What kind of book is Bernard Schlink’s Olga? It is absolutely not a story about a peasant and outsider, Olga, who falls in love with an aristocratic boy, Herbert.
It is also not about how their love defies the ethnic and class-based expectations set by nineteenth-century Prussian society. No, the story of Olga, translated here from German by Charlotte Collins, is the story of Germany’s modern history. It is also a study of memory.
From the author of the 1995 bestseller The Reader, which was later made into an Oscar-winning film, Olga traces the life of a girl born into the chauvinist world of Bismarck’s Prussia. Her parents die soon after and she is sent to live with her grandmother in the Pomeranian countryside. She couples up with the striving son of the local aristocrat, against the wishes of his family.
After stubbornly insisting on getting an education, difficult for a village girl at the time, she becomes a teacher in a local school. She is then transferred out of her home town, loses her hearing and becomes a refugee during the second world war.
Through Olga’s life and losses, we see colonial Germany become Weimar, ill-at-ease with its modernity, only to lapse into the extreme ideology of Nazism and then the tentative acceptance of liberal democracy.
Her lover Herbert exemplifies a new, confident Germany after unification in 1871. He is instilled with ambition to explore and conquer. He imposes his brutal civilising mission on the natives of Namibia, and he travels to the most remote corners of the globe with little care for his own mortality. “Better in the bloom of life to be snatched away”.
Olga, on the other hand, is stubborn, cynical and individualist. She places great value on the local: her garden, her students. ‘Fatherland’, ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’ are just words. She rejects ideology, in a century defined by political extremism and ideological conflict.
Yet the story is not narrated by Olga; she is merely the subject of it. The first part is told dispassionately, as a story of her life. In the second part the narrator Ferdinand, a boy she looked after close to the end of her life, retells her story from his standpoint. In the final part, we see her own perspective through her letters to Herbert, whose ambition drives them apart.
History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it
The story is littered with the results of the march of history. After bittersweet lines like “perhaps 1914 will be our year” comes a more recognisable era than that of the horse and plough. One with commercial flights, computers and the collapse of advertising revenue for newspapers.
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It is striking that two of the main characters, Olga and Ferdinand, devote so much of their time to thinking about others’ lives. We see throughout the novel how people change themselves in response to those around them.
You should read this novel if you appreciate the power of history. How do we remember each other? As individuals, or as parts of a larger whole? As they were, or as we wish they had been?
The narration can be breakneck: decades pass in single sentences, while other paragraphs describe mere moments. This is the effect of memory; lives are condensed into a series of experiences and relationships.
One line still sticks in my head, in a letter from a Norwegian bookseller. “History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it”.
Olga by Bernhard Schlink translated by Charlotte Collins (W&N, £16.99)
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