Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink was born in 1944 to Edmund and Irmgard Schlink. Growing up, theology and religion were major influences in the lives of Schlink and his three older siblings. Their mother Irmgard was a Swiss theology student who was deeply concerned with justice and morality and who instilled in her children a sense that they must do good in the world. Their father Edmund was a German theologian, professor, and pastor. As part of a nightly ritual, the family would read the Bible together after dinner. After his father was fired from his teaching position for anti-Nazi affiliations, Bernhard and his family moved to Heidelberg, where he grew up. In the 1960s Schlink studied at the Free University in West Berlin, where he was able to observe the wave of student protests that swept Germany. Fueled by poor economic conditions and anger at the remnants of the previous generation’s Fascist past, the student protests peaked in 1968, the same year that Schlink graduated. Though Schlink was not heavily involved in the demonstrations, his interest in them during his student days later manifested in his creative writing. The generational conflict expressed by the student protests would later emerge as a central theme in Schlink’s novel The Reader. In the 1970s, Schlink married Hadwig Arnold, who gave birth to their son Jan, and obtained his J.D. from the University of Heidelberg. In 1981 he was conferred his PhD at Freiburg University and soon began teaching as a professor. It was in the 1980s that, as a young academic, Schlink began to feel as if something were missing from his life. He decided to explore other pursuits, and while visiting America, he took a massage course in California and became a qualified masseur. In Germany, he decided to learn goldsmithing and began to make jewelry. However, his massage and jewelry careers were short-lived, and he eventually turned to creative writing. While serving as a judge in North Rhine-Westphalia, he wrote and published a series of post-war detective novels about a reformed Nazi prosecutor who becomes a private detective. In 1995, he published The Reader, which also explored life after the Holocaust and which was met with great acclaim. The Reader was awarded numerous literary prizes and became a global bestseller. In 2008, it was adapted into an award-winning and critically acclaimed film. Since the success of The Reader, Schlink has published a number of literary works, as well as legal texts. He teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.