INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. "A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." —Los Angeles Times When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
From the author of the international bestselling novel The Reader comes a compelling collection of six essays exploring the long shadow of past guilt, not just a German experience, but a global one as well.?I know of no other writer who engages with the struggle between the individual and the political world as deftly - and poetically - as Bernhard Schlink.' - The Herald Bernhard Schlink explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. He considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behaviour, how to.
Gerhard Self, the seventy-something, sambuca-drinking, Sweet-Afton smoking sleuth returns in a riveting new mystery about money-laundering, murder, and mafiosi.Despite his failing health and his girlfriend's pleading, Gerhard Self won't stop doing what he does best—investigating. And his most recent case is one of the most intriguing of his career. Herr Welker desperately wants to write a history of his bank, but to do so he needs Self to track down a mysterious silent partner. Self takes the job, but is soon accosted by a man who frantically hands him a suitcase full of cash and speeds off in a car, only to crash into a tree, dying instantly. Perplexed, and convinced there is more to the case than he is being told, Self follows the money. Soon he finds himself traveling to eastern Germany, where he encounters some of the most unsavory villains he has met yet.
Growing up with his mother in Germany, Peter Debauer knows little about his father, an apparent victim of the Second World War. But when he stumbles upon a few pages from a long-lost novel, Peter embarks on a quest that leads him across Europe to the United States, chasing fragments of a story within a story and a master of disguises who may or may not exist. Homecoming is a tale of fathers and sons, men and women, war and peace. It reveals the humanity that survives the trauma of war and the ongoing possibility for redemption.
Gerhard Self, the dour private detective, returns in this riveting crime novel about terrorism, governmental cover-up, and the treacherous waters where they mix. Leo Salger, the daughter of a powerful Bonn bureaucrat, is missing, and Self has been hired to find her. His investigation initially leads him to a psych ward at a local hospital, where he is made to believe that Leo fell from a window and died. Self soon discovers, however, that Leo is alive and well and that she was involved in a terrorist incident the government is feverishly trying to keep under wraps. The result is a wildly entertaining, superbly nuanced thriller that follows one detective’s desire to uncover the truth, wherever it may lead.
Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees her as second-best. When she falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with the era's dreams of power, glory and greatness, her life is irremediably changed. Theirs is a love against all odds, entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leading us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west. This is the story of that love, of Olga's devotion to a restless man - told in thought, letters and in a fateful moment of great rebellion.
From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a mélange of beautifully rendered relationships. In ”After the Season,” a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she’s rich. In “Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,” a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn’t his father who was the distant one. A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in “The Night in Baden-Baden,” but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. And in “Stranger in the Night,” an obliging professor becomes an accomplice—not entirely unwittingly—to the temporary escape of a charismatic fugitive on a delayed flight from New York to Frankfurt. The truth, as once character puts it, is “passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free.” Tantalizingly, so is the act of telling a lie—to others and to ourselves.
A classic noir thriller about love and deception from the bestselling author of The Reader. Georg Polger ekes out a lonely living as a freelance translator in the south of France, until he is approached by a certain Mr. Bulnakov, who has a intriguing proposition: Georg is to take over a local translation agency and finish a project left by the previous owner, who died in a mysterious accident. The money is right and then there is the matter of Bulnakov’s secretary, Francoise, with whom Georg has fallen hopelessly in love. Late one night, however, Georg discovers Francoise secretly photographing a sensitive military project. He is shocked and heartbroken. Then, her eventual disappearance leaves him not only bereft, but suspicious of the motivations behind Mr. Bulnakov’s offer. To make matters worse, Georg’s every move is being watched. Determined to find out who Francoise really is, and to foil who ever is tracking him, Georg sets out on an mission that will take him to New York City, where with each step he is dragged deeper and deeper into a deadly whirlpool in which friend and foe are indistinguishable.
