The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Granddaughter is a pretty straightforward novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins. The time is contemporary Germany, and Berlin book store owner Kaspar comes home to find wife Birgit dead in the bathtub, apparently by drowning.  They had met in the early 60’s, in a divided country. They had fallen in love at university, he having traveled as a student to East Germany on several occasions in the early sixties. He helped her to escape from the GDR, and their early marriage seemed solid. Birgit, however, is hiding a dark part of her history, an affair with a married man that had resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and a life-altering decision.

Kaspar never learned about the tragic event until, as a grieving widower, he read an autobiographical novel Birgit had been working on before her death from depression, drugs and alcohol. Central to Birgit’s ability to adapt to her new life in West Germany had been her struggle over whether to search for the infant girl she had turned over years before to the married lover. Much of the book takes place well after the 1990 fall of the Berlin Wall, when Kaspar sets out to find the daughter and, now, a 15-year-old granddaughter.

This book is interesting to me for its setting.  There’s a small amount of character development. But, as one who traveled to Berlin and East Berlin both in 1961-62, shortly after the Wall had been built, and again in 1990, immediately after the wall came down, I found the historical and cultural differences between the East and West particularly fascinating.

Birgit had been a child of East Germany and believed in the myths of the German Democratic Republic, with the deeply embedded false promise of its own brand of nationalist socialism. Kaspar is a man of the enlightened West, a reader (and seller) of books, deeply imbued with the music, theater and arts of the world in which he grew up. Years after reunification, some who had lived on the former East side were still angry from the loss of the GDR. They suffered economically, and, over time, the antisemitism and xenophobia, repressed for years, rose to the surface.

Kaspar’s journey to find his stepdaughter and granddaughter brings him face to face with far-right Holocaust deniers, gay haters, despisers of foreigners, skinheads given to acts of violence.

In 1962, visiting a beer hall in Berlin, I remember my blood running cold to observe older men with their WWII medals pinned to their collars, stand and lift their steins fervently to the rousing anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles,” signaling to their younger compatriots the glories of their past. Such fearsome nationalist emotions still run deep.

Nearly 30 years later, in 1990, traveling though Eastern Europe with a group of editorialists meeting with students, labor leaders, politicians and others, I asked the then-head of the German Christian Democratic Party, who would go on to be mayor of the reunified Berlin, about the rise of skinheads and increasing attacks on Jews.  His answer was a chilling “boys will be boys.”

Today, we see the rise of the far right in Germany and throughout many countries in Europe. The Economist has followed the rise of such extremist parties in Europe, which now outnumber the more stable conservative and social democratic parties for the first time since 1933. And here, in the United States, we see Donald Trump’s sickening admiration of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders. Earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance even supported the radical right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD), providing an official stamp of legitimacy to these dangerous rising powers.

The narrative of The Granddaughter will hold the reader’s attention, but, as an attempt to come to grips with the lesson of the past, it is not as compelling as Schlink’s 1995 book The Reader. It is, however, an effective exploration of the effect of political extremism on families and society. The Granddaughter (1921) is less important to me as a literary accomplishment than as a  very timely red-flag warning of the tenacity of right-wing hatred and blindness to the truths of history. It’s yet another reminder of the fragility of liberal democracy in the face of rising right-wing radicalism.