Nanovic Forum: Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink, photo credit Johannes Wallat

Bernhard Schlink is a writer and a professor of public law and legal philosophy. For many years he was also a judge on the German Constitutional Law Court in Bonn. He was born in 1944 and has lived in Germany, France, and the United States. He teaches now at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. Schlink began publishing crime novels in 1987 and other fiction in 1995. His first fiction to appear in English was his novel The Reader, 1997; since then his collection of stories Flights of Love, the novels Homecoming and The Weekend and his trilogy about the private detective Gerhard Self, Self’s Punishment, Self’s Betrayal, and Self’s Murder, have come out. His essays Guilt about the Past deal with Germany’s recent past, collective and individual guilt, forgiving and forgetting, law and morality, his scholarly work focuses on fundamental rights, the role of the police, and the meaning of justice.

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).