Bernhard Schlink, OLGA: A Novel
[0:01]Hi, I'm Sivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:05]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:07]If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids.
[0:12]Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things
[0:16]Moms Don't Have Time to Do. All the authors have been on this podcast.
[0:19]Also, check out my TikTok at with Sivi and Tracy.
[0:22]My other podcast, Sex Talk with Sivi and Tracy.
[0:25]Check out Moms Don't Have Time to Write on Medium.
[0:28]And of course, my new publishing company called Sivi Books.
[0:32]And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids.
[0:37]Hi, hello.
[0:38]Enjoy the show.
[0:41]Bernhard Schlink is the author of Olga, a novel.
[0:44]Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944.
[0:47]A professor emeritus of law at Humboldt University Berlin and Cardozo Law School, New York,
[0:52]he is the author of the Internationally Best Selling Novels, The Reader,
[0:56]which became a multi-million copy international bestseller,
[1:00]and an Oscar winning film starring Kate Winslet and Rafe Fines,
[1:04]and The Woman on the Stairs.
[1:06]Other notable works available in English include Homecoming,
[1:10]Summer lies the weekend, guilt about the past, Flight of Love,
[1:13]and the Gerhard self-series.
[1:15]He lives in Berlin and New York.
[1:17]Welcome, Bernhard. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to read books to discuss Olga.
[1:23]Hi, Zibi. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
[1:27]It's my pleasure. What a beautiful story.
[1:30]I mean, in this book, you have captured an entire life.
[1:35]Expectations crushed. Happiness is attained and then lost.
[1:41]I mean, multiple generations.
[1:43]It's really amazing the way you're able to craft this person
[1:48]who we now feel like we know and have lived this whole life with.
[1:51]What's the secret? How do you do this so well?
[1:55]Oh, no, Zibi. I don't know.
[1:58]I can't say what the women who inspired me to write about Olga.
[2:03]Yeah.
[2:04]It's my grandmother's.
[2:06]They were several old ants in my family.
[2:09]And when I was a child, they had time for me.
[2:12]And then when I got older, I so much enjoyed talking to them
[2:17]and learning from them and hearing about their lives and their times.
[2:21]And I think all that went into Olga.
[2:25]What you said really resonates with me that your grandparents made time for you
[2:30]because I feel like that's the one true gift we all have to give the people that we love.
[2:34]That is sometimes feels like the hardest one to spare.
[2:37]And grandparents sometimes can give or parents can't.
[2:42]They're kind of understanding time they don't judge.
[2:47]They just are happy to learn what the grandchildren are interested in and want and do.
[2:54]Yeah.
[2:55]Although Olga's grandmother was not particularly nice to her.
[2:58]Well, Olga had bad luck with her grandmother.
[3:00]Yeah, bad luck.
[3:02]In fact, you have this one passage.
[3:04]Maybe I could read if you don't mind.
[3:06]You said, is that okay if I read a little like a few lines?
[3:09]Okay, you said when Olga arrived, her grandmother was already lying in her coffin in the church.
[3:14]Olga sat beside her and held the wake.
[3:16]From nightfall till daybreak, she sat beside the woman who had taken her in and raised her but had not liked her.
[3:22]She did not mourn what had been between her grandmother and herself, which was now over.
[3:26]But that which had never been.
[3:28]She also mourned the unlive lives of those fallen young men and the life she and Herbert would never have.
[3:33]For the first time, all of it was real.
[3:35]The loss, the farewell, the pain, the morning, she started weeping and could not stop.
[3:41]I loved that passage because that's that's part of grief, which I feel like is coming more into the mainstream.
[3:48]You're not just sad and devastated by the loss of the person, but all those experiences you would have had and then could not have.
[3:57]The experience she couldn't have with Herbert because he died on this futile expedition.
[4:04]And with the man of her generation who died in the first world war by millions.
[4:11]And also the experiences she wasn't allowed to have as a woman.
[4:16]How hard did she have to fight to become even an elementary school teacher and she would have enough to go to university.
