Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink
Schlink, Fondation Maeght, February 2005
Born	Bernhard Schlink 6 July 1944 (1944-07-06) (age 72) Bielefeld, Germany
Occupation	Author, Professor, Judge
Nationality	German
Notable works	The Reader

Bernhard Schlink (born 6 July 1944 in Bielefeld) is a German lawyer and writer.

He was born 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 had died in 1936.) Bernhard's father had been a seminary professor and pastor in the Confessing Church. (In 1935 he had been removed from his teaching position in Giessen for his public criticism of Nazi policies.) In 1946 he became a professor of dogmatic and ecumenical theology at Heidelberg University, where he would serve until his retirement in 1971. Over the course of four decades Edmund Schlink became one of the most famous and influential Lutheran theologians in the world 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 for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin. He retired in January 2006.

Schlink studied law at the University of Heidelberg and at the Free University of Berlin. He had been a law professor at the University of Bonn and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main before he started in 1992 at Humboldt University of Berlin. His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selb—a play on the German word for "self"—(the first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp () being available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize () in 1989.