The Reader () is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in 1995. The story is a parable dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Bertolt Brecht called the Nachgeborenen (those who came after). Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the struggle to come to terms with the past), The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses died and living memory was fading.Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 201ff.
Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards; Der Spiegel wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959). It sold 500,000 copies in Germany and was listed 14th of the 100 favorite books of German readers in a television poll in 2007."Unsere Besten", ZDF, October 31, 2007, accessed January 21, 2011. It won the German Hans Fallada Prize in 1998, and became the first German book to top The New York Times bestselling books list. It has been translated into 45 different languages, and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature.
The Reader was adapted by David Hare into the 2008 film of the same name directed by Stephen Daldry; the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Kate Winslet winning for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz.
Synopsis
Characters Michael Berg, a German man who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life; notably, 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, a former guard at Auschwitz. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship. Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and on whom he probably has a crush. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends. 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 tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life. Jewish woman, who wrote about surviving 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.
Part 1 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 conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling scarlet fever. 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 asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a practice 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 is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she 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 her taints all his other relationships with women.
Part 2 Six years later, while attending law school, Michael 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 main prosecution witness at the trial.
Michael is stunned to see that 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, then in a panic admits it in order not to have to provide a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes then that Hanna has a secret that she refuses to reveal at any cost—that she is illiterate. This 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 fear she carried her entire life of being discovered.
During the trial, it transpires that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael is uncertain if she wanted to make their last days bearable or if she sent them to their death so they would not reveal her secret.
After much deliberation and having consulted his father, who advised that he only reveal her secret if he spoke to her first, he chooses not to tell the judge of Hanna's illiteracy. She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison while the other women receive only minor sentences.
Part 3 Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter. He is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. 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, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, 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, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.
While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and 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 describes his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, and with a letter of thanks for the donation made in Hanna's name, Michael visits Hanna's grave after 10 years for the first and only time.
Literary elements
Style Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it, a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her."The Reader, p. 27. His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism. 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."The Reader, p. 181. For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation:
But while he would like it to be as simple as that, his experience with Hanna complicates matters:
Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical relationship enacts, in microcosm, the pas de deux of older and younger Germans in the postwar years: Michael concludes that "the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate."The Reader, p. 171. This idea plays itself 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 sense of the place. 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:
After the man tells an anecdote about a photograph of Jews being shot in Russia, one that he supposedly saw, but which showed an unusual level of insight into what a Nazi officer might have been thinking, Michael suspects him of being that officer and confronts him. The man stops the car and asks him to leave.The Reader, p. 152.
Metaphor Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities. Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian, likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy," and Ron Rosenbaum of Slate says that Hanna is "a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to 'read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens."