Credit Illustration by Ulla Puggaard

It cannot always be easy to be a German. How does one deal with a recent national history drenched in so much innocent blood? How does a German writer find the right tone to describe it, without escaping into mawkish self-flagellation or nervous apologetics? Whether Bernhard Schlink, a lawyer as well as a novelist, found the right tone in “The Reader,” his best-selling 1995 novel about the love affair between an illiterate war criminal and an adolescent boy, is open to question. But the combination of erotic allure and earnest moral soul-searching, about sex, growing up and the German past, made the book a worldwide hit.

Schlink’s latest novel, about a pardoned German political terrorist and his old friends and comrades discussing life, sex, growing up and the German past, during a country house weekend, is again an earnest effort to combine high seriousness with literary appeal. It is a good subject. The brutal 1970s activities of German ultraleftists, often trained in Palestinian refugee camps, were linked to (and said to be justified by) the Nazi past.

It was not for nothing that the most ferocious left-wing revolutionaries in the developed world after World War II were Germans, Japanese and Italians. They felt they had to make up for what had happened before. In the words of Jörg, the pardoned ex-terrorist in “The Weekend”: “We had to fight. Our parents conformed and shirked resistance — we couldn’t repeat that.” To the German Rote Armee Fraktion, the Japanese Sekigun and the Italian Brigate Rosse, it was as if the war had to be fought all over again, this time on the right side, the side of the oppressed and persecuted: the Vietnamese, the Palestinians or indeed the entire third world. Once again, young Germans were engaged in acts of grotesque violence, not just against German officials and American “imperialists” but even against Israeli Jews, to show that they, unlike their parents, would resist “fascism” wherever they saw it.

Enough moral complexity, then, for a good novel. One can see why Schlink chose a terrorist as his subject: he is of the same ’68 generation as the Rote Armee revolutionaries. And the theme fits into his preoccupation with past legacies haunting the living, like some Wagnerian ring. As one of the terrorist’s friends says, after Jörg is accused by his own son of being as bad as the Nazis: “Isn’t it a curse, what’s being passed on from the generation before Jörg to Jörg and from Jörg to his son?”

Yes, it is indeed hard to be a German. The idea, long espoused by German intellectuals, of a cursed people or culture or society, “a community bound by fate,” is enough to make anybody feel gloomy. In Wagner’s operas, at least, it resulted in some glorious music. In the case of “The Weekend,” it makes for a very dull novel.

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Jörg could have been an interesting character, a contemporary Raskolnikov, a revolutionary who steps outside society and its moral constraints because he is made for greater stuff. He could have been a dark believer who does terrible things for honorable reasons. Or something. But we never get much of an idea what he is like inside, or what demons drive him. There are perfunctory hints of childhood fantasies of being a hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. He grew up without a mother and is pampered by a doting sister, who hosts his coming-out-of-jail weekend. But this is not enough to make him interesting, or even plausible.

Like the others, Jörg functions as a figure in the conversation, but in a passive role. He is not so much a character as a catalyst for talk, talk about or inspired by him. And the talk is less political than existential. The only one who talks politics is a cardboard young comrade called Marko, who spouts the old jargon about “the struggle” and the betrayal of “the revolution” by former leftists. He even goes on an incoherent rant about joining forces “with our Muslim comrades,” without explaining why this would be such a good thing. This seems as contrived as the scenes from 9/11 injected in the novel-in-progress written by one of the weekenders.

The other talkers, apart from the aspiring novelist, are a cleric, a lawyer, a journalist, a dental technician, and various spouses and children. Unlike Marko, who hopes Jörg will carry on with the armed struggle, they want their old friend to rejoin “the social contract,” settle down, get a decent job and muddle along as they do. Being a good middle-aged citizen comes at a price, of course. Youthful dreams of heroism, changing the world or just being a huge success, in love or work, have had to be abandoned, and adults must cope with their sense of failure and loss. Living “in exile” is how one of the weekenders puts it, exile from our old expectations about life. “Perhaps,” this same person, a woman named Margarete, says, “that’s what makes a terrorist. He can’t bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way to his dream of home.”

This ponderous statement shows up the main fault in Schlink’s novel: the tendency to lecture, without humor or much element of surprise. Metaphors come down with a heavy thump. The weekend ends with a rainstorm, after which all the guests line up in the cellar to scoop out the water. That we can survive only in society, and that for society to survive we must help one another, is a thoroughly decent conclusion. But good intentions are not sufficient to create an interesting story.


By Bernhard Schlink

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

215 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95

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