Photo: Gaby Gerster / © Diogenes Verlag 

The visit of Bernhard Schlink in Tbilisi is organized by Goethe Institute.

Bernhard Schlink, born near Bielefeld, Germany in 1944, is a lawyer and lives in Berlin and New York. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968.  He served as a judge at the Constitutional Court and became a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University in 1992, a position he held until 2006.

Schlink began his career as a writer with several detective novels, one of which one the Glauser Prize in 1989. His novel The Reader was published in 1995 and became a bestseller in both Germany and the United States. The novel was turned into a movie by Stephen Daldry in 2009, has been translated into more than 50 languages and established Bernhard Schlink’s worldwide renown as an author.

He has been awarded with national and international prizes like the German Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit), the French Chevalier dans l’Ordre de la Legion d’Honneur and the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize.

Excerpt from the novel The Reader

I don’t know if Hanna knew how she looked, or maybe she wanted to look like that. She was wearing a black suit and a white blouse, and the cut of the suit and the tie that went with the blouse made her look as if she were in uniform. I have never seen the uniform of the women who worked for the SS. But I believed, and the spectators all believed, that before us we were seeing that uniform, and the woman who had worked for the SS in it, and all the crimes Hanna was accused of doing.

The spectators began to whisper again. Many were audibly outraged. They felt that Hanna was ridiculing the trial, the verdict, and themselves, they who had come to hear the verdict read out. They became more vociferous, and some of them began calling out what they thought of Hanna. But then the court entered the courtroom and after an irritated glance at Hanna, the judge announced the verdict. Hanna listened standing up, straight-backed, and absolutely motionless. She sat down during the reading of the reasons for the verdict. I did not take my eyes off her head and neck.

Translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway

© Intelekti Publishing