Expatica Germany’s reviewer Ruth Zein examines German novelist Bernhard Schlink’s mystery series, which are ripe with tensions from the past.

The past is unforgettable in Bernhard Schlink’s novels. From the Nazi era to the revolutionaries of the 1960s-1970s, Schlink explores moral dilemmas in Germany’s past through his work. And while that is evident in his best-known book, The Reader, it is also true of the Self detective series with which he started his fiction career in 1987.

Gerhard Self, a Nazi prosecutor in Heidelberg, was barred from the judicial system in the aftermath of World War II. Now at 68, he is a wary yet successful private investigator in 1980s Heidelberg, where Madonna is singing, “He’s a pretender” on the radio and Diva is playing in theaters.

Self’s powerful and wealthy brother-in-law Korten, who helped him get his first case as a private investigator, calls on him again in the series’ debut novel, Self’s Punishment. he wants Self to track down a hacker who has invaded the computer systems of the Rhineland Chemical Works, where he is general director. Over the course of a few months, the culprit had “doubled the vacation benefits of the low-wage groups . . . deleted all salary account numbers beginning with a 13” and overbooked the tennis courts.

Perhaps it was the influence of Walter Popp, his collaborator on the debut mystery, but Schlink’s mysteries contain humorous touches unknown in his novels. Or perhaps it was their collaborative writing process; The two acted out the parts of the major characters. In their house in the south of France, one played the part of Self while the other typed and took on another role.

At some point in all of Schlink’s books, events from the past intrude into the present and raise questions of guilt and self-recrimination. Soon the humorous hacker is dead and Self back on the job, not because Korten engaged him but because he was compelled to absolve his own guilt. He subtly yet effectively exposes the hacker’s guilt on the very tennis court he overbooked. “In the summer on the tennis court, I’d destroyed a part of (withheld)’s vitality, and now he was dead.”The connection between the hacker and the subsequent action is a device to turn the attention back to the Nazi era. An investigation leads to Jewish chemists forced to develop chemical war materials during World War II and forced Self to examine his own complicity as the prosecutor of a man who turned out to be innocent: “I’d been a convinced National Socialist, an active party member, and touch prosecutor who’d also argued for, and won, the death penalty. There were some spectacular trials. I had faith in the cause and saw myself as a soldier on the legal front . . . You probably can’t imagine how anyone could believe at all in National Socialism. But you’ve grown up with knowledge that we, after nineteen forty-five, only got piece by piece.”

Part of Self’s process of coming to terms with his guilt is making clear to all that he lost faith in the party and refused to return to the judiciary when he could have been drafted back in.

The plot proceeds at a leisurely pace. Self, like Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, works better when he eats and drinks well. In between plates of his and Schlink’s favorite tafelspitz (boiled beef), many coffees and sambucas, many more unfiltered Sweet Aftons and lots of his favorite aperitif, Aviateurs, Self tracks the murderer and confronts public opinion about the Nazi era. He chokes on his pizza when one of his informants confronts him: “I never thought I’d be able to eat with an old Nazi prosecutor without choking on my pizza. Are you still a Nazi?”Self’s problems with his past emerge most distinctively in his failed relationships with women. The beautiful Frau Buchendorff, a former secretary at the Rhineland Chemical Works and his sometime collaborator, accused him of preferring to take “responsibility for the past rather than for the present.”

In a bold ending, Self overcomes his wariness and paralysis to finally see the case through to the end, stands up to the past and begin a relationship with Brigitte, a woman he met at his favorite restaurant.

In Self’s Deception, written without the collaboration of Walter Popp, Schlink’s detective has been hired by a government official in Bonn to find his daughter Leonore Salger, a student at the Heidelberg Institute for Translation and Interpretation, who has disappeared. Self is suspicious when asked to report to an answering machine in Bonn in order to protect the family’s privacy. Still, he is seduced by Leonore’s brown curls in the passport photo sent to identify her, and also by the packages of hundred mark bills that start arriving in the mail. So he agrees.

Working at a more rapid pace than on his previous case, Self quickly discovers that Leonore spent three months in the State Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. Rolf Wendt becomes Self’s primary suspect when he tries unsuccessfully to convince Self that Leonore is dead.

Self soon discovers he is searching for fugitives from the leftist groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The leftists groups were started by children of the affluent industrialists of West Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder or economic miracle, the same children who doubted their parents when they insisted they had never heard of concentration camps, and distrusted their teachers who covered the whole of the Holocaust in two hours. Peter Weiss, author of a play about the early 1960s Auschwitz trials, insisted, “The men of Auschwitz, the executives . . . were indistinguishable from, were indeed the same people as, the men who are managing the profit apparatus today . . . They were the embodiment of the capitalistic system.”

These bearers of the “second guilt” children came to maturity in the 1960s. They insisted on a moral imperative in the belated Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the early 1960s, morphed into the 68ers, and some went on to become the urban guerrillas who led a revolution against the capitalist and judiciary systems.

Wendt had been a member of the leftist group SPK, the Socialist Patient Collective, fighting against medicine and doctors as enemies of the “patients’ class.” SPK merged with the Red Army Faction, the final evolution of the Baader Meinhof Group, in the 1970s. Son of a real estate magnate, Wendt hides Leonore underground. Her “father” turns out to be the mastermind of an attack on an American military installation. When the men from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency, the terrorist branch of the national police, start investigating, violence occurs and Self ends up a wanted fugitive.

While on the lam, Self faces up to his relationships with women. He recognized he was treating Brigitte unfairly: “With Brigitte, who was generous, I was belatedly fighting for my independence—a fight I hadn’t even started with my grouchy and whining wife, Klara, in all the years of our marriage.”

Perhaps that is why Bernhard Schlink cites Self as one of his male characters who can sustain a successful relationship. When questioned at the recent PEN World Voices festival in New York, Schlink brought up Self’s long marriage, which ended in widowhood rather than divorce. His relationship with Brigitte, begun during the first mystery, remains intact through the third book, scheduled to be released in English in 2009.