The Reader

For the film based on the book, see The Reader (2008 film). For other uses, see The Reader (disambiguation).

The Reader

Author	Bernhard Schlink
Translator	Carol Brown Janeway
Cover artist	Kathleen DiGrado (design), Sean Kernan (photo)
Language	German
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Vintage International
Publication date	1995
Publication place	Germany
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	218 pp
ISBN	0-375-70797-2
OCLC	370051270

The Reader (Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink. It was published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) in 1997. It deals with the difficulties which subsequent generations have in comprehending the Holocaust; specifically, whether a sense of its origins and magnitude can be adequately conveyed solely through written and oral media. This question is increasingly at the center of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses of the Holocaust die and its living memory begins to fade.

Schlink's book was well received in his native country, and also in the United States, winning several awards. The novel was a departure from Schlink's usual detective novels. It became the first German novel to top The New York Times bestseller list. It has been translated into 37 languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. A 2008 film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry was received with mixed reviews.

Synopsis

The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past.

Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductress Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely on his way home. He spends the next several months absent from school battling hepatitis.

He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she directs him to retrieve coal from the cellar, he is covered with coal dust. She watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and begins a heated affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog. Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally despite their physical closeness. Hanna, wrestling with her own guilt, is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael.

Months later, Hanna suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends. He feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of Hanna taints all his other relationships with women.

In Part II, eight years later, while attending law school, he is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the star witness at the trial.

To Michael's stunned surprise, Hanna is one of the defendants, sending him on a roller coaster of complex emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire. At first she denies this but then in panic admits it in order to not have to give a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes that Hanna has a secret she refuses to reveal at any cost — she is illiterate.

This realization explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women, and also the panic she carried her entire life over being discovered. During the trial, it comes out that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael decides she wanted to make their last days bearable; or did she send them to their death so they would not reveal her secret? She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He chooses to not reveal her secret, but cannot master his emotions.

Part III: Michael, trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1984, she commits suicide and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden expresses the disappointment of Hanna in her anger towards Michael for not communicating with Hanna in any way other than the audio tapes. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.

In a dénouement, Michael visits the Jewish woman now living in New York who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He reveals his short, unloving marriage, and the distant daughter. The woman, comprehending but unable to resolve her own loss of family, refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "That would mean giving absolution, which I cannot do". She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. The woman does, however, take the old tin tea box in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos, "to replace the similar tea box which was stolen from me as a child in the camp"—a small gesture towards her former guard, and healing her own memories. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first and only time.

Characters

Beyond mic and Hanna, none of the significant characters who actually appear in the mimetic sense have names.

• Michael Dick, a German who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life, when he is a researcher in legal history, divorced with one daughter, Julia. Like many of his generation, he struggles to come to terms with his country's recent history.
• Hanna Schmitz, illiterate and former SS guard at Auschwitz. She is 36 and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship.
• Michael's father, a philosophy professor who specializes in Kant and Hegel. During the Nazi era he lost his job for giving a lecture on Spinoza and had to support himself and his family by writing hiking guidebooks. He is very formal and requires his children to make appointments to see him. He is emotionally stiff and does not easily express his emotions to Michael or his three siblings, which exacerbates the difficulties Hanna creates for Michael. By the time Michael is narrating the story, his father is dead.
• Michael's mother, seen briefly. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. A psychoanalyst he sees tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life.
• The Jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family.

Literary elements

Style

Schlink uses both the hardboiled tone of the detective novels he had previously written and a more reflective, sometimes poetic, approach more consistent with the weighty material. The former is exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, like "Next morning, she was dead." The latter comes into play in passages like "It was one of the pictures of Hanna that has stayed with me. I have them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed."

Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis ("the past which brands us and with which we must live"). For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation,

... (which) had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from their midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame ... We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst ... The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse ... The Nazi past was an issue even for children who couldn't accuse their parents of anything, or didn't want to..

But while he would like it to be as simple as that, his experience with Hanna complicates matters:

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding ... I wanted to pose myself both tasks — understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical relationship enacts, in microcosm, the pas de deux of older and younger Germans in the postwar years. "... the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate," Michael concludes.

