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.
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