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Summary
Summary
Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart.
They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they've taken since their youth. But this isn't just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren't your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jörg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon will send shock waves through the country, but before the announcement, his friends--some of whom were Baader-Meinhof sympathizers or those who clung to them--gather for his first weekend of freedom. They have been summoned by Jörg's devoted sister, Christiane, whose concern for her brother's safety is matched only by the unrelenting zeal of Marko, a young man intent on having Jörg continue to fight for the cause.
Bernhard Schlink is at his finest as The Weekend unfolds. Passions are pitted against pragmatism, ideas against actions, and hopes against heartbreaking realities.
Author Notes
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. He is a professor of law at the University of Berlin and a judge. He is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning detective novels that are now being translated into English. He lives in Bonn and Berlin, Germany.
(Publisher Fact Sheets)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Old friends cautiously reunite at an isolated German estate after one of them is released from prison in Schlink's (The Reader) meditative novel on the past's grip on the present and the possibility-or impossibility-of redemption. Convicted of quadruple murder and numerous acts of terrorism on behalf of the radical left, Jorg spent 24 years in prison before being unexpectedly pardoned. His sister, Christiane-whose obsessive concern for her brother's welfare has turned her into a borderline recluse-arranges a gathering to welcome Jorg back into society. Among those assembled are journalist Henner, whom Jorg believes betrayed him to the police; quiet Ilse, using the weekend to begin a novel about a common friend's alleged suicide; and Marko, a young revolutionary keen on convincing Jorg to use his newly earned freedom to speak out against the current government. Schlink avoids the easy route of condemnation and salvation, never lingering too long on Jorg's crimes-though the ties to the RAF aren't cloaked-and though the past is admirably handled (sketched in, but not overbearing), the book's real strength is the finely wrought dynamics among the characters, whose relationships and histories are fraught with a powerful sense of tension and possibly untoward potential. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
IT cannot always be easy to be a German. How does one deal with a recent national history drenched in so much innocent blood? How does a German writer find the right tone to describe it, without escaping into mawkish self-flagellation or nervous apologetics? Whether Bernhard Schlink, a lawyer as well as a novelist, found the right tone in "The Reader," his best-selling 1995 novel about the love affair between an illiterate war criminal and an adolescent boy, is open to question. But the combination of erotic allure and earnest moral soul-searching, about sex, growing up and the German past, made the book a worldwide hit. Schlink's latest novel, about a pardoned German political terrorist and his old friends and comrades discussing life, sex, growing up and the German past, during a country house weekend, is again an earnest effort to combine high seriousness with literary appeal. It is a good subject. The brutal 1970s activities of German ultraleftists, often trained in Palestinian refugee camps, were linked to (and said to be justified by) the Nazi past. It was not for nothing that the most ferocious left-wing revolutionaries in the developed world after World War II were Germans, Japanese and Italians. They felt they had to make up for what had happened before. In the words of Jörg, the pardoned ex-terrorist in "The Weekend": "We had to fight. Our parents conformed and shirked resistance - we couldn't repeat that." To the German Rote Armee Fraktion, the Japanese Sekigun and the Italian Brigate Rosse, it was as if the war had to be fought all over again, this time on the right side, the side of the oppressed and persecuted: the Vietnamese, the Palestinians or indeed the entire third world. Once again, young Germans were engaged in acts of grotesque violence, not just against German officials and American "imperialists" but even against Israeli Jews, to show that they, unlike their parents, would resist "fascism" wherever