The Odyssey is a novel about homecoming. Odysseus, the long-suffering husband and Trojan War hero, resists the sirens’ call and fights his way home. There he finds his wife courted by suitors eyeing his throne, camping out in his house. Odysseus, Homer’s "glib Odysseus, cunning Odysseus" enters in disguise. His son, Telemachus, becomes the guide through his father’s deception, revealing the true nature of his story.

Bernhard Schlink, one of Germany’s best-known contemporary novelists, has transported the famous epic to World War II in his latest novel Homecoming. Odysseys and the aftereffects of World War II are recurring themes here. Born the year the war ended, Schlink explores "second guilt," the guilt of children born to the generation of Germans who lived through the war, as he does in all of his books.

The child of a soldier killed during the war, Peter Debauer’s early life alternates between the reliability and security of his grandparents’ life and the financial uncertainty and emotional repression of life with his mother. His grandparents’ Swiss home provides idyllic reprieve for an emotionally conflicted child. Peter’s neighborhood in Germany crackles with traffic noises but the quiet and poetic sounds of Swiss summer abound with Proustian elegance. These childhood passages find Schlink at his most lyrical even as the entire story unfolds in an accomplished, understated style.

In his boyhood, Peter’s grandparents publish a series of novels and give him bound galleys as scrap paper, admonishing him not to read the stories on "the forbidden sides of the proofs." He cannot resist and one day, he reads an anonymously written World War II odyssey about Karl, "a German soldier who had escaped from a Russian POW camp and braved a number of dangers on the journey home." Karl’s homecoming sticks in Peter’s mind: The soldier finds his wife’s flat and rings the doorbell. The door opens revealing a beautiful woman with two little girls too young to be his children and "a man standing next to her with his arm around her."

Peter discovers he had used as scrap paper the pages the story’s ending was printed on -- he cannot finish the story. Later, as an adult, he finds the rest. He has since left his unfaithful girlfriend, given up hopes of completing his doctoral dissertation on justice after six years work, quit his job at the university, cashed the bonds inherited from his grandparents and spent several months in America before returning to Germany and finding a job with a publisher of legal titles in a city close to his hometown. Unpacking his childhood toys, he finds the beginning of the story of Karl’s homecoming and recognizes The Odyssey as its source albeit lacking its ending. "Why had the author deviated from his model at the end?" he wonders.

Finding the answer to that question propels Peter on his own journey to find out what happened to Karl after the door opened. A very neat coincidence sets him on the right path. One day, he realizes the apartment building described by Karl is the very one he had seen in the market. There, Peter finds a blonde woman around his age. Barbara Bindinger’s family had lived in the apartment during the war. Could her mother have been the woman Karl came home to? What about his own mother? What happened there?

No one remembers that Odysseus left home the morning after his reconciliation with Penelope. "But now that we’ve arrived . . . at the reunion that we’ve yearned for all those years . . . I must be off to the upland farm . . . to see my father." Peter’s search for his own identity becomes intertwined with finding the identity of his father.

This search brings out many long buried issues regarding German identity. During the 1960s and 1970s, the "Auschwitz generation" came of age and confronted their parents’ role in the Nazi era. One of the few professors willing to engage the students of the protest movement was Professor Hans Schwerte, a leftist intellectual and champion of Wiedergutmachung (reparations). In 1995, Schwerte was revealed as Hans Ernst Schneider, a Nazi SS officer and assistant to Heinrich Himmler. After the war, he faked his own death and remarried his wife.

Schwerte’s transformation is a metaphor for Germany’s conversion from National Socialism to democracy, turning its back on the past to create a new society. But the new society turned its back on Schwerte. In the new climate of confronting the Nazi past, he was condemned for waiting too long to apologize.

Schwerte seems to have lived by the iron rule, a perversion of the golden rule created by Peter’s father, as Peter learns. Fundamentally the role of good and evil in society, the iron rule means "I can inflict it on you because it will never happen to me."

Homecoming confronts the effects of the Nazi era on individuals. Children of the "Auschwitz generation" carrying "second guilt" have problems coming home. But what is home? Is home merely country? Or does home include identity, love and trust? In every chapter, Peter becomes a different person as he experiences his own odyssey: finding out the truth about his father. He cannot  truly come home until he does.

-- Ruth Zein/Expatica