Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink is a German jurist and writer. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and has been a professor of public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, since January 2006.

His career as a writer began with several detective novels with the main character named Selb--a play on the German word for "self." In 1995 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical novel. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list.

He was born in Großdornberg, near Bielefeld, 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 died in 1936.) Bernhard's father had been a seminary professor and pastor in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. In 1946, he became a professor of dogmatic and ecumenical theology at Heidelberg University, where he would serve until his retirement in 1971. Over four decades, Edmund Schlink became one of the world's most famous and influential Lutheran theologians 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 1968. Schlink became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and, in 1992, a professor of public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. Among Schlink's academic students are Stefan Korioth and Ralf Posture. He retired in January 2006.