[In the following review, Bogan compliments the sophisticated literary style of Flights of Love, calling the work a “provocative collection of stories on the theme of ethical predicaments.”]

It sometimes happens that writers, like peacemakers, advance the very division they set out to examine and even denounce. For Bernhard Schlink, a professor of public law and legal philosophy, this appears to be increasingly the case. Following the international success of The Reader (1998), a Holocaust coming-of-age novel, Schlink has found himself thrust repeatedly into the twin spotlights of adulation and condemnation by critics who either praise or censure him for his method of mingling ethical arguments about the horrors of the Holocaust with the promotion of tolerance and harmony.

Critical and popular attention has intensified with the publication of Schlink's new collection Flights of Love. Skillfully translated by John E. Woods, the seven stories take up the themes of guilt, change and choice that were used so successfully in The Reader to examine the interpenetration of private and public worlds and the individual search for identity in a particular society. Writing against the background of generational guilt that has haunted German fiction since the Second World War, Schlink pushes beyond cultural and geographical boundaries to offer wider perspectives on loyalty and betrayal. He presents these human responses as the inevitable legacy of war, but also as the reaction of modern humanity struggling with the shifting foundations of justice and law, truth and belief in an uncertain present. Throughout the collection, the power of choice is shown as underscoring every action and twist of plot.

“A Little Fling,” for example, sets the complex realities of relationships against the backdrop of politics in pre-Unification Germany. GDR totalitarianism is juxtaposed with global capitalism, duplicity is twinned with fidelity, and personal and public illusions are shattered. The power of choice is the key here, as it is in “The Other Man,” a skillfully crafted detective story, in which a widower plans a complex revenge on his dead wife's lover. The story demonstrates why Schlink has such a following in Germany as a writer of mystery novels. (Three detective novels will appear in English in 2003, followed by a new novel in 2004.) In “Sugar Peas,” an architect reacts to the pressures of a capitalist society, as he spirals out of control with each decision to annex yet another relationship on to the structure of his over-extended world. Another character suffers disillusionments that lead him to dismantle his life, in “The Woman at the Gas Station,” while, in “The Son,” an ageing political observer is finally able to recognize the limits of human nature and thus choose what is ultimately of real value.

The story that seems to have touched a raw nerve with some critics is “The Circumcision,” which describes a German student visiting New York who has a love affair with a Jewish girl. Once marriage is in the offing, their relationship is tested by conflicts, both external and internal, as they come up against a disturbing past and a threatening future. Striving to adjust their personalities to each other, they find themselves finally exemplifying the everyday stereotypes defined by society. Schlink has been criticized for interjecting platitudes into a story that grapples with the Holocaust. He has the boy's uncle ask, in a controversial reference to the Holocaust:

What's the point? That was fifty years ago. I don't understand why we can't let the past be. Why we can't let it be the same way we let the rest of the past be?

A possible objection here might be that the subject of universal reconciliation deserves a larger treatment than can be afforded in a short story, with its limited narrative scope. To have a character raise important questions only in passing may seem like an author genuflecting to the nostrums of today. But Schlink's characters operate in a world of uncertainties. Their visions of reality are intentionally distorted, since that very distortion is evidence of their struggle for meaning in a changing world. Throughout the collection, people are continually re-evaluating themselves and their place in society, readjusting their connections with the past to the demands of the present, in an attempt to find some kind of reconciliation.

Schlink is a sophisticated and conscious artist who combines questing scepticism and romantic expectation in this provocative collection of stories on the theme of ethical predicaments. From this description he might seem a rarefied writer and philosopher—the moral conscience of the world; his writing, however, is grounded in unvarnished observation and often spiced with irony and wit. If his characters sometimes cast doubtful shadows, it must mean that they are real.

Hippocrates said that “healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity”. Despite some virulent adverse comments, particularly from French and German reviewers, Flights of Love may be seen as a gesture to help that process along.