Bernhard Schlink appointed Hague Peace Philosopher

German judge and writer Bernhard Schlink has been appointed The Hague’s second Peace Philosopher as part of a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS).

The appointment of a Peace Philosopher in international justice city The Hague is a joint initiative of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, NIAS and the Municipality of The Hague.

From the beginning of October, Schlink will give 5-minute personal, legal interpretations of six famous philosophers’ quotes in an RNW radio show. He will also take part in a debate at the Peace Palace on 29 November.

The Reader

Writer, judge and Peace Philosopher Schlink (66) is probably most widely known for his international bestseller The Reader (1995), which was translated into 39 languages and received several awards. The Reader was the first German book to reach the number one position on the New York Times bestseller list.

It reached an even larger audience in 2008, when director Stephen Daldry produced a movie of the same name. The movie stars Kate Winslet, who received an Oscar for her role. Pathé Buitenhof in The Hague will show the movie on the occasion of Schlink’s new role on 19 September, but tickets are already sold out.

Schlink is both a writer and a jurist. He grew up in Heidelberg as the son of a theologian. After studying in Heidelberg and Berlin, he served as a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988. He then worked as a law professor at the University of Bonn and the Johann Wolfgan Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. In 1992 Schlink became Professor of Public Law and the Philosophy of Law at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Moral issues

Betrayal, lies, morals and escape are recurring themes in Schlink’s work. In The Reader, a 15-year old boy falls in love with a woman 20 years his senior. She continuously wants the boy to read to her. Their short, intense affair ends when the woman suddenly disappears. The boy only sees her again years later in court, while she is being heard during an Auschwitz lawsuit. She turns out to have been a supervisor of a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.

Schlink has been contemplating moral dilemmas since his youth in Nazi Germany, when he was confronted with both Jewish Nazi victims, friends of his father, and former Nazis.

He started his writing career with a series of detective novels, the main character of which was called Selb, the German word for ‘self’.

Schlink wrote his first novel, Selb’s Justice, together with his friend Walter Popp. The story is about a pensioned jurist who served as public prosecutor demanding death sentences under the Nazi regime. After the end of the Second World War, Selb could not find work within his field of expertise and decided to become a detective instead. Schlink wrote two more books without Popp in the Selb series: Selb’s Deceit in 1992 and Selb’s Murder in 2001.

He has so far published ten novels and various legal works.

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