[4:24]This life under her possibilities and often next to the man who lived above theirs.
[4:32]I mean, that's that was a tough life.
[4:35]What do you think Olga would do if she was alive today?
[4:37]What would her job be?
[4:38]Do you think?
[4:39]Oh, she would go to university and maybe she would become a professor or a doctor.
[4:45]I don't know, but she certainly would go to university and be someone.
[4:50]Yeah.
[4:51]It was so much of it.
[4:53]It was.
[4:54]More success.
[4:55]Yes.
[4:56]Very motivated.
[4:57]I feel like maybe she would have won the National Book Award or something.
[5:01]Who knows?
[5:02]So another interesting part of her story is that she goes deaf.
[5:08]And then you show us what it's like to live in the shoes of somebody who can't hear the world and also to be someone who regularly is in someone's orbit.
[5:18]I'm not saying that very properly, but you know, her student, if you will, who has a huge affection for her.
[5:27]And yet she can't hear him and it doesn't even seem to matter.
[5:31]It's like she learns how to listen when she can't even hear.
[5:35]So tell me how you decided to make her to have that, you know, what was the purpose of that?
[5:40]Well, one inspiration was when I grew up like Ferdinand.
[5:45]We had a seamstress who was couldn't hear.
[5:49]And like he's other women, she still became important for me.
[5:53]And I remember as a very small child, I shouted at her and couldn't understand why she didn't respond.
[6:00]And later we found our way to communicate.
[6:03]She was very good at liberating.
[6:06]And so I spoke slowly and she had interesting things to tell.
[6:12]Wow, very interesting.
[6:14]And you also included both third person and first person.
[6:19]So you have two points of view.
[6:21]You introduce this character sort of halfway through who ends up linking everything all together, which we don't want.
[6:28]I wanted to get closer and closer to her.
[6:31]So first, it's a kind of third person omniscient narration.
[6:37]And only at the end, we learn that it's Ferdinand who tells everything he has learned from her and about her.
[6:46]And then in the second part, it's his meeting her and talking to her and liking her and being like by her.
[6:55]And then in the third, I wanted to get even closer and hear her voice in her letters.
[7:03]Yes, letters, of course.
[7:05]Did people really do that like were there post offices that held all the letters the way it happened here.
[7:11]Like that you could have a stockpile like that and have people come in and rummage through. Yes.
[7:18]And I learned she are accident by about a post office where they were really too lazy to sort out what has to go to the national archive archives and what we should be throughout.
[7:31]And they just put it all.
[7:34]On the attic and there it lay for decades.
[7:38]And at one point it was found.
[7:40]Wow, but a treasure trove.
[7:42]Oh my gosh.
[7:44]So what was the act of writing this book like relative to the reader and your other works.
[7:51]Did this like what is your process like in general and how did this sort of stay the course or deviate?
[7:57]Oh, I don't have a ritual in my writing.
[8:00]Probably because I started writing whenever so busy as a professor and a judge.
[8:06]I just had to take every chance.
[8:09]I got to write.
[8:11]So I write whenever I have time.
[8:14]I'm still pretty busy with other things.
[8:17]And sometimes it's just an evening and sometimes it's whole weekend or a week or even a month.
[8:25]And I wrote Olga partly in Germany and partly in the United States where I also live.
[8:32]And how has how has it felt having so much sort of a claim to with your writing?
[8:39]Does it ever make you nervous to start another project or like does it have any impact at all?
[8:45]Or are you just delighted and you just move on and do your thing?
[8:48]What does it had as a field?
[8:50]Well, I think it's such a gift that I was so successful so far.
[8:57]And I think there will be readers who will enjoy my next book.
[9:02]And if it's not quite the success that the last was who cares?
[9:07]I enjoy writing so much.
[9:09]And it's a way of it's a way of self escaping.
[9:13]If some escapism that I write and I create this route or I find this route and I escape into it.
[9:25]And when did that?
[9:26]I'm very happy when I sit down and write.
