Schlink deals with German colonialism in the early twentieth century, the waste of the first world war, the aggression of the second, all the way through to reunification. While this is Olga’s story it is also the story of Germany in the Twentieth Century. Ferdinand takes up the story when it moves into the 1970s and finds himself tracking down evidence from Olga’s past, ultimately providing a very different view of her life to the one that had already been told. Adrift, Olga floats through the first half of the twentieth century, ending up after the Second World War as a housekeeper and developing a friendship with a young man called Ferdinand. Unable to stay still, Herbert goes to German East Africa and then to various other places around the world before determining to conquer the North Pole, a venture that will prove tragic. Olga ends up in a relationship with the peripatetic Herbert. It is there that she strikes up a relationship with the two children of the local aristocracy – Herbert and his sister Viktoria.

When her parents die she is sent to live with her grandparents in Prussia. Olga Rinke was born in Poland at the end of the Nineteenth Century. A view that looks like one thing and then, after a series of letters is discovered, changes shape. But he also provides a nuanced “history” of Olga herself. In Olga, Schlink provides a history of Germany in the Twentieth Century through the eyes of a woman and later the man who becomes obsessed with her life. It’s the shape we give it.” This observation by a Norwegian antiquarian in Bernhard Schlink’s latest novel Olga may well be a mission statement for the whole book. “History is not the past as it really was.

Olga schlink