Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink (born 6 July 1944 in Bielefeld) is a German lawyer and writer. His novel The Reader, first published in 1995, became an international bestseller. 2Early life He was born to a German father (Edmund Schlink) and a Swiss mother, the youngest of four children. His mother, Irmgard, had been a theology student of his father, whom she married in 1938. (Edmund Schlink's first wife had died in 1936.) Bernhard's father had been a seminary professor and pastor in the Confessing Church. In 1935, he had been removed from his teaching position in Giessen for his public criticism of Nazi policies. In 1946, he became a professor of dogmatic and ecumenical theology at Heidelberg University, where he would serve until his retirement in 1971. Over the course of four decades Edmund Schlink became one of the most famous and influential Lutheran theologians in the world and a key participant in the modern Ecumenical Movement. Bernhard Schlink was brought up in Heidelberg from the age of two. He studied law at West Berlin's Free University, graduating in 196