Just as Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novels, The Reader and Homecoming, tackle the burden of German guilt about events during the Second World War, so too the six essays that make up this compelling book view the long shadow of past guilt that is not just a German experience, but also a global one. Schlink explores the phenomenon of collective guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. He considers: how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behaviour; how to reconcile a guilt-laden past; the role of law in this process; and how the theme of guilt influences his own fiction. Based on the Weidenfeld lectures he delivered at Oxford University in 2008, Guilt is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how events of the past can affect a nation's future. Written in Bernhard Schlink's eloquent but accessible style, it taps in to worldwide interest in the aftermath of war and how to forgive and reconcile the various legacies of the past.

Reviews

Based on a series of lectures that Schlink (constitutional law, Humboldt Univ., Berlin; The Reader) delivered at Oxford University, these six essays grapple with the question of guilt, particularly collective guilt as understood in the aftermath of the Nazi genocides. Schlink brings his knowledge of both law and fiction to bear on this difficult subject. While he writes that guilt is universal and not limited to German history and national consciousness, German guilt permeates his work, although other national histories do figure in his writing, with references to Rwanda, the Stalinist USSR, and South African apartheid. Schlink's essays tackle the complexities of guilt: how the actions of individual perpetrators become another generation's guilt; the connection between past and present; fiction, literature and truth; how individuals live with and overcome past guilt; and the role of law. His legal analysis complements Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. VERDICT Recommended for readers and researchers interested in the philosophical questions surrounding national atrocities, trauma, collective guilt, reconciliation, and the Nazi genocides.-Karen Okamoto, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice Lib., New York Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.