[9:29]Oh, that's beautiful.
[9:31]Did you always love to write? Did it start when you were a kid or when was the first time you wrote a story?
[9:36]Well, I started as a child.
[9:39]And I wrote stories about animals.
[9:44]And then when I wrote, I wrote bad poems and bad plays.
[9:52]And then I started writing scholarly stuff and I thought of the driver.
[9:56]I didn't know what will fill itself in scholarly writing.
[9:59]Until then.
[10:00]realized something was missing.
[10:02]And at first, I didn't know what was missing.
[10:05]So I went to the California Massage Institute
[10:09]and got an education as a masseur.
[10:12]And I tried jewelry and did that for a while
[10:16]until finally I realized,
[10:17]no, I have to go back to writing.
[10:20]And started writing mysteries.
[10:23]And then turned to other fiction.
[10:26]No writing is part of my life from the long.
[10:29]And how about reading?
[10:30]What types of books do you love to read?
[10:32]I'm not a very systematic reader.
[10:35]And I love short books that were understand moms.
[10:42]Go ahead and click that books.
[10:46]I love short books.
[10:48]I love old books, 19th century literature, again, again.
[10:53]And I try to keep up a little bit
[10:55]with what's been, what's coming out.
[10:59]And what about stories that you're eager to tell
[11:01]that you haven't told yet?
[11:02]Do you have a whole, do you have a lot of characters
[11:05]that are floating around who you're excited to write about?
[11:08]Or do you have more, is it more of the plot
[11:09]that appeals to you?
[11:10]How do you, what what propels you to decide
[11:13]this is going to be a novel?
[11:15]I start with a plot.
[11:17]And I play around then, of course,
[11:20]also not just with a plot, but with situations
[11:23]and patterns, fears and characters,
[11:26]but the first is a plot.
[11:28]And sometimes it fits and it becomes a novel or a story.
[11:35]I have a feeling it fits.
[11:37]I don't fit it, I don't do it, it comes.
[11:42]And that's wonderful.
[11:44]And then when I have an idea, finally it fits,
[11:50]then I can start writing.
[11:52]I pretty much have the whole thing in my mind
[11:54]before I start.
[11:56]I know other writers go from chapter to chapter,
[12:00]maybe because I am an lawyer who has to systematize things.
[12:06]I have to have it all in my head before I can start writing.
[12:12]Well, and what tell me a little bit more
[12:15]about the dynamic of Olga and Herbert's family
[12:20]and never really feeling accepted from the beginning
[12:23]and not being able to, you know,
[12:26]really have the relationship that she wanted
[12:29]because of external constraints.
[12:31]It's not the relationship she wanted because of that.
[12:35]Also, once she suggests marriage,
[12:41]it would mean for her to lose a position as a teacher
[12:45]in crush on those days once a woman
[12:48]teacher got married, she took it up to her, she.
[12:51]And she loves the independence
[12:55]and the strength that she gets from being a teacher.
[13:01]So she's also reluctant to give it up
[13:05]and to marry Herbert.
[13:07]And she has also very clear sense of his flaws
[13:11]and the shortcomings.
[13:13]She loves him anyway, he's lively and he is charming
[13:18]and he's enthusiastic.
[13:20]But she also seems that he's somewhat illusion.
[13:27]Did you ever have a lost love like this?
[13:30]Like Olga had for Herbert.
[13:32]Yeah.
[13:34]A little bit, I mean, goes a little less.
[13:38]That makes women are different
[13:40]in their illusiveness than men, but a little bit.
[13:44]A little bit.
[13:45]Of course, of course, what I have experienced goes
[13:49]into my characters, we can only write about what we know
[13:52]and we know what we have experienced.
[13:56]Although a lot of people write about things
[13:58]they haven't experienced, I feel like there's a lot
[14:00]of debate now, is that okay to even do?
[14:02]Can you write from somebody else's point of view
[14:04]if you can never have their lived experience?
[14:06]Is that okay or not?
[14:08]Do you have a view on that?
