Every family has its secrets. Or something like that. Some historical periods make those secrets more or less painful, more or less intractable, more or less, well, secret. "The Granddaughter" is about a painful and seemingly intractable secret rooted in the tragedies, both grand and petty, of the division and subsequent reunification of Germany. I have not read Schlink before, and based on this book, he seems like a fine writer: the story generally "works," it is told well, without excess sentimentality and with a good sense of pacing. Yet something about how he tells felt oddly flat and clipped, as if Schlink labored under some kind of a self-imposed max volume limit. I also felt that, at times, some connecting plot tissue was missing or was buttressed with cliche. In all, someone with a (strong) interest in contemporary German history and fiction would do well to pick this up, if not necessarily expect to be blown away.

This was a well written, thought provoking book that takes place in the 1960's to recent Germany. It was so easy to develop a relationship with the characters in the book, I could almost visualize and hear them as if I were watching a movie. The only thing that disappointed me was the ending. It seemed so sudden, and left it to the imagination of the reader to determine what happened next.

Kaspar, from West Germany, met his wife Birgit when he was visiting East Berlin. He helped her escape to the west, which is what they both wanted. They bought a bookshop and worked together, but after reunification, Birgit became restless. She traveled, took classes and never seemed to settle on what she wanted. She drank too much. They did not have children, but were happy together. Or so Kaspar thought. After Birgit died, he came across notes she had written, describing her life. She had been pregnant when they met over the summer, and while they were apart for a bit she had a daughter. She asked her best friend to leave the child at the door of an orphanage for her. Birgit had wanted to find the daughter but never did.

Kaspar, in spite of not knowing Birgit had been pregnant, decided it was up to him to find her and fulfill Birgit's wishes. When he found her, she was married and had a 14 year old daughter. The family lived in a community of right wing nationalists. Kaspar developed a relationship with the granddaughter, Sigrun, showing her what life was like outside the community, causing her to question what she had been taught.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishing for the ARC of this book to read and reveiw.

The Granddaughter was an excellent read. I loved the writing and it was propulsive. Great character study. I would read more from this author.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Granddaughter will open readers’ eyes to East and West Germans’ differing outlooks as it tells a story beginning in 1964 with the meeting of two university students, roughly twenty-five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and continuing into the 21st Century.

Schlink divides the novel into three multi-chapter parts. Part One opens just before elderly bookseller Kaspar’s discovery of his wife Birgit’s body and gradually fills in the story of West German university student Kasper’s meeting Birgit in East Germany in 1964, of their marriage, and of Kasper’s discovery of Birgit’s writing only after her death—her thoughts about their marriage and the longed for but never attempted search for the infant daughter, another man;s child, abandoned in East Germany decades ago. Part Two details Kaspar’s search for his stepdaughter Svenja, his discovery of his step-granddaughter Sigrun, age 14, and the relationship developing between the two of them until it suddenly ends. Part Three brings them back together several years later but with Sigrun, now a young adult, forced to make a difficult choice.

Throughout these sections, Schlink portrays the lingering differences that can separate East and West despite the many years since political reunification. Are the differences reconcilable or irreconcilable? Can love bridge the gap? Trust? Common interests? Communication? Hope? Schlink’s characters ponder their options, and readers receive no simple answers.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for an advance reader egalley of this thought-provoking and highly recommended new novel from Bernhard Schlink.

I'll be honest and say this felt a bit dated and predictable. Schlink is a fine novelist and The Granddaughter is a fine novel that reads really well, especially its strong opening chapters, but I felt this had all been done before and more interestingly (I am thinking of Juli Zeh and Jenny Erpenbeck especially).

I do think it will appeal to a large public.

A word of warning about the English audiobook: the male narrator is good on a sentence level, but clearly didn't get the atmosphere or just didn't care about the content.

Adding to his engrossing novels The Reader, Olga, and the Detective Self books, Bernhard Schlink gives us a strong piece of German history... literary, intense and sensitive. Kaspar loses his wife. The alcoholic Brigitte dies in an unexplained way. When her widower sifts through the literary estate, he realizes that his wife kept a secret after her escape from the GDR.... she left behind a daughter in the former unjust state.
Kaspar decides to go on a search.... and finally finds both daughter and granddaughter.
But they live a German life according to nationalist principles, which Kaspar cannot understand and tolerate.
Sensitively and intensively, Bernhard Schlink creates the overall picture of a German family with sympathetic and authentic characters that threatens to break apart under their different values. Highly recommended

Having been a huge fan of The Reader, I really wanted to love this, but I found the story to be a bit anticlimactic. The writing is beautiful and I loved the Berlin setting, but the characters fell a bit flat for me.