they saw it. Enough moral complexity, then, for a good novel. One can see why Schlink chose a terrorist as his subject: he is of the same '68 generation as the Rote Armee revolutionaries. And the theme fits into his preoccupation with past legacies haunting the living, like some Wagnerian ring. As one of the terrorist's friends says, after Jörg is accused by his own son of being as bad as the Nazis: "Isn't it a curse, what's being passed on from the generation before Jörg to Jörg and from Jörg to his son?" Yes, it is indeed hard to be a German. The idea, long espoused by German intellectuals, of a cursed people or culture or society, "a community bound by fate," is enough to make anybody feel gloomy. In Wagner's operas, at least, it resulted in some glorious music. In the case of "The Weekend," it makes for a very dull novel. This is a shame, for Schlink is clearly an intelligent, well-intentioned, reflective, sensitive man. The problem with the book is not intellectual. Although he is far too skillful to preside as judge and jury over his invented characters, it is plain where Schlink's own sentiments lie: on the side of decency, of muddling along as best we can, and of incremental social and political change rather than violent action inspired by granthose dreams. Just as "The Reader" cannot be read as a justification of Nazi atrocities, there is nothing in "The Weekend" that condones the behavior of antifascist agents of terror. What makes this a bad novel is that the characters are dead on the page. They are cutout types to whom the author has tacked arguments and opinions to keep the conversation going, but nothing more than that, despite the sexual couplings that go on when people run out of things to say. The sex, too, one feels, is there for the sake of argument. Jörg could have been an interesting character, a contemporary Raskolnikov, a revolutionary who steps outside society and its moral constraints because he is made for greater stuff. He could have been a dark believer who does terrible things for honorable reasons. Or something. 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There are perfunctory hints of childhood fantasies of being a hero, like Lawrence of Arabia. He grew up without a mother and is pampered by a doting sister, who hosts his coming-out-of-jail weekend. But this is not enough to make him interesting, or even plausible. Like the others, Jörg functions as a figure in the conversation, but in a passive role. He is not so much a character as a catalyst for talk, talk about or inspired by him. And the talk is less political than existential. The only one who talks politics is a cardboard young comrade called Marko, who spouts the old jargon, about "the struggle" and the betrayal of "the revolution" by former leftists. He even goes on an incoherent rant about joining forces "with our Muslim comrades," without explaining why this would be such a good thing. This seems as contrived as the scenes from 9/11 injected in the novel-in-progress written by one of the weekenders. The other talkers, apart from the aspiring novelist, are a cleric, a lawyer, a journalist, a dental technician, and various spouses and children. Unlike Marko, who hopes Jörg will carry on with the armed struggle, they want their old friend to rejoin "the social contract," settle down, get a decent job and muddle along as they do. Being a good middle-aged citizen comes at a price, of course. Youthful dreams of heroism, changing the world or just being a huge success, in love or work, have had to be abandoned, and adults must cope with their sense of failure and loss. Living "in exile" is how one of the weekenders puts it, exile from our old expectations about life. "Perhaps," this same person, a woman named Margarete, says, "that's what makes a terrorist. He can't bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way to his dream of home." This ponderous statement shows up the main fault in Schlink's novel: the tendency to lecture, without humor or much element of surprise. Metaphors come down with a heavy thump. The weekend ends with a rainstorm, after which all the guests line up in the cellar to scoop out the water. That we can survive only in society, and that for society to survive we must help one another, is a thoroughly decent conclusion. But good intentions are not sufficient to create an interesting story. 'Perhaps that's what makes a terrorist. He can't bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way . . . home.' Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce professor at Bard College. His most recent book is "Taming the Gods."