In a museum far from home, a lawyer stumbles across a painting of a woman he once knew, Irene. Decades before, he had become entangled in her affairs when he was called on to settle a dispute between her husband, who had commissioned the portrait, and the painter of the work—who was also her lover. When, ultimately, the lawyer fell in love with her himself and risked everything for her, she mysteriously disappeared—along with the painting. Now, face to face with the portrait once again, the lawyer must reconcile his past and present selves. When he eventually locates Irene, he is forced to confront the truth of his love—and the reality that his life has been irrevocably changed. A poignant, intricately crafted novel of obsession, creativity, and love, this is Bernhard Schlink at his peak.
Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth. But this isn’t just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren’t your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jörg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon will send shock waves through the country, but before the announcement, his friends—some of whom were Baader-Meinhof sympathizers or those who clung to them—gather for his first weekend of freedom. They have been summoned by Jörg’s devoted sister, Christiane, whose concern for her brother’s safety is matched only by the unrelenting zeal of Marko, a young man intent on having Jörg continue to fight for the cause. Bernhard Schlink is at his finest as The Weekend unfolds. Passions are pitted against pragmatism, ideas against actions, and hopes against heartbreaking realities.
As a young man, Gerhard Self served as a Nazi prosecutor. After the war he was barred from the judicial system and so became a private investigator. He has never, however, forgotten his complicity in evil. Hired by a childhood friend, the aging Self searches for a prankish hacker who’s invaded the computer system of a Rhineland chemical plant. But his investigation leads to murder, and from there to the charnel house of Germany’s past, where the secrets of powerful corporations lie among the bones of numberless dead. What ensues is a taut, psychologically complex, and densely atmospheric moral thriller featuring a shrewd, self-mocking protagonist.
Bernhard Schlink brings to these seven superbly crafted stories the same sleek concision and moral acuity that made The Reader an international bestseller. His characters–men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception–are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse toward flight. A young boy’s fascination with an eerily erotic painting gradually leads him into the labyrinth of his family’s secrets. The friendship between a West Berliner and an idealistic young couple from the East founders amid the prosperity and revelations that follow the collapse of communism. An acrobatic philanderer (one wife and two mistresses, all apparently quite happy) begins to crack under the weight of his abundance. By turns brooding and comic, and filled with the suspense that comes from the inexorable unfolding of character, Flights of Love is nothing less than masterful
A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of the war. Now an adult, Peter embarks on a search for the truth surrounding his mother's unwavering--but shaky--history, and the possibility of finding his missing father.
“Two world wars and the passage of more than a century do not overshadow [Bernhard Schlink’s] story of lovers who never fully belong to each other, just as they never fully belonged to the world.”—Booklist “A brilliant novel about history and the nature of memory.”—Evening Standard A sweeping novel of love and passion from author of the international bestseller The Reader about a woman out of step with her time, whose life is witness to some of the most tumultuous events of modern age. Abandoned by her parents, young Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village in the early years of the twentieth century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against ingrained chauvinism to find her place in a world run by lesser men. When Olga falls in love with her neighbor, Herbert, the son of a local aristocrat, her life is irremediably changed. While Herbert indulges his thirst for exploration and adventure, Olga is limited by her gender and circumstance. Her love for Herbert goes against all odds and encounters many obstacles, but even when they are separated, it endures Unfolding across decades—from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century—and across continents—from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west—Olga is an epic romance, and a wrenching tale of a woman’s devotion to a restless man in an age of constant change. Though Olga exists in the shadows of others, she pursues life to the fullest and her magnetic presence shines—revealing a woman complex, fascinating, and unforgettable. Told in three distinct parts, brilliantly shifting from different points of view and narrative formats, Bernhard Schlink’s magnificent novel is a rich, full portrait of a singular woman and her world. Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
As an effect of the recent economic and financial crisis in the USA, a vast number of people have suddenly lost their jobs and income and often also their home. Many of them still live in their cars or even just in the streets. In spring 2007, the young
An important resource, it includes the most significant and influential texts representative of the political and conceptual diversity of the intellectual approaches of that time. . . . Very significant for contemporary debates about the relationship between state, law, and constitution."—Ulrich Karl Preuss, Freie Universität Berlin
This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.