The Presence of the Past

Hosted by Boston University Center for International Relations, AGNI, and the Goethe Institute Boston

Bernhard Schlink, a lawyer by training who took up fiction writing and is best known for his best-selling novel The Reader (currently a film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes) discusses his generation of Germans — those born at the tail end of World War II or in the immediate postwar years — and how they approached the memory and lessons of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. For Germans in every facet of society, from business to law to medicine to the arts, “the past at one time or another was or still is our topic,” Schlink says.
But confronting this kind of a horrific period in the history of one’s nation is no simple task, Schlink says. Overly repeated “lessons” about it in school and countless analogies to it in discussions of modern atrocities and current tragedies, he believes, has led to a deadened response among younger Germans. “The Holocaust has become small change that is easily handed out,” he says.
Another aspect of Holocaust remembrance that Schlink discusses is his generation’s tendency to draw a moral lesson, rather than an institutional one, from the past. “We accused older generations of a lack of moral courage [and] individual moral failings,” he says. And while he agrees that moral courage is a good lesson to learn, he doubts how much of it can be taught in this didactic way. “I think it is learned mostly by living, and daily experience,” says Schlink.

Mark Feeney, an arts writer and photography reviewer for the Boston Globe who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, moderated the discussion. Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI, the literary journal published at Boston University, introduced Schlink.

February 2, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

About the speaker:
Bernhard Schlink, a professor of public law at the Humboldt University of Berlin, was born in Germany in 1944. From1988 to 2006, he sat on the Constitutional Law Court for the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Munster. He has taught in Freiburg, Bonn, and Frankfurt and is a regular visitor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. A best-selling novelist, he is the author of The Reader, Homecoming, and Flights of Love: Stories, as well as several prize-winning crime novels, including The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

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