The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink gives a complicated , yet poignant look at Germany’ s troubled history through one family’s experiences.

The novel’s setting is a unified Germany where Kaspar Wettner, a Berlin bookseller discovers among his late wife’s Birgit’s papers details of her hidden life in East Germany .

In her writings he learns that she longed to find the child she felt she had to give away.

Compelled by his grief and desire to fulfill Birgit’s wish, Kaspar takes it upon himself to search for this child now an adult. His journey takes him to eastern Germany where he locates Birgit’s daughter Svenja , and granddaughter, Sirgun living in a rural community of neo-Nazis. At first Svenja and her husband, Bjorn rebuff Kaspar’s offer to connect, but after they are enticed by an offer of a generous inheritance, they allow Sirgun to visit him in Berlin. Although they are miles apart ideologically, they bond through classical music.. Nonetheless this uneasy , yet amiable relationship struggles because she remains skeptical of his challenges to her far right views.

Although the characters are complicated and fully developed, they aren’t likeable except for Kaspar, who at times seems naive, yet the reader feels pity for him.
In addition Schlink’s clarity and serious tone permit the reader to reflect on the philosophical aspects in his work.

The Granddaughter is a sensitive and fascinating look at Germany and it’s struggle with its past.

The Granddaughter
by Bernhard Schlink
There are so many works of fiction regarding the war and the holocaust and I really thought this was going to be similar, however, the author, as only authors can do, takes you on a totally different ride in this book. After losing the love of his life and discovering that he has a granddaughter from a step daughter he never knew existed, Kaspar, a bookstore owner, must research to find them. As a long lost hope to have a connection to the stepdaughter he never knew and to bind him more closely to his love and loss, Kaspar sets out to create a bond with a girl he has never known nor never met. The problem? He lives in what was referred to as the free west of Germany and she lives in the former communist part of East Germany. Though the wall is gone, the barriers of different ways of life are not. It is these barriers he will need to overcome if he wishes to reach this family he never knew he had.
The author has done an incredible job of conveying to the reader the variations in their social status, religion, community interactions, celebrations, and overall the differences in their way of life. Dealing with a family that has only known life in a communistic commune lifestyle where everyone contributes to day to day life including the children to the differences of his free democratic lifestyle, the family must reach past that and work together to create a bond that will last. Can that happen when two people have known totally different lifestyles? That is the question that will have you delving into this book with unabashed interest. A very eye opening book about a revolving country trying to recover from war when there are completely different views and opinions on both sides of the wall and what happens when that wall is obliterated. Overall, a very good read that keeps you engrossed and enlightens your mind on what Germany did after the war.

Bernhard Schlink gave us one of the most accomplished novels of the twentieth century, capturing the zeitgeist of post-war Germany. The trauma of what one generation visited upon the next generation was captured in the relationship between the tram conductor and THE READER. The many equations of responsibility and survival, personal commitment and social mores play out in the narrative, one that blends the concrete individual dilemma with the larger implications.

In his latest book, he brings the same ability to capture a sweeping ontological landscape with an intricate pattern of relationships. He has taken on the most recent earthquake in German history, reunification.

When Kaspar Wettner’s wife dies, he discovers her diary in which she records the birth of a child before they were married. She left the child on a doorstep in East Berlin; finding her will be difficult, but he is compelled. When he does find her, she is living in a neo-Nazi enclave, and has a child, THE GRANDDAUGHTER of his wife. At first, the girl’s father will not let him have access to her, but with the promise of an inheritance he allows the girl to visit. During those visits, they explore the Berlin arts scene, and Kaspar tries to sway her away from her neo-Nazi beliefs by plying her with books and articles. Although he doesn’t succeed, the two develop a touching relationship that accepts those differences, thus keeping them at the forefront of the narrative. The drama is heightened by the prospect that the girl’s father may deny access at any time. The compromises entailed in the maintenance of their relationship highlights their love, as well as the entrenchment of the neo-Nazi movement. Once again, Schlink offers an unflinching look at modern day Germany, and the quandaries of those who live there.

