![]() "I don't know for how many years, but definitely for the foreseeable future Germans will be shackled to their past and that will influence the way they act in Europe," says Schlink. ![]() This summer, he postponed work on his latest novel (whose subject is top secret) to concentrate on a script for a film set at the start of the first world war. Most of Schlink's literature is tangled up in the German past – from his 1997 bestseller The Reader, about the affair between a teenager and a woman who is later tried for war crimes (which was made into an award-winning film with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes), to a trilogy of detective novels surrounding about a character called Selbs with a shadowy Nazi past, and the novel Homecoming, whose protagonist goes on the hunt for a father he never knew.Įven his latest work, Summer Lies, while focusing on modern-day love stories that all have a sad twist to them – although nothing to do with the war – touches on the subject of hidden pasts and the convoluted stories people tell to keep up appearances. This pessimism I think leads people to ask now: 'Have we had it too good?'" There are these beautiful comparisons of German, English and French soldiers' war songs, and the English and French ones, they're all about hope and victory, and the German soldiers' songs are all about losing comrades, or imminent death. "Germans have a melancholic, a pessimistic streak, which cultural historians trace back to the thirty years' war. The writer sees the German sense of melancholy and pessimism for which its people are sometimes ridiculed as national traits that mean that even though most Germans are enjoying a comfortable standard of living, low unemployment, and a booming export economy, they are unable to view it without sensing the doom that might be about to come. ![]() "It's interesting, my son is 40 years old, a dentist, with a good life, two lovely kids, a lovely wife and everything's going well for him, but even he said to me: 'Well, don't you think maybe we've had it too good for too long?' I said to him: 'It's up to us to use this crisis as a chance.'" "I sense some sort of fear of revenge for the fact that historically speaking, and in comparison to many parts of the world, we have it good right now," Schlink says over the phone from his US home in the Berkshires, Massachusetts. "I think that turning to Europe is an attempt to escape a difficult identity in favour of a more simple one … This idea will always fail, because a German who goes to France, England, the United States and presents him or herself as simply a European, this is not what he is, he is not just a European, he's a German and those who travel learn that the world is not as cosmopolitan and international as we'd like it to be."Īn innate sense of German fatalism is also playing into the way Germans are reacting to the current crisis – which after all has yet to directly affect them – as well as a melancholic streak. ![]() It is a subject he covers in depth in a volume of essays, Guilt About the Past, in which he argues: "We Germans tend to prefer to see ourselves as world citizens of a world society, as free citizens of a free world, as Atlanticists or Europeans rather than as Germans." The wish, he says, is symptomatic of another desire, to escape what it means to be German, including the solidarity, responsibility and guilt attached to that.Įurope, he agrees, as a wider community in which Germany is only one part, is a place in which Germans have tried to retreat from themselves. The burden of nationality has very much shaped the way in which Germans view themselves and their responsibilities within Europe, Schlink says. "I remember one of the nicest things a colleague of mine in the United States said when he introduced a lecture of mine: that he had never met a German in academia in the United States who so little tried to hide that he's German," he says "I certainly know German colleagues in the US who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. I have accepted it." The former judge, whose main home is in Berlin, cites examples of friends and colleagues who have done much to disguise their Germanness, to assume other identities in an effort to escape the sometimes overwhelming historical responsibility. "But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn't want to escape it. "I can't say I'm thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden," Schlink says. An unravelling of the European ideal would deprive the Germans of an "escape from themselves". And he adds that the reason the European crisis is so agonising for Germany is that the country has been able to retreat from itself by hurling itself into the European project.
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