Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Which Way Is Home?

The urban legend that we're never more than six feet away from a rat may be rubbish science but it is accurate politics in Schlink's novel. The message of Homecoming is that the political evil of fascism is perpetually lurking just out of sight, just under the floorboards as it were, masquerading as modern philosophy in even the most refined and educated society. Particularly, as it turns out, in the United States.

The narrative of Homecoming is of a German son's search for the details of his Swiss-German father's life, a life spent mysteriously involved with the Nazi occupation of the old Hapsburg province of Silesia. But the recurring central theme is the choice of what can be described as one's fundamental ethical presumptions about the world, one's duty.

Peter Debauer, the protagonist, is a symbol of the German post-WWII generation - wary of commitment, eager to 'get on', liberally-educated, unable to comprehend the motivations of their parent's generation on either a personal or national level. Peter's unfinished doctoral thesis in law is about the absolute requirement for justice regardless of practical consequences. Doing right is for him a matter of principle not effects.

The conventional stance on justice can be summarised as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the traditional Judaeo-Christian principle which is arguably the core of European civilisation. It is so widely taught as philosophy and preached as religion that we might be tempted to take it for granted as defining the only defensible moral stance. 

But Peter is confronted in his paternal search by a very different moral principle, the Iron Rule: Do not make others endure what you are unprepared to endure. A law of chivalry rather than love perhaps. At first glance the Iron Law seems to have some affinity with the Golden Rule. Both appear to restrict behaviour within similar ethical bounds. But this is not at all the case.

The Iron Rule was the central moral principle of fascist Germany. Among other things, it implies an acceptance of killing to the extent that one accepts the possibility of being killed. In other words, total commitment of one's life to the cause is the moral justification for any action taken in the name of the cause, including mass murder. In less inflammatory terms it can be ​interpreted as the willingness to endure the effects of evil in pursuit of the good.

Peter finds the Iron Law abhorrent but also discovers it to be the foundation of his father's position in legal philosophy, and his teaching at an American university. His father's arguments to justify this position are a combination of solipsistic analysis and the philosophical maxims of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi intellectual apologist of the 1930's. As a political rat, the father has substantial influence in New York City and Washington, DC; a combination of Werner Earhard and Warren Bennis.

Implicitly Peter recognises the uselessness of engaging in debate with his father. Both the Golden Rule and the Iron Rule are self-fulfilling prophecies. Following either will produce the conditions justifying the chosen behaviour. Both, it turns out, fit his initial thesis, that is, they are applied regardless of consequences. But the consequences are exactly contrary. Neither can be 'proven' by either logic or experience. So, Peter can only do one thing: walk away, even if it requires abandoning his own heritage.

This, of course, is not a resolution of the issue. Peter is aware of the continuing problem: "I did not like my father, and I did not like his theory: it freed him of all responsibility, the responsibility for what he had written and for what he had done. At the same time, I was fascinated by how he had made his way through life, getting involved in whatever came his way, then moving on, and in the end creating a theory to justify it all." Peter's ambivalence does not dissipate because of a single ethical decision; it is a permanent condition.

After all, the Iron Rule is manly, it gets results, it's simple, it moves the earth. It also eliminates the post-war "... fear of being on the side-lines..." So Peter feels comparatively inept under the Golden Rule, "unlike his father the successful adventurer and latterly legal scholar who could cope with anything." The Iron Rule sits waiting patiently for the right moment and the right vocabulary with which to re-exert itself. Therefore, there is real existential content to Peter's intellectual choice. Does he become a Telemachus fighting at the side of his father-hero Odysseus or does he reject the Iron Law permanently and let his mother and father work out their own problems? What does homecoming really mean?

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