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.

I found this to be very transportive - not only was the story beautiful but the prose seemed to also convey the mood and the stoic nature of that time and place. Most books are not successful on both levels. I also appreciate the subtle ways it reminds us of a time of history we can never allow ourselves to forget without being set in the time of the war itself. Thank you for the chance to read this!

This book disappointed me. I read The Reader many years ago and I loved it. But, at the time, I was just home from a semester in Poland where I was up to my eyeballs in all things Holocaust and WWII aftermath. So, twenty-plus years later, my hopes for this book were perhaps too high. Maybe the translation was awkward. I couldn't get attached to the characters and the escape from East Berlin to West seemed too easy for me.

This was a very interesting read, but it was hard to connect or relate to. It was still very entertaining and it did keep me engaged in this book, and it was a quick read. I liked the pacing, and the way it was written. I liked the characters and the development of them.


Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!