 They had two sons, Wilhelm Schlink (d. 2018) who was an art historian, and Bernhard Schlink, who is a lawyer and novelist.Schlink's daughter, Dorothea (d. 2019), was the wife of the former bishop of the Protestant Church in Baden, Klaus Engelhardt, who was also a former chairman of the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany.Shortly after his arrival at Heidelberg in 1946, Schlink founded an ecumenical institute there, the first of its kind at a German university.