Review: Vivien Horler

The Granddaughter, by Bernhard Schlink; translated by Charlotte Collins (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

One day last week Daily Maverick opened its First Thing newsletter with a quote from the US novelist Chuck Palahniuk: “When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”

It first appeared in his novel Invisible Monsters in 2011, well before any Trumpian fever dreams, arbitrary invasions and accusations of genocide. But it does seem to ring true today.

A review in Le Monde said of The Granddaughter: “Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now.”

The novel was originally published in German in 2021, a time when the world seemed a safer place, Joe Biden was president of the US and sensible Angela Merkel was still chancellor of Germany.

Now things feel very different, not least in Germany with Conservative leader Friedrich Merz tipped to become the country’s next chancellor.

Last week he won a vote in parliament to strengthen anti-migration laws – and here’s the scary bit – with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

It is a comfort that a crowd of 160 000 Berliners protested against this on Sunday, February 2, and also that the AfD reportedly has no chance of winning Germany’s general election on February 23. But it is clearly a force to be reckoned with.

The Granddaughter is a family story set against major German events over the past 60 years, incorporating the reunification of the country. Kaspar is an elderly bookshop owner in Berlin, a cultured man who goes to concerts and the opera. Shortly after the Wall went up he and his wife Birgit met in East Berlin at a music festival, when it was still possible for young West Berliners to visit East Berlin.

They fell in love, and with the aid of bribes and false papers, Kaspar arranged for Birgit to leave her family and escape to the west.

But at the beginning of the novel their childless marriage is more form than content. And one evening Kaspar comes home from the bookshop to find Birgit dead in the bath.

Swept from his equilibrium by grief, Kaspar goes through all Birgit’s papers and discovers a lot about her early life that she had never told him. Crucially, in the months between their meeting in East Berlin and their reunion in West Berlin, Birgit had given birth to a daughter, not Kaspar’s, whom she gave up for adoption.

And it soon becomes clear Birgit’s daughter also has a daughter, now 14, making Kaspar an unexpected step-grandfather.

He is determined to find her.

It turns out, however, that Birgit’s daughter, Svenya, her husband Bjorn, and the girl, Sigrun, live in a volkisch far-right farming community that, to borrow from Trump, wants to make Germany great again.,

At their first meeting, after Kaspar has found Svenya and Sigrun, the child asks him for his favourite book. He tells her it is War and Peace, and she wants to know why it isn’t German.

All of this is an anathema to Kaspar, but he believes he can be an influence of reason in Sigrun’s life.

He persuades her parents – with the promise of a legacy they believe Birgit left Svenya – to allow Sigrun to spend holidays with him in Berlin. But later he has doubts. “Had it seemed to him such an obvious thing to do because she was in danger in her far-right environment? Because he wanted to save her from moral and intellectual corruption?”

Then he realises: “And now that he had her, he had to tend her soul. He laughed. Sigrun’s soul, the German soul… what am I letting myself in for?”

When Bjorn delivers Sigrun to Kaspar for her first holiday in Berlin, he tells Kaspar: “No television and no cinema, no Internet, no cigarettes, no jeans, no lipstick, no piercings.”

This last is apparently because Sigrun’s friend has a tiny silver swastika in her ear. It becomes clear one of Sigrun’s female heroes is Irma Grese, an Auschwitz guard of such exceptional cruelty that she was nicknamed the “Hyena of Auschwitz.” She was later hanged.

Another hero is Rudolf Hess. In the bookshop Kaspar finds Sigrun looking at a book on Hess, and she tells Kaspar it’s full of lies. “All the books here are full of lies. Hitler didn’t want the war, he wanted peace. And the Germans didn’t murder the Jews.”

But it turns out Sigrun is delighted by Kaspar’s collection of classical music CDs, and begins what is clear will be a lifelong love of performing.

There are signs of hope – but of course things do not go smoothly. Saviours are mostly not rewarded.

And yet, all is not lost.

I found The Granddaughter an eye-opening, worrying and poignant read. And I’m paying a lot more attention to commentators on the upcoming German elections.

• The Granddaughter was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for January.