The Reader
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| Author | Bernhard Schlink |
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| Translator | Carol Brown Janeway |
| Cover artist | Kathleen DiGrado (design), Sean Kernan (photo) |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Vintage International |
| Released | 1995 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 218 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-375-70797-2 |
The Reader (Der Vorleser) is an award-winning novel by German law professor (at the time, also a judge) Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the USA (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) in 1997. It concerns itself with the difficulties of comprehending the Holocaust as experienced by the generations growing up afterward, and whether it can be understood through language alone, a question increasingly at the center of much literature about the Holocaust in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as it begins to fade from living memory.
Schlink's book was well received not just in his native country, where it was a surprising change from the detective novels he had been writing up till that point and won several awards, but in the United States as well (where it is also briefly set). It became the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list and Oprah Winfrey made it a selection of her book club. It has been translated into 37 other languages, and been assigned in college-level courses on Holocaust literature.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
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 an unnamed German city (Heidelberg) in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael gets sick on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz brings him to her apartment and cleans him up before bringing him to his parents. He spends the next several weeks absent from school battling a pre-existing case of hepatitis.
On a subsequent visit, he realizes he is attracted to her; embarrassed after she catches him watching her get dressed, he runs off. But when he returns she asks his help retrieving coal, which gets him dirty. She bathes him and they make love. He starts to return on a regular basis, and the two begin an affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and making love, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, chiefly works of German Literature (hence the title). However, both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally.
It ends months later when she suddenly leaves without a trace after the distance between the two of them grows while Michael spends more time with his school friends. Michael 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 guards at a satellite of Auschwitz near Cracow are being tried for allowing Jewish women under their ostensible protection to die in a church that burned after being bombed during the evacuation of the camp. It had been chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to America after the war, and she is the star witness.
To Michael's surprise, Hanna is one of the defendants.
This sends him on a rollercoaster of complicated emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a criminal. He is also mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for having supervised the other guards despite evidence pointing to others.
After she is convicted, Michael reviews what he knows of her life from both their affair and the trial. He realizes that all her life Hanna has been protecting what is to her a more terrible secret than her Nazi past: she cannot read or write.
She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Over Part III, he renews their acquaintanceship, sending her books with accompanying audiotaped readings. Eventually she learns to read by taking the corresponding books from the prison library. She writes back to him, but he does not reply.
On the day before her release in 1984, she commits suicide. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. He finds a note