Guardian Review
How do we like our terrorists now? Can a man with four murders to his credit, pardoned by the German state and released from prison after 24 years, ever be integrated back into society? Is there some fundamental shift in thinking since the events of 9/11 that has forever placed all ideologies of physical force beyond sympathy, beyond understanding? These are the questions that draw us into The Weekend, a novel in which a gathering of family and friends come together to receive a member of the Red Army Faction terrorist group back into the everyday world of food and talk at a country house in Brandenburg. They also await an explanation. It's a day of judgment, looking back over the violent, revolutionary past in which they were once caught up in conflict with the capitalist state. With his professional background in law, Bernhard Schlink has always carried the precision of an advocate summing up before the court of history. His novels are laid out with a clarity of purpose; they are a faithful reconstruction of the human predicament in which characters sway between right and wrong, between accusation and defence, taking his work to such extraordinary depth and worldwide critical acclaim. The Reader is the story of a teenager who walks without caution into a sexual relationship with an older woman, having no idea what effect this carnal intoxication will have on him. When the woman turns out to have been involved in a horrific crime against humanity during the Nazi past, he discovers that this sexual encounter has made him unfit for any conventional relationship with the world. The book can be understood and misunderstood on so many levels. But it's clear that the inheritance of the Holocaust has cast this young German into an obsession that has made him unable to express love. Even though he is aware of a crucial piece of information that could clear her name in a war crimes trial, he cannot allow himself to defend her. Similarly, Homecoming takes up the story of a young boy sent to stay for the summer with his grandparents in Switzerland, where he comes across proofs of an old novel describing a soldier coming home from the war. But the end of the story is missing, and the boy is condemned not to know the experience of returning home. As he grows up, he never manages to reconcile this elusive need in his own life, and remains lost, apart from everyone he knows. On the surface, these novels have an elliptical, almost parable-like structure. Behind the seemingly plain glance backwards in time, they open up a vast excavation of German society and history. It is the intersection between personal and political awareness, the enormity of history seen through a small aperture, that makes them so successful. The Weekend proceeds almost like a stage play, with arguments going back and forth between characters who have become trapped by the past. They perform normal functions - cracking open bread rolls, drinking wine, saying goodnight and sleeping soundly. But the presence of Jorg, the ex-terrorist, has given them a duty to examine their lives and their relationships with him. He is accused of having no feeling. His son Ferdinand wants to know why he cannot show remorse. His sister Christine wants him to be accepted as a human being who has paid his debt to his victims. And amid this ethical crossfire, it is finally revealed who snitched on him to the police and caused him to be imprisoned for his own safety. A young woman inspired by the gunsmoke charm of the old terrorist tries to seduce him, but his libido has been damaged by incarceration and he is no longer inclined towards the trademark free love of the revolutionary years. He bursts into tears, and seeks consolation from her instead. We are left looking back with a cold eye at the romantic old days, when Che Guevara posters hung on so many bedroom walls and the sparkle of resistance to the authoritarian state flashed between so many young people's eyes. Is it the failure to win that puts an activist in the wrong? In his own defence, the ex-terrorist clings to the zeal with which the postwar generation in Germany took up a resistance that remained dormant in their own parents during the Nazi era. In "the curse of generations", failures cascade down the years. Though the engagement with history has become the defining achievement of Germany, the generation of 1968 has at times been said to have strayed into a fascist undertaking to undo the Nazi past. In an impressive novel of closing arguments, Schlink provides the perfect rear view on an inglorious revolution. But he also achieves an explanation for the nature of terrorism in our time. The strongest word is given to the ex-terrorist's former lover, who decides to put her account into fictional form. She recalls that youthful first sight of a spring-loaded Jorg walking into a lecture hall at university, the swagger of "happiness and defiance". Now the happiness is gone. All that is left is defiance, and the only glorious ending she can imagine for the terrorist is death. Hugo Hamilton's latest book is Hand in the Fire (Fourth Estate). To order The Weekend for pounds 9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Hugo Hamilton A young woman inspired by the gunsmoke charm of the old terrorist tries to seduce him, but his libido has been damaged by incarceration and he is no longer inclined towards the trademark free love of the revolutionary years. He bursts into tears, and seeks consolation from her instead. We are left looking back with a cold eye at the romantic old days, when Che Guevara posters hung on so many bedroom walls and the sparkle of resistance to the authoritarian state flashed between so many young people's eyes. Is it the failure to win that puts an activist in the wrong? In his own defence, the ex-terrorist clings to the zeal with which the postwar generation in Germany took up a resistance that remained dormant in their own parents during the Nazi era. In "the curse of generations", failures cascade down the years. Though the engagement with history has become the defining achievement of Germany, the generation of 1968 has at times been said to have strayed into a fascist undertaking to undo the Nazi past. In an impressive novel of closing arguments, [Bernhard Schlink] provides the perfect rear view on an inglorious revolution. But he also achieves an explanation for the nature of terrorism in our time. The strongest word is given to the ex-terrorist's former lover, who decides to put her account into fictional form. She recalls that youthful first sight of a spring-loaded Jorg walking into a lecture hall at university, the swagger of "happiness and defiance". Now the happiness is gone. All that is left is defiance, and the only glorious ending she can imagine for the terrorist is death. - Hugo Hamilton.
