ARI SHAPIRO, Host:
This is Weekend Edition from NPR News. I'm Ari Shapiro. A decade ago, the novel "The Reader" reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A year later, it became a selection for Oprah's Book Club. The book tells the story of a 15-year-old who falls in love with an older woman. Later, he has to come to terms with her role in the Holocaust.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE "THE READER")
LENA OLIN: (As Ilana Mather) Why don't you start by being honest with me?
RALPH FIENNES: (As Michael Berg) The affair only lasted a summer.
OLIN: (As Ilana Mather) And did Hanna Schmitz acknowledge the effect she'd had on your life?
SHAPIRO: Now "The Reader" is a new movie with Lena Olin, Ray Fiennes, and Kate Winslet. The book was written by Bernhard Schlink, and he joins us from our New York studios. Welcome.
BERNHARD SCHLINK: Hi, Mr. Shapiro.
SHAPIRO: Your book has been incredibly successful, translated into nearly 40 languages. It's virtually required reading in German schools. I wonder, when it came time to make it into a movie, why did you decide to entrust someone else with that responsibility?
SCHLINK: I wanted it to be an international movie because even though it's a very German topic, I think it's not just a German topic. The problem of what does it mean to us, how do we cope with the fact that someone whom we love, admire, respect has - turns out to have committed an awful crime, I think is not just a German problem.
SHAPIRO: This is interesting to me that you describe the movie not as a story about the Holocaust per se, but a story about loving someone who turns out to have done something awful.
SCHLINK: Well, it's not a movie about the Holocaust. It's a movie about the second generation trying to come to terms with what the first generation had done.
SHAPIRO: It seems as though this is an issue and a question that you've struggled with throughout your life and your career as an author and as a member of the second generation in Germany.
SCHLINK: Yeah, that's true.
SHAPIRO: What kinds of answers have you reached?
SCHLINK: I think that it is in fact inevitable that we of the second generation or someone who loves someone who is guilty and doesn't break with this person, doesn't expel this person from his or her solidarity, is being entangled into that guilt and has to live with it.
SHAPIRO: You sound as though you're speaking from personal experience.
SCHLINK: This is something that I think everyone in my generation has to tell a story of. In my case, one of the stories was that a teacher whom I really owe a lot - among other things, my love for the English language - who was a wonderful teacher, and then it came out he had been involved in something quite awful. He had denounced people with the Gestapo. He himself was an SS officer. He denounced people with the Gestapo who then were subsequently killed.
SHAPIRO: And in writing this story, were you better able to resolve how you ought to feel about those relationships?
SCHLINK: I think it just helped to find gestalt for it. In a way, it's an unsolvable problem. I mean, the second generation can't just expel the parent generation from its love and solidarity. If one doesn't expel them, then they stay close to us.
SHAPIRO: You write about this a bit in the book. And if you have a copy there with you, I wonder if I could ask you to read a passage from it. This is on page 104 of the paperback. I'm not sure which edition you have.
SCHLINK: That's the passage that you have picked. OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF NOVEL "THE READER")
SCHLINK: (Reading) We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible. We may not compare the incomparable. We may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?
SHAPIRO: You wrote those questions more than a decade ago now. And I wonder if you have answers to them.
SCHLINK: Yes and no. I think that the second generation finally wasn't and isn't just silenced by revulsion, shame, and guilt. We all tried as researchers, as teachers in the media, as authors to make that past speak out for our and - even more so - for the next generations.
SHAPIRO: Before you became an author, you were an attorney, a law professor, a judge. I understand you still teach and practice. Tell me a little bit about what you get from writing about justice in fiction that you don't get from administering justice in the real world?
SCHLINK: Administering justice means you have to bring problems to the point of the solution, to the point of the decision. And that's on the one hand good and it makes you focus in a very specific way. And at the same time what literature does is it allows to keep things in their ambiguity, to live with tension and ambivalence that is not resolved in one or the other way.
SHAPIRO: No, I suppose the court is not very good at handling ambiguity and ambivalence.
SCHLINK: (Laughing) No.
SHAPIRO: Do you ever feel in your life as an attorney, as a law professor, as a judge, as though the real world is less equipped to handle the intricacies of life than the fictional worlds that you create?
SCHLINK: (Laughing) That's a nice question. The world does as good a job as it can.
SHAPIRO: Well, thank you very much. It's been wonderful talking with you.
SCHLINK: Thank you for talking to me.
SHAPIRO: That's Bernhard Schlink speaking about his novel "The Reader." You can read a review or watch clips of the film version of "The Reader" on our Web site, npr.org.