A World In Shades Of Gray.(Bernhard Schlink)

Outwardly, Bernhard Schlink's life hasn't changed much in recent years. Now 57, he still teaches constitutional law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University in Berlin. He still commutes once or twice a month to Munster, where he is a judge on North Rhine-Westphalia's constitutional court. He still lives in a modest two-bedroom Berlin apartment, and often rides to his classes on his bicycle. And he still happily accepts invitations to do stints as a visiting professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin Cardoza Law School in New York. But lately he has come to a couple of decisions. Next year he will cut his teaching load in half, and he's looking to buy a house, either near Berlin or near New York, where he can withdraw and write. "Sometimes I think I'm too old to change," he says. "But gradually I realized that the money I've made can buy time and freedom."

That money is the product of the phenomenal success of "The Reader," his slender novel that won glowing accolades when it was published in Germany in 1995 and went on to become an international best seller. In the United States, TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey's endorsement helped boost sales to 2 million copies. Set in postwar Germany, it told the story of a young man's discovery that his mysterious first lover, a woman more than twice his age, was a concentration-camp guard who was involved in a major atrocity. Now Schlink has published "Flights of Love" (308 pages. Pantheon Books), a collection of stories that touch on similar themes of guilt, betrayal and angst. Given his fresh status as a literary celebrity, this latest offering is getting careful scrutiny from the critics--winning him more praise in some quarters and angry denunciations elsewhere. For the mild-mannered professor from Berlin, it's all a bit astounding.

Schlink's writing is littered with autobiographical clues. Like the protagonist of "The Reader," who was a law student, the younger and older German men who populate his latest stories are usually studying, teaching or practicing law, with the odd architect thrown in. Many of them are fascinated by the United States and, sometimes, by utopian societies--two of Schlink's preoccupations, which he sees as very much linked. "In a way, you can say that the United States started as a utopian project, the city on the hill," he says. Most of his grown men are either divorced or in failing marriages; his only marriage, to his high-school sweetheart, effectively ended after five years.

Schlink warns against reading too much into the obvious parallels. In "The Son," one of his most poignant stories, a doomed father bemoans his lack of contact with his only child since his marriage broke up. In reality, Schlink has maintained close ties with his son, Jan, now a 29- year-old dentist. This story and others, he explains, are "more about autobiographical fears, hopes and fantasies than autobiographical experiences." But what can be taken literally is the preoccupation of all of Schlink's characters with guilt, with how they are perceived as Germans. "Guilt is one of the big themes of my generation," he says. "It still shapes our consciousness." He's equally intrigued by how the next generations of Germans live with the burden of their history, how much guilt gets passed on or dissipates.

Growing up, Schlink always had a strong interest in writing. "When I got serious about legal scholarship, I thought that the joy of writing would fulfill itself in scholarly writing." It did--but only for a while. "I realized something was missing from my life," he recalls. In the early 1980s, when he was already a law professor, he used his time off to train as a massage therapist in ...