lacked a moral compass.

Schlink’s characters remain two-dimensional, and by clothing them in his own ideological narrative he denies them a well-rounded portrayal.

In the increasingly romantic and didactic latter half of the novel, Kaspar persuades his step-granddaughter’s parents to let her visit him in Berlin. During these short visits, she takes a few hours of piano lessons and is clearly a musical prodigy, soon playing Bach and Schumann with ease, even though the author himself fails to distinguish between Schumann and Schubert when introducing her to Scenes from Childhood!

He weans her away from her parents’ ideology, but she leaves them to join another extremist right-wing group in Berlin and is party to the killing of a left-wing activist. After he helps extricate her from this group, she departs for Australia after taking his money and credit card. There she intends attending a music academy and becoming a professional pianist.

A toxic fairytale that sits comfortably into the mainstream narrative, portraying the GDR as successor regime to the Nazis.