Olga, by Bernhard Schlink

A story full of emotions, giving a flavor of a life during the century following the time of Bismarck.

The protagonist in the novel, Olga Rinke, mistrusted “grand” undertakings. Plenty of them happened over the time in which the novel takes place, starting with Bismarck’s undertaking to make Germany big and powerful, colonizing places like South West Africa and Samoa. And then came the German rivalry with Britain, its motivation to support Austria against Serbia and declare war on Russia, France and Belgium, the beginning of World War I, followed two decades later by Hitler’s designs on all of Europe, which became World War II. Olga’s lover, Herbert Schröder, harbored grand plans as well. He began his life with childhood running, every place he went. He next joined the colonial army in Africa, then traveled to South America, the Kila Peninsula, Siberia, and the Kamchatka Peninsula, and finally he sought to find the Northwest Passage and the North Pole. Olga accused him of a misguided search for the great expanse, the expanse without end. Herbert was not dissuaded. He set off for Nordaustlandet in 1913, a journey, Olga feared, that would snatch him away in the bloom of his life. Olga stayed at home, alone for two world wars, and then was afflicted by deafness from an illness, which meant the loss of her teaching career and the beginning of her job as a seamstress in 1950, soon working only for a family with a young boy named Ferdinand.

The first part of the novel, before Ferdinand, is written in a third person, omniscient, point of view. It is a biographical account of Olga’s life before 1950. The second part of the story is told by Ferdinand in his account of Olga’s life from 1950 until her death when she was ninety. Through Ferdinand’s observations, gaps in Olga’s early years are filled in and the reader is handed a wider perspective of the history of Germany surrounding Olga during her life, a closer look at the “grand” events and a contextual exploration of the woman. The passage of time in the first two parts of the novel can leave the reader dizzy. Events and years, sometimes decades, pass in between the paragraphs. This pace is a brilliant device used by the author to demonstrate how memory works, and how the meaning of one’s life can be uncovered by putting it side by side with historical events. Through a minor character in the novel, the owner of a secondhand bookshop in Tromsø, Schlink directly comments on the process, lest the reader miss it: “History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it.” The third and final part of the novel is epistolary. It contains the letters Olga sent to Herbert, letters he never received, care of a post office in Tromsø, a small town from which he was to depart on his search for the Northwest Passage. These letters are found by Ferdinand in his trip to Tromsø and reveal what Olga thought during the decades after Herbert’s departure, in effect granting the reader her sometimes shocking first person narrative to complement Ferdinand’s earlier one. With the help of these letters, Ferdinand binds together Olga, Eik and Adelheid Volkmann and concludes the story, noting that before her death from an explosion at a statute of Bismarck Olga “set the counterpoint to the melody of her life.”

Olga is as much about emotions and memory as it is about the historical events during the life of a German woman. This is as it should be. In the words of Doris Lessing, “Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.” German history and the enormous social upheaval that occurred between Victorian and modern times is inextricably entwined with Olga’s life. At one point Ferdinand comments upon Olga’s like of walking through cemeteries: “. . . everyone was equal here: the powerful and the weak, the poor and the rich, the loved and the neglected, those who had been successful and those who had failed . . . All were equally dead, no one could or wanted to be grand anymore, and too grand wasn’t even a concept.” Olga castigated Ferdinand at one point, accusing him of being a moralizer, wanting to save the world instead of attending to his own problems: “Moralizers want it both ways: big and cozy at the same time. But no one’s ever as big as their moralizing, and morality isn’t cozy.” For these attitudes, Olga held Bismarck responsible, but how true her words rang when also applied to Hitler’s reign. And how true they ring in today’s “grand” globalized world, full of an expanding “cancel” culture and, in Ferdinand’s words, a “media that have forgotten how to do research and replaced it with moralizing sensationalism.”

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