Darkness In a New Generation

AFTER THE defeat of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, the Germans set themselves the near-impossible task of coming to terms with their legacy.

- JULIA M. KLEIN

They even invented a word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung-in a literal translation, "mastering the past." In Bernhard Schlink's fiction, the unruly German past refuses to stay mastered. It keeps intruding on his characters' lives, exposing cultural and political rifts and alienating generations from one another.

Like "The Reader" (1995), the novel that put Mr. Schlink on the literary map, "The Granddaughter" engages with both historical trauma and generational bonds. It thematizes not only the aftershocks of the Holocaust but of Germany's division into East and West-two societies, with distinct trajectories and cultures, reunited in 1990 but still not fully unified. Alternatingly wistful, frustrated and angry, the novel asks how love, tolerance and time might bridge those persistent gaps.

Mr. Schlink's protagonist, Kaspar Wettner, is a bookseller, a man immersed in the heritage of the civilized West. He returns home to his Berlin apartment one evening to find that his alcoholic wife, Birgit, has drowned in their bathtub. In his characteristically plain-spoken prose, translated with a few Britishisms by Charlotte Collins, Mr. Schlink captures the surrealism and shock of the moment: "He looked down at her and knew that she was dead. Yet at the same time it was as if he would be able to tell her, later, that he had found her dead in the bath, and talk about it with her." Birgit, we learn via flashback, grew up in the former East Berlin. When Kaspar visited its gray precincts in 1964, the two met and fell in love.