An odyssey into the scars of history

Just over a decade ago, Bernhard Schlink published “The Reader,” a stunning little novel about a 15-year-old boy who falls into a passionate affair with a streetcar conductor old enough to be his mother. Years after she disappears without warning, he is shocked to encounter her as a defendant in a trial of former Nazi concentration camp guards that he’s been assigned to study as a law student.

Schlink’s new novel, “Homecoming,” continues his exploration of what he refers to as “the scars of history,” evident not just on a country’s infrastructure but on war survivors and their offspring. This rich vein has drawn such talented literary surgeons as W.G. Sebald, Gunter Grass, Ursula Hegi and Rachel Seiffert.

“Homecoming” shares “The Reader’s” concerns with second generation post-Holocaust guilt and is also propelled by a similar compulsion to unravel the mysteries that shroud even the people closest to us. Both novels are narrated by mild, bookish, sometimes frustratingly nonconfrontational males who are often too quick to accept blame and who were born, like their author, in Germany in 1944.

In addition, the two novels share an interest in theories of law and history entwined with a fascination with Homer’s “Odyssey,” often considered the prototypical homecoming story. Schlink instead proposes “The Odyssey” -- not entirely convincingly -- as a model for the dilatory flux of law. Odysseus, like history itself, Schlink writes, “is clearly in no hurry.” He tarries on his homeward journey, visiting various women and, as Schlink notes in “The Reader,” “does not return home to stay, but to set off again. ‘The Odyssey’ is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?”

Despite the shared concerns and similarities between Schlink’s two novels, rest assured that there’s nothing redundant about “Homecoming.”

The novel opens with Peter Debauer’s reminiscences of being sent alone to visit his paternal grandparents in Switzerland during his boyhood summer holidays. Life in postwar Germany with his single, working mother is shabby and somewhat joyless. In contrast, the cozy, orderly domesticity Peter finds with his grandparents -- what he calls “the routine of love” -- is something he tries, not always successfully, to replicate in his adult life. He also absorbs their passion for literature and his grandfather’s fascination with military history and theories of justice.

Peter’s grandparents edit a pulp fiction series called “Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment.” They send him home with bound galleys as scrap paper, making him promise not to read the stuff. Inevitably, he sneaks a peak.

The first manuscript he reads is a homecoming story sprinkled with allusions to “The Odyssey.” It’s about a German soldier who escapes from a Russian POW camp and makes his way home to find his wife with a new husband and daughter.

To Peter’s frustration, the last pages of the novel are missing. The omission triggers an obsessive quest to discover who wrote this book set in the precise geography of his early childhood and to learn what happens after the soldier rings his wife’s doorbell. Peter’s search becomes entangled in surprising ways with his attempts to learn more about his Swiss father. His “not-quite-unloving but highly formal” mother, a woman harboring secrets if ever there was one, has told him she saw his father get shot in Breslau at the end of the war.

In the course of Peter’s investigations, he meets the love of his life when he visits the apartment he easily pinpoints as the returning soldier’s home. More chillingly, he unearths Nazi propaganda that appears to have been penned by one man under various aliases, a writer with close ties to high-ranking Nazi officials.

These documents introduce Peter to a disturbing ethical formulation. The Nazi apologist claims that the golden rule “goes against the very first of all legal rights: the right to defend oneself against attack” by forbidding “one from doing to another what one would not oneself wish to suffer.” Instead, he proposes that “[t]he law rests not on this golden rule but on an iron rule: whatever you are willing to take upon yourself, you have the right to inflict upon others. . . . It is the rule that supplies the foundation for all authority and leadership.”

This willingness to use evil for the sake of good as long as the “decision-maker be willing to bear the brunt of evil” forms the moral debate at the heart of Schlink’s new novel. “Homecoming,” fueled by a mystery, is also a powerful meditation on justice, history and the nature of evil.

The issues Schlink raises are still disturbingly topical. One need only scan current headlines to find people who -- although they might stop short of condoning the iron rule -- rationalize torture or seizing authority by arguing that evil “can be made to work for the good.”

Michael Henry Heim’s generally felicitous translation features a few terms that may puzzle American readers, including “the gauleiter of Silesia,” and “Hilda rolls,” which seem to be some sort of cookie. There is also a presumption of familiarity with what transpired in Silesia during World War II.

Schlink again considers evil from unusual angles. Peter’s investigations lead him to troubling questions and uncomfortable situations, including a diabolic social experiment with overtones of “Lord of the Flies” as well as Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” college experiments meant to make participants “look evil in the eye, the evil in others and ourselves.”)

In “The Reader,” Hanna became a death camp guard to hide what she considered a greater shame -- her illiteracy. Understanding her motivation does not exonerate her, but it does make her more sympathetic. The evil at the heart of “Homecoming” is darker because it stems from sinister convictions and rationalizations that know no shame. Schlink has written another lean, meticulously structured, disquieting thought-provoker.

Heller McAlpin is a critic whose reviews appear in a variety of publications, including Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle.