What Inspired Bernhard Schlink to Write THE WEEKEND

On Tuesday night I went to see Bernhard Schlink, best known as the author of THE READER, read from his newly paperbacked book THE WEEKEND in Brooklyn. Schlink is patchy-haired and tall and his English is better than he gives it credit for, but he says he still struggles with the inability to make jokes in the language. Given the darkness of most of his books, this in itself was pretty funny.

Schlink is a retired judge and teaches law part-time while he writes. THE WEEKEND, a terrific book that was one of my favorites of last year, isn't as close to the law as THE READER was but comments on it through the experience of Jörg, one of its main characters and a former domestic terrorist who has just been unexpectedly pardoned. The weekend in question is Jörg's first as a free man in over 20 years, and his sister Christiane has invited some of their "old friends" (read: mostly former collaborators) to her country cabin to attempt to help ease him back into the world.

The seed for THE WEEKEND was planted some forty years ago, Schlink said, when he was a graduate student and the type of cells such as described in the novel were somewhat common among his age and social group. (I say "somewhat" because this is a gap in my knowledge; I don't want to overstate their prevalence, but to Schlink's telling they were quite close to him, and an acquaintance even went to prison through his activities with one.) Schlink described himself, "living the bougie life," coming home and having his parents confront him with the words, "We've been thinking, and if you become a terrorist and you have to take shelter, you can stay overnight, but the next day you have to go." While such acts were far from the author's mind at the time, he began to imagine that one night of refuge -- and its counterpart, the welcome-home several years later.

To write the book Schlink was able to interview a bunch of former terrorists, including one who wrote her dissertation on THE READER while in prison, and he said that those accounts are trickling out in books and interviews without much condemnation for those former acts. As someone in the audience pointed out, the idea of rehabilitating terrorists (even domestic ones) and welcoming them back into society is fairly foreign to American ears.