The Reader

The Reader

The Reader

Author: Bernhard Schlink


The German writer Bernhard Shlink’s novel “The Reader” is about the love story between a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirty-six-year-old woman which was interrupted by the woman’s unexpected disappearance. Years later, the boy, who was already studying law, met the woman in the court. It turned out that she had been a warden at a concentration camp. Holocaust, events in national-socialistic periods, the problem of sin and atonement are discussed in the novel in a specific way.

Bernhard Schlink (born 6 July 1944 in Bielefeld) is a German lawyer and writer. He was born in Bethel, Germany, to a German father (Edmund Schlink) and a Swiss mother, the youngest of four children. Both his parents were theology students, although his father lost his job as a Professor of Theology due to the Nazis, and had to settle on being a pastor instead. Bernhard Schlink was brought up in Heidelberg from the age of two. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968.

Schlink became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and in 1992 a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. He retired in January 2006.