The Presence of the Past
Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader on BUniverse
Click here to watch Bernhard Schlink on BUniverse.
Bernhard Schlink, a lawyer by training, who took up fiction writing and is known primarily for his best-selling novel The Reader(currently a film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes) discusseshis generation of Germans — those born at the tail end of World War IIor in the immediate postwar years — and how they approached the memoryand lessons of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. For Germans in everyfacet of society, from business to law to medicine to the arts, “thepast at one time or another was or still is our topic,” he says.
But confronting this kind of a horrific period in the history ofone’s nation is no simple task, Schlink says. Overly repeated “lessons”about it in school and countless analogies to it in discussions ofmodern atrocities and current tragedies, he believes, have led to adeadened response among younger Germans. “The Holocaust has becomesmall change that is easily handed out,” he says.
Another aspect of Holocaust remembrance that Schlink discusses ishis generation’s tendency to draw a moral lesson, rather than aninstitutional one, from the past. “We accused older generations of alack of moral courage and individual moral failings,” he says. Andwhile he agrees that moral courage is a good lesson to learn, he doubtshow much of it can be taught in this didactic way. “I think it islearned mostly by living, and daily experience,” he says.
Schlink’s talk was sponsored by BU’s Institute for Human Scienceswith the support of the Humanities Foundation. Mark Feeney, an arts writer and photography reviewer for the Boston Globe, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, moderated the discussion. Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI, the literary journal published at Boston University, introduced Schlink.
February 2, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Photonics Center
About the speaker:
Bernhard Schlink, a professor of public law at the Humboldt Universityof Berlin, was born in Germany in 1944. From 1988 to 2006, he sat on theConstitutional Law Court for the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen,Munster. He has taught in Freiburg, Bonn, and Frankfurt and is aregular visitor at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. Abest-selling novelist, he is the author of The Reader, Homecoming, and Flights of Love: Stories, as well as several prize-winning crime novels, including The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.
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