It’s May 1964 in the German Democratic Republic. The communist regime has organised a meeting in East Berlin of German youth from both sides of the border. Half a million youngsters congregate, avidly curious and keen to talk, make friends and – who knows? – fall in love. Press photographs show earnest-faced young men discussing politics in front of the Café Warschau on Karl-Marx-Allee. East German groups with guitars and Beatles haircuts are permitted for a moment to strum a version of ‘Western’ music. People are dancing on Alexanderplatz and mingling at the Humboldt University. Surely there’s a chance for engagement, even reunification, if representatives of East Germany and West Germany are not hectoring one another but listening? 

Bernhard Schlink has taken this fleeting moment of delusional optimism as the narrative seed of The Granddaughter. Young, idealistic Kaspar, an open-minded history student, wants ‘to experience Germany – all of Germany, not just the West, where he had lived up until then, in the stolid, Catholic Rhineland’. Kaspar exemplifies the yearning for unity that afflicted postwar Germany and Schlink’s own generation – he was born in 1944 – children of the war and heirs to a fractured nation. After crossing the border, Kaspar finds himself on Bebelplatz, where he meets an East German student, Birgit, who is ‘vivacious, sparkling, quick-witted, not ideologically blinkered like the others’. He briefly loses sight of her, then comes upon her again on Alexanderplatz and is ‘swept off his feet’. Birgit escapes to West Germany and they marry. It proves a union of deep affection, tolerance and secrecy.

This initial encounter is described in retrospect. In the novel’s opening section, we find Kaspar, in his seventies, with Birgit’s dead body. He breaks into her computer and rummages through the repository of her literary leavings: letters, notes, an unfinished novel. We are made aware of Birgit’s inscrutable volatility and