Kirkus Review
A tight literary contrivance by the novelist best known forThe Reader(1997).ImagineThe Big Chilltransplanted to the German countryside in the wake of 9/11 terrorism. As the title suggests, this narrative encompasses a single weekend, Friday through Sunday, which represents a reunion of those who were close (even lovers) during their university days, but who have seen their lives take significantly different paths. The impetus for the gathering is the pardon of Jrg, a convicted terrorist who has been imprisoned for more than two decades for the murder of at least four victims. His older sister, Christiane, has been like a mother to him (though some suspect a lover as well), and she has arranged for the gathering of former friends (and spouses and a few interlopers) to welcome her brother back to the world at the country house she shares with Margarete. Christiane and Margarete may or may not be lovers, though the romantic alliances that begin the novel are likely to shift before its end (or there would be no novel). Among the guests is a noted journalist who might be able to help Jrg make his case with the public. He was once Jrg's best friend, later (and briefly) became the lover of Christiane and is suspected by Jrg of the tip to authorities that led to his arrest. There is also a back story, a gathering from some 30 years earlier, at a funeral for a friend to them all who mysteriously committed suicide. At least one of the friends believes that the suicide was a fake, that the purported suicide was also a terrorist who may still be alive. She spends the weekend writing a novel within the novel concerning this possibility, constructing a narrative that "she couldn't research, but had to fantasize." Jrg finds himself in a tug of war between a younger radical who wants him to issue an unrepentant proclamation and a lawyer who wants Jrg to cut ties with his terrorist past.Amid ongoing revelation, all narrative strands (and there are many) are tied neatly by the end.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Would you die for a cause? Would you kill for one? Jorg was willing to kill, going after capitalists and anyone else who got in his way back in Eighties Germany. Now, after 24 years in prison, he's being released. Is he contrite? Still a firebrand? In Schlink's probing new work, it's more complicated than that. Jorg's sister Christiane has planned a get--together with old friends at the country house she shares with Margarete-a -welcome-home party for a murderer. There's Henner, whom Jorg suspects of having betrayed him; Ulrich, who baits Jorg and whose daughter tries to seduce him; Karin, now an irritatingly patient and loving minister; quiet Ilse, who's writing a fictional account about another member of their group; and assorted spouses. Enter Marko, a crafty young revolutionary who wants Jorg to rejoin the cause, and an anonymous visitor who turns out to have a shattering connection to Jorg. Verdict Schlink (The Reader) deftly manages his characters' interlocking stories yet refuses to give readers an easy answer to the central dilemma: How are we supposed to feel about Jorg? That might frustrate some readers, but the ambiguity is realistic and the book itself a beautifully crafted and stimulating read. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One She got there just before seven. She'd expected to make more headway and arrive sooner by traveling in the early morning. When she hit more road construction, and yet more, she grew nervous. Would he walk through the gate, look out for her in vain, his first reaction one of disappointment, of discouragement? The sun rose in the rearview mirror--she would rather have been driving toward it than away from it, even if it had dazzled her. She parked where she had always parked and walked the short path to the gate as slowly as she had always walked. Everything to do with her own life she cleared from her mind, to make room for him. He always had a firm place in her mind; not an hour passed without her wondering what he was doing right now, how he was getting on. But each time she met him, he alone existed for her. Now that his life was no longer in suspended animation, now that it was starting to move once more, he needed her full attention. The old sandstone building stood in the sun. As so often before, she was strangely moved that a building should serve such an ugly purpose and at the same time be so beautiful: the walls covered with Virginia creeper, field and forest green in spring and summer, yellow and red in autumn, the small towers on the corners and the large one in the middle, its windows like those of a church, the heavy gate, forbidding, as if it wished not to shut the inhabitants in but to shut their enemies out. She looked at the clock. The people in there liked to keep you waiting. She had often applied in vain for a two-hour visit, and after the hour granted, was simply