[14:10]I find there's a very strange debate.
[14:12]I must say, I mean, what would we do without Anna Karina?
[14:18]What would we do without Doris nesting writing about men
[14:22]or James Baldwin writing about white people?
[14:24]I mean, we have to know how others see us,
[14:28]how others experience us.
[14:31]And we can only get it from them talking about it
[14:34]and writing about it.
[14:35]So I think a world where everybody would only write
[14:39]about his own experience would be very poor.
[14:44]Of course, even if he write about the other,
[14:48]we can't write about the other fully authentically.
[14:52]But that's not what we need.
[14:55]We know someone writes about the other
[14:58]and tries to understand.
[15:01]But I think we need it.
[15:03]We have to look immediately.
[15:05]I feel like with fiction,
[15:08]I mean, all you're trying to do is see the world
[15:10]through someone else's perspective.
[15:12]And that is like the embodiment of empathy, right?
[15:15]That is what we're trying to get everybody to do
[15:18]is to put ourselves in other people's shoes.
[15:20]So this is just the literary outgrowth
[15:23]of that sort of emotionally intelligent exercise.
[15:27]I don't know.
[15:27]I don't feel like it takes anything away from other people
[15:31]just like...
[15:32]No, go to the country.
[15:34]Yeah, I think it's trying to be additive.
[15:36]It's trying to say, look, like, here I am taking years
[15:40]of my life, putting myself in your shoes.
[15:43]Maybe I didn't, maybe this isn't perfect,
[15:45]but here I am, like trying my hardest.
[15:48]Well, so also always it's an offer to communicate.
[15:51]Yes.
[15:52]I don't get it right.
[15:53]Talk to me.
[15:54]Correct me.
[15:55]Make me understand more and better.
[15:58]I totally agree.
[15:59]I agree.
[16:01]I feel like even in acting now,
[16:02]there's some backlash people are saying,
[16:05]you know, can you really be a character
[16:07]if it's not exactly like you?
[16:09]And it's like, isn't that acting?
[16:11]I mean, isn't that what the exercise is, right?
[16:13]That's like writing.
[16:14]Isn't this what the exercise is, is, but anyway.
[16:20]Yeah.
[16:21]So what are you working on now?
[16:22]Do you have another book in the works?
[16:25]I just finished an album in German,
[16:28]and it's also about women, three generations.
[16:34]And I think I have often been asked
[16:37]by the right about women so much.
[16:40]And I think basically I find them more interesting than me.
[16:44]And I think one reason is this last century
[16:47]was such a century of change for women.
[16:52]You wrote patterns didn't work anymore.
[16:56]They had to define them in a new way.
[16:59]They had to enter into society and politics.
[17:03]And for women, much more happened than for men.
[17:09]This is going to change.
[17:10]I mean, the world's becoming ever more difficult for men now.
[17:14]The old role is to unwork anymore.
[17:16]So we have to find new ones.
[17:18]So maybe in the future, or I would write more about men,
[17:23]but this last century was really the century of women.
[17:27]And I think that's probably why.
[17:30]It's the new novel is a story that also deals
[17:33]with East West, East Germany, and Western me,
[17:36]even though we are united.
[17:38]We still haven't really found together.
[17:42]And all these years of being a communist country
[17:47]isn't just, hasn't just disappeared.
[17:50]It has shaped people, shaped the inspirations,
[17:54]their hopes, their resentments.
[17:57]And we have still two different societies
[18:00]that are still in the process of growing together.
[18:03]And that's what the novel is doing with.
[18:06]That sounds good.
[18:08]I was interested in this novel.
[18:09]Also how you introduced several Jewish characters
[18:14]or people who were, how you were trying to handle that
[18:17]in the context of the time and place,
[18:19]and how people even viewed Jewish people a little bit.
[18:23]And tell me about that.
[18:25]And if you were conscious in your depictions of that.
[18:28]Well, that happened the first time with the reader.
