Schlink's The Reader

About The Reader

Bernhard Schlink (born 1944) is a German law professor and novelist who is best known internationally for The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995), the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list and the most widely read German novel about the postwar generation's relationship to Nazi crimes. The Reader's narrator, Michael Berg, has an affair with an older woman named Hanna Schmitz when he is fifteen, and encounters her again as a defendant in a war crimes trial when he is a law student; the novel raises the question of how understanding a perpetrator's circumstances affects moral judgment without providing an easy answer. Schlink is also the author of the crime novel Self's Punishment (1987, written with Walter Popp) and the detective trilogy featuring investigator Gerhard Self; Homecoming (2006) and The Weekend (2008) are his subsequent literary novels. He is also a legal scholar specializing in constitutional law at Humboldt University Berlin and has been a justice on the Constitutional Court of North Rhine-Westphalia.