not collected but went on sitting with him for another half hour, three quarters of an hour, without really being with him any longer. But when the bells of the nearby church began to strike seven, the gate opened and he stepped out and blinked into the sun. She crossed the street and embraced him. She embraced him before he could set down his two big bags, and he stood in her embrace without returning it. "At last," she said, "at last." "Let me drive," he said as they stood by the car, "I've dreamed of it so many times." "Are you sure? Cars have got faster, the traffic's heavier." He insisted, and kept driving even when the sweat stood out on his brow. She sat tensely next to him and said nothing when he made mistakes turning in the city and overtaking on the autobahn. Until they passed a sign for a service station and she said, "I need some breakfast, I've been up for five hours." She had visited him in prison every two weeks. But when he walked along the counter with her, filled his tray, stood at the till, came back from the toilet and sat down facing her, she felt as if she were seeing him for the first time in ages. She saw how old he had become, older than she had noticed or admitted during her visits. At first glance he was still a handsome man, tall, square face, bright green eyes, thick salt- and- pepper hair. But his poor posture emphasized his little paunch, which didn't match his thin arms and legs, his gait was slow, his face gray, and the wrinkles that crisscrossed his forehead, and were steep and long in his cheeks, indicated not concentration so much as a vague sense of strain. And when he spoke--she was startled by the awkwardness and hesitancy with which he responded to what she said, and the random, jittery hand movements with which he emphasized his words. How could she have failed to notice that on her visits? What else was happening, in him and to him, that she had also failed to notice? "Are we going to your place?" "We're going to the country for the weekend. Margarete and I have bought a house in Brandenburg, rundown, no heating, no electricity, and the only water comes from the pump outside, but it's got a big, old park. It's gorgeous now, in the summer." "How do you cook?" She laughed. "Are you interested in that? With great fat red gas canisters. I've ordered an extra two for the weekend; I've invited our old friends." She'd hoped he'd be pleased. But he showed no pleasure. He only asked: "Who?" She had thought long and hard. Which old friends would do him good, which would only make him embarrassed or reserved? He needs to be among people, she thought. And more than that, he needs help. Who will he get that from, if not his old friends? Finally she decided that the ones who were pleased she had called, the ones who wanted to come, were also the right ones. In some of those who made excuses she sensed honest regret; they would have liked to be there if they'd known about it earlier, if they hadn't already made other plans. But what was she to do? His release had come as a surprise. "Henner, Ilse, Ulrich with his second wife and their daughter, Karin with her husband, Andreas, of course. With you, Margarete and me that's eleven." "Marko Hahn?" "Who?" "You know the one--for a long time he just wrote to me. He visited me for the first time four years ago and he's been a regular visitor ever since. Apart from you he's ..." "You mean that lunatic who nearly cost you your reprieve?" "He only did as I asked. I wrote the welcoming speech, I knew who the addressees were, what the occasion was. You have nothing to reproach him for." "You couldn't have known what you were doing. He did know, and he didn't try to stop you, he just rode on into it. He uses you." She was as furious now as she had been that morning, reading in the paper that he had written the welcoming address for an obscure left- wing conference on the theme of violence. His actions, the paper said, had revealed his incapacity for insight and remorse--such a person didn't deserve to be reprieved. "I'll give him a call and invite him." He got up, looked for and found some coins in his trouser pocket and walked to the phone. She got up too, was about to run after him and stop him, then sat back down again. When she saw he didn't know where to take the conversation, she got back up, walked over to him, took the receiver and described the route to her house. He put his arm around her, and it felt so good that she was reconciled. When they drove on, she was at the wheel. After a while he asked, "Why didn't you invite my son?" "I called him and he just put the phone down. Then I wrote him a letter." She shrugged. "I knew you'd want him to be there. I also knew he wouldn't come. He decided against you a long time ago." "That wasn't him. That was them." "What difference does it make? He's become the person they brought up." Excerpted from The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