[18:31]I remember when I then came to New York,
[18:35]after it had been a success,
[18:37]I have been invited by several book groups
[18:41]of old Jewish ladies.
[18:44]And I wanted to go, God, what are they going to say?
[18:48]And will they be unhappy with what I wrote
[18:50]because Hannah becomes a figure that is not just a monster.
[18:55]But no, they're interesting.
[18:56]They were interested in Michael and his generation.
[19:00]How does this generation experience what their parents did?
[19:06]And they were also interested in Hannah.
[19:09]How do we experience these, for some was the father
[19:13]or the uncle or whoever was important in his life
[19:18]and suddenly fans out involved in something awful?
[19:22]How do you deal with that?
[19:24]Do you automatically stop loving the person?
[19:26]No, of course not.
[19:28]You're at home.
[19:29]It's a feeling, difficult feeling,
[19:32]and they're very interested in that too.
[19:34]Interesting.
[19:36]So if you had advice to give to someone
[19:39]just starting out as a writer, what would you say?
[19:42]Well, one advice that I found once,
[19:47]it's not for me, but it's excellent.
[19:50]You have to love sentences.
[19:53]So can you develop enough for sentences?
[19:56]And the other that's obvious,
[20:00]read and read really with the consciousness that you are dealing with other
[20:10]lives you are feeling yourself into them and what is it and do you really
[20:17]enjoy that and do you enjoy playing with it then go ahead and try love it
[20:23]what are you reading like right now what are you going to read today I read the
[20:29]old novel I was with my American partner in Northern Italy and so to take a
[20:38]book on this trip I took Manzoni Poemesi Sporzi about this couple who once
[20:45]they get married and for years they can't because they are wars and then
[20:52]diseases and conflicts and it was written in the 19th century and it
[21:01]pretends to retell a chronic from the 17th century and it's it's much
[21:09]fun it's really much fun I know that in the end they will be able to get
[21:15]married there's still another 200 pages together it's funny that when you're
[21:28]reading and you know something is gonna happen and yet you can still wish so
[21:32]hard that it's not going to or or hope so much that it will and reading a book
[21:36]now and I know that there's going to be this death but I keep hoping that maybe
[21:40]if I just read it it will change that maybe it won't happen even though in real
[21:45]life I knew it happened you never like it said wishful reader thinking that
[21:50]makes no sense but you know maybe you have to wish harder maybe I have to wish
[21:55]harder yeah
[21:58]how beautiful how it can be drawn into books yes oh my god I know I'm sometimes
[22:05]I think what does it say about me that I want to spend my whole life in books
[22:09]like what does that say about my actual life why do I do that I'm problem but I
[22:14]just love it I love getting lost and like I feel like I was in Olga's life
[22:20]right I experienced that like I I could feel the cold and I could you know like I
[22:26]could just feel the whole thing and that's it's just so magical it's we want
[22:31]to live more than one life I mean that's all the reason to write one wants to
[22:37]live and I was with Olga I seem to describe it and I love all my characters and
[22:45]when the book is done it's always a painful farewell now they go out into the
[22:53]world and I'm not within the way I was for one or two or three years you know
[23:00]who knows how the universe works right we have all these souls here and yet
[23:05]then there are all these characters in all these books and they also kind of
[23:10]float around do you know I mean where do they go anyway it's hard to believe that
[23:15]once you craft something or something gets created that it can be lost entirely
[23:21]right it's out there so anyway
[23:25]yeah I'm entitled anyway you have lots of books behind them I do I do yeah I love to read
[23:33]anyway thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read bugs thank
[23:38]you for introducing us all to Olga and the various cast of characters in her
[23:42]orbit and and thanks for taking the time thank you Ziggy for having me it was
[23:47]just fun oh good I'm so glad it's fun to talk to you too all right have a
[23:53]great day okay bye bye thanks for listening to this episode of mom's don't have
[23:59]time to read books don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at
[24:04]moms don't have time to read books also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign
[24:08]up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week thanks so much
[24:13]to Steve and Ryan in fact texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to
[24:17]morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music