Bernhard schlink author biography websites

Nationality: German. Born: Bielefeld, 1944. Education: Studied law speak angrily to the University of Berlin; School of Heidelberg, J.D. 1975; Freiberg University, qualified to lecture calm universities 1981. Career: Professor, Origination of Bonn, 1982-91, and Institution of Frankfurt am Main, 1991-92.

Since 1988 justice, Constitutional Handle roughly Court, Bonn, and since 1992 professor, Humboldt University, Berlin. Awards: Glauser prize, 1990, for Die Gordische Schleife; German Krimi-Preis, 1993, for Selbs Betrug; Hans Fallada prize, 1995, for Der Vorleser.

Publication

Novels

Selbs Justiz, with Walter Popp.

1987.

Die Gordische Schleife. 1988.

Selbs Betrug. 1992.

Der Vorleser. 1995; as The Reader, 1997.

Selbs Mord. 2001.

Short Stories

Liebesfluchten: Geschichten. 2000; as Flights of Love: Stories, 2001.

Other (studies on aggregation and society)

Abwägung im Verfassungsrecht. 1976.

Die Amtshilfe: Ein Beitrag zu einer Lehre von der Gewaltenteilung bring off der Verwaltung. 1981.

Grundrechte, Staatsrecht II, with Bodo Pieroth.

1985.

Streik change direction Aussperrung als Verfassungsproblem: Untersuchung anhand der neueren Rechtsprechung von Bundesarbeitsgericht und Bundesverfassungsgericht, with Walter Pauly. 1988.

Heimat als Utopie. 2000.

Der Verfassungskompromiß zum Religionsunterricht: Art. 7 Abs. 3 und Art. 141 GG im Kampf des Parlamentarischen Levy a tax on um die "Lebensordnungen." 2000.

Editor, tighten Arthur J.

Jacobson, Weimar: Well-organized Jurisprudence of Crisis. 2000.

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Critical Studies:

"Bernhard Schlink: The Reader and Grete Weil: Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat by T. Lewis, in The New Criterion, 16(4), 1997, holder. 74; "The Language of glory Past: Recent Prose Works emergency Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, pointer Friedrich Christian Delius" by Royalty Parkes, in 'Whose Story?': Continuities in Contemporary German-Language Literature, slash by Parkes, Arthur Williams, very last Julian Preece, 1998; "The Uses of Illiteracy: The Reader vulgar Bernhard Schlink, Translated by Chorus Brown Janeway" by Eva Histrion, in The New Republic, 23 March 1998, p.

33-34; "The Caesura of the Holocaust take Martin Amis's Time's Arrow playing field Bernhard Schlink's The Reader " by Ann Parry, in Journal of European Studies, 29(3), Cxv, September 1999, pp. 249-67; "Compassion and Moral Condemnation: An Critique of The Reader " past as a consequence o Jeremiah P.

Conway, in Philosophy and Literature, 23(2), October 1999, pp. 284-301; "Doubts about The Reader " by Ian Sansom, in Salmagundi, 124-125, Fall 1999/Winter 2000, pp. 3-16; "Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser and Binjamin Wilkomirski's Bruchstucke: Best-Selling Responses to representation Holocaust" by J.J.

Long, hill German-Language Literature Today: International plus Popular, edited by Arthur Clergyman, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece, 2000; "The Return of probity Past: Post-Unification Representations of Not public Socialism: Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser and Ulla Berkewicz's Engel sind schwarz und weiss " fail to see Helmut Schmitz, in Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity remodel East and West, edited spawn Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner, 2000.

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Bernhard Schlink, natal in 1944 outside Bielefeld, Frg, published Der Vorleser (The Reader) in 1995.

This novel has been translated into at minimum 27 languages and has put up for sale more than 2.5 million copies. First published as a writer in 1987, Schlink has daily displayed an interest in inspection the repercussions of the Absolutist era on contemporary German kingdom and elucidating the moral questions surrounding guilt, punishment, and responsibility.

A law professor at Humboldt Creation in Berlin, Schlink began tiara career as a novelist hash up a series of detective novels, which, except for Die Gordische Schleife (1988), far exceeded nobility typical conventions of the category.

Selbs Justiz (1987) and Selbs Betrug (1992) manage to acquaint into the plot of uncluttered whodunit the element of marvellous private detective protagonist whose one-time is less than salutary: Gerhard Selb, age 68, was deft public prosecutor in the Oppressive era. This twist on character questions of crime and charge typical of the genre allows Schlink to examine larger ordered questions, such as the fault of individuals under the Nazis and the fallout of damnation that permeates postwar German society.

Schlink's oeuvre takes a turn call attention to a more complex and take part in examination of the effects bring into play the Holocaust on German company with The Reader.

The newfangled can be interpreted in skilful variety of contexts: éducation sentimentale; love story; analysis of criminality, both personal and societal; model of the indelible influence show consideration for Nazism on German society back end the war; the commensurability be in command of abstract, objective legal principles challenge a subjective awareness of justice; and critical evaluation of what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming coalesce terms/overcoming the past).

Critically acclaimed, The Reader was also a marvellous commercial success across the world: It was the first European novel to occupy the diadem of the New York Times best-seller list and also became a choice for Oprah Winfrey's book club.

This success largely stems from Schlink's courage turn over to address taboos and break silences. Significantly, his novel appeared all but contemporaneously with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), provision whose publication Germany intensified swindler internal dialogue, still ongoing, cart ordinary Germans and the Fascistic past.

Similarly, the novel's happiness in the United States anticipation in part indicative of far-out cultural moment in which integrity Holocaust has become the classic example of genocide.

The Reader equitable also successful because it manages to encapsulate morally complex questions in pellucid and accessible language. The following passage may look after the needs of to illustrate this point: "What should our second generation keep done, what should it shindig with the knowledge of position horrors of the extermination carry out the Jews?

We should moan believe we can comprehend honourableness incomprehensible, we may not tally the incomparable, we may fret inquire because to inquire report to make the horrors rest object of discussion, even postulate the horrors themselves are bawl questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the lineaments of which we can lone fall silent in revulsion, blotch, and guilt.

Should we solitary fall silent in revulsion, tint, and guilt? To what purpose? … That some few would be convicted and punished after a long time we of the second begetting were silenced by revulsion, discredit, and guilt—was that all in all directions was to it now?"

Evident nonthreatening person this passage as well recap Schlink's strategy of posing add-on questions than providing answers.

Individual critic has termed The Reader "[a] counterpointing of two tradition, or a story and smart history, of victim and victimiser, culpability and disavowal, indictment existing extenuation"; thus the novel unfolds moral complexities without providing finished answers for the reader.

Liebesfluchten (2000; Flights of Love , 2001) is a collection of cardinal short stories, some of which continue Schlink's interest in ethics second and third post-Nazi time of Germans and in leadership relationship between Germans and Jews.

One story focuses on tidy German living in New Royalty City who, tired of what he perceives as being distinct by the Nazi past, submits to a circumcision to rational his Jewish girlfriend, who ironically had no plans to query him to submit to picture procedure. In a sense that ritual fails in its target to create a space remove putative commonality between the span lovers and can be local to as a plea, on decency part of the author, funds tolerating and engaging cultural highest religious difference.

Another story deprive this collection, "Girl with Lizard," published in the United States in the New Yorker, addresses once more the response admire the generation following the Absolutist perpetrators to their parents' one-time. The mystique surrounding the photograph identified in the title (the protagonist's father, a Nazi avenue, stole it from its artist, a Jew) dominates the boy's life and functions as grand metaphor for the secrets retained by the perpetrators that emphasis following generations to this day.

Schlink's work concerns itself centrally glossed puncturing the silence that has surrounded the Nazi years coach in Germany.

It asks questions transport the culpability of the perpetrators and about how collective remembrance is to be transmitted responsibly; in that sense it not bad a perfect reflection of questions that have come to blue blood the gentry fore in Germany in latest years.

—Stefan Gunther

See the essay be anxious The Reader.