A strong version of this plays out in the scene where the student Michael hitchhikes to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site during the trial, to get what he hopes will be some first-hand knowledge he has not gotten during the trial. The driver who picks him up is an older man who questions him closely about what he believes motivated those who carried out the killings, then offers an answer of his own:

An executioner is not under orders. He's doing his work, he doesn't hate the people he executes, he's not taking revenge on them, he's not killing them because they're in his way or threatening or attacking them. They're a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.

After the man tells an anecdote about a picture of mass executions he supposedly saw that shows an unusual level of insight into what a Nazi officer shown might have been thinking, Michael suspects him of being that officer and confronts him. The man stops the car and asks him to leave.

Illiteracy

In addition to complicating Michael's (and our own) estimation of Hanna's true culpability, her illiteracy becomes a metaphor for modern understanding of the Holocaust. Even the title of the book plays on this (in German, the verb vorlesen applies only to reading aloud, as Michael does for Hanna, and as her indictment is read aloud to her in court over a day and a half).

The Reader abounds with references to representations of the Holocaust, both external and internal to Michael's narrative, some real and some invented by Schlink. Of the latter, the most important is the book by the death-march survivor that constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna. It is summarized at some length and even briefly quoted, although its title is never given. Michael must read it in English since its German translation has not yet been published: "(It was) an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy." On a second reading in later life, he says, "it is the book itself that creates distance."

This conceit applies to the Holocaust as a whole as seen through late 20th-century eyes, throughout the novel. Hanna, once she attains literacy and understands the situation more fully than we can, cannot live with herself anymore. She tells Michael:

I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.

When she breaks with German practice and asks the judge at her trial "What would you have done?" about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, she really wanted an answer, and wasn't just exasperated or asking rhetorically. As a result of her shame at being illiterate, she has not only let the bulk of the crime be pinned on her, she has let those with a greater share of responsibility escape full accountability, raising the question of whether she became a convenient scapegoat.

For our part, Michael is aware that all his attempts to visualize what Hanna might have been like back then, what happened, are colored by what he has read and seen in movies. He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as he would later on, only to send that girl on to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months. Did she do it to make the last months of one almost certain to die a little more bearable? Or to keep her secret safe? Michael's inability to both condemn and understand springs from this.

He asks himself and the reader:

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?

Literary significance and criticism

Schlink's novel was a huge commercial success not only in his native country but in the English-speaking world, becoming the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list when it was translated two years later.

Germany

The Reader sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list.

Critic Rainer Moritz of Die Welt wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd." Werner Fuld wrote in Focus that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them."

In 1998 The Reader was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.

English translation

In the pages of the New York Times itself, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." While finding the ending too abrupt, in the Book Review, Suzanne Ruta said Schlink's "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work." . It went on to sell 750,000 copies, many of them after it was featured in "Oprah's Book Club" in 1999.

That same year, Sir Claus Moser, chair of the Basic Skills Agency of Britain's Department for Education and Employment discussed Hanna's story in the foreword to the BSA's comprehensive report on illiteracy and innumeracy. The book sold 200,000 copies in the UK, although reviews there were slightly more mixed.

The book won the 1999 Boeke Prize.

Criticism

Schlink's problematic approach toward Hanna's culpability in the Final Solution has been a frequent complaint about the book. Early on he was accused of revising or falsifying history. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators.

In the English-speaking world, Cynthia Ozick in Commentary Magazine called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur." Frederick Raphael was blunter, saying no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil. Ron Rosenbaum, criticising the film adaptation of The Reader, noted that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate" with regards to the Holocaust, "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate... You'd have to be exceedingly stupid."

As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, they chose not to remark that Schlink had decided to have "Hanna" born outside of Germany in "Hermannstadt" (Transylvania, Romania). The first study on the reasons why Germans from Transylvania entered the SS appeared only in 2007, 12 years after the publishing of the novel; at that point however, discussions on The Reader had already solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany. The study paints an equally complex historical picture as Schlink's novel.

Schlink has said, "in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book" but those of his own generation were more likely to criticize Michael (and his) inability to fully condemn Hanna. He added (also in The Guardian), "I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."

Film adaptation

Main article: The Reader (2008 film)

The film version, directed by Stephen Daldry, was released in December 2008. Kate Winslet played Hanna, with David Kross as the young Michael and Ralph Fiennes as the older man. Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin played supporting roles. It was nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Winslet won the Oscar for leading actress.

External links

• Publisher's guide with 16 questions
• Oprah's book club page with biography, reviews, questions and forum
• bookrags.com study guide with chapter synopses
• Reading guide with questions from a college German history course