German authors have big challenges in their writing. The 20th Century's history is a minefield of tragedy, brutality, and horrible ideas. Often German authors write directly about these events, as Schlink did in his most famous work, <i>The Reader</i> which related the life of a female concentration-camp guard through the perspective of a boy who reads to her.

The moment of history at the center of Schlink's new novel is present-day Germany and the threat of neo-fascism.

The book opens with two surprises for 70-something Kaspar, a bookseller in Berlin. He finds his wife drowned in the bathtub, a victim of her own alcoholism. Then, while reviewing a manuscript for a book she had been writing, he realizes that she had left behind a newborn daughter when she had escaped East Berlin to marry him in the West.

To find this daughter -- and the granddaughter of the title -- Kaspar must enter rural enclaves that are völkish/ nationalistic. Indeed, when he meets his granddaughter, he learns that her heroes are Rudolph Hess and a notorious concentration camp guard, Irma Grese, who proudly went to the gallows rather than renounce the Holocaust she had perpetrated.

The drama of this book is Kaspar's efforts to love his granddaughter, no matter what. Under strict instructions from her father and Kaspar's step-daughter NOT to interfere. So Kaspar faces a dilemma: can he give his granddaughter the love and guidance she needs, or will a reconning have to take place with the right-wing brainwashing that has been her life so far?

A fascinating read. Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Books for providing me with a galley in exchange for this honest review.

Unfortunately, this one didn't work for me. Although it ticks all the boxes, and I absolutely loved BS's The Reader, something in this book prevent me to conncet with the plot and the writing. I'm thinking that maybe it has to be with the translation. I remember Schlink's writing to be higly engaging and dynamic,but here is not the case. The format (a big part of the book is Birgit's journal) didn't help either.
Schlink is a good character writer, so that was a really good aspect from this book.

At only 20 years old, Kaspar, from West Germany, met and fell in love with Birgit in the GDR. He organizes her escape, and they lived a normal live as booksellers in Berlin for decades. Kaspar always knew that Birgit had some secret sorrow that led to her restlessness and her later alcoholism. When Birgit dies, Kaspar goes through her papers and discovers that before their marriage and while in the East, Birgit had a baby and gave her up for adoption. She had been consumed with a desire to find her daughter, but never did.

Kaspar decides to fulfill Birgit’s desire, finding that Birgit’s now 40-year-old daughter lives in an eastern “volkische” (i.e., neo-Nazi) farming village with her doctrinaire husband and teenage daughter. Kaspar negotiates visits from his step-granddaughter, Sigrun, and attempts to expose her to the world outside her neo-Nazi belief system. But Sigrun has been thoroughly indoctrinated and maintains intense prejudice against anything and everything that isn’t ethnically German. Music becomes a shared interest of Kaspar and Sigrun; that and his bookstore are tiny windows of enlightenment for Sigrun.

Schlink insightfully and beautifully describes the thoughts and emotions of his characters, particularly Birgit’s about the GDR and her secret, and then Kaspar’s about his longing to make a connection with Sigrun and to move her to an understanding and empathy with the wider world, but without alienating her and her parents. It’s tremendously difficult and tentative, and Schlink masterfully, and without condescension, describes the hold that extremism can have.

A brilliant novel that is particularly well-suited to our current world, not just Germany.

***Thank you to NetGalley and HarperVia for my free arc! The Granddaughter tells the story of Kaspar, who, after the death of his wife Birgit, finds out about her illegitimate daughter and gets to know his radicalized granddaughter. As he tries to build a connection with her, he must deal with political and moral conflicts.

The story is educational and raises important social questions, but I was unable to develop an emotional connection to the main characters. They remained distant for me, which made reading difficult, even though the subject matter is relevant and thought-provoking. But I still think fans of historical fiction will enjoy this!

What an interesting and important premise: the way ordinary Germans still bear the effects of their country being torn in two post-war, then hastily reunified, and the way families and ideologies were affected and continue to be affected. I’m sorry to say it reads like a first draft. There is a great deal of narrative summary, some of it very beautiful, but still, for much of the read I was thinking that the narrative seemed superficial. I didn’t understand these characters and didn’t believe in their motivations. Brigit feels the most unbelievable and yet she is key to so much. The first two sections dragged on when the real story should have been focused on the meeting and the conflict between granddaughter and grandfather. A disappointment for me.

brilliant and interesting book with a lot of cool aspects. would definitely recommend it. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink translated by Charlotte Collins
Publication Date January 7th, 2025
Harper Via

I have read a lot of historical fiction novels set in WWII and a few during the Cold War, but this one goes deeper, showing how these wars have affected generations and how life was after the reunification portraying the division in the German society because of the East-West conflicts, different religious beliefs and political views.
It opens with the death of Birgit, the wife of Gaspar, a bookseller, and after that, Gaspar will find out about what Birgit kept in secret for so long.

This is a novel about loss, pain, identity, stigmas, and memory.
I learned about the different movements and ideologies in Germany, and I love how, through a work of fiction, I can learn about history and diversity. I might not agree with a character, but I could know the different points of view and how hard it can be to understand something that goes against one's morals or beliefs. This is a reality that we are facing all around the world, so the beauty of literature is that these themes are universal.

I read before The Reader, and I liked The Granddaughter as much as the other one. I think the author, who was born in 1944 and who has experienced lot in a country full of changes, portrays the history of Germany through well-written novels.


Thank you, HarperVia and Netgalley, for this digital-ARC.

A new author to me. Kaspar is determined to find his granddaughter in the 1960’s in Germany. Twists and turns and sadness.

A powerful piece of German history... literary, intense, and sensitive...!

Kaspar loses his wife. The alcohol-addicted Brigitte dies under unclear circumstances.
As her widower goes through her literary estate, he discovers that his wife had been hiding a secret since her escape from East Germany: she had left behind a daughter in the former oppressive state.
Kaspar decides to search for her... and eventually finds both the daughter and a granddaughter.
However, they are living a life based on nationalist principles—a way of life that Kaspar cannot understand or tolerate.

With sensitivity and intensity, Bernhard Schlink creates a comprehensive portrait of a German family, featuring sympathetic and authentic characters whose different values threaten to tear them apart.

Absolutely worth reading!

You wonder if prisoners at Ravensbruck or Auschwitz might have thought things had taken a turn for the better for them when they first caught sight of female guard Irma Grese, who was later remembered by a female inmate doctor as “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
And certainly if you study pictures of her in which she looks more girlish than monstrous, more simply defiant than truly awful, it’s hard to reconcile the images with the woman we're told carried a whip and pistol and shot prisoners in cold blood, beat some women to death and whipped others mercilessly with a plaited whip, let loose upon prisoners half-starved dogs, selected prisoners for the gas chambers and went unrepentantly to the gallows when she was hanged by the British at age 22.
“The hyena of Auschwitz,” Grese was called, as close to a real-life monster as any of us is likely to imagine, and yet she’s a hero to Sigrun, the young East German girl who’s the titular character of Bernard Schlink’s novel, “The Granddaughter,” in which the girl spends time with her West German grandfather, who’s appalled by sentiments from her such as, “We don’t need people like that,” about the “Africans and Mussulmen” who ran a kebab stall that was torched in her East German community.
Fully understandable, though, her sentiments, given how she was raised in a household where there was a photograph of Rudolf Hess above a kitchen sideboard and her father insisted that Hess was a martyr for Germany and peace and was “murdered” at Spandau Prison.
Little wonder, then, as I say, that she holds the attitudes that she does, waxing exuberantly about the sentiment, “my honor is loyalty,” which the grandfather reflects was the motto of the SS, and how she thinks that the books in his bookshop, including “The Diary of Anne Frank,” are full of lies about the Reich, insisting “Hitler didn’t want the war, he wanted peace. And the Germans didn’t murder the Jews.” And when he tries to refute her, noting that the books are based on the records of the German government and eyewitness statements from the concentration camps, she responds with, “they’re lying about Auschwitz. People can’t be gassed with Zyklon B, or at least not as many and not as fast as they claim they were in Auschwitz. Papa says that’s not politics, that’s chemistry."
A true believer, in short, her father, and while her mother isn’t as hard-core a devotee of Nazism, she’s nevertheless confrontational with the grandfather, wanting to know what he’s up to, if he’s trying to “save our souls.”
“Sigrun belongs to Germany,” she says, and “I will not allow you to take her away from it.”
No easy proposition, then, for the grandfather to instill in the girl a more humanistic viewpoint, yet over time the two do come to forge a bond in a book which, with its recollection of a ghastly time whose horrors are still denied by some today, is especially timely now for Americans rent by an election whose aftermath has already seen Reich-like incidents including texts going out to blacks to report to the plantation and a play about Anne Frank being disrupted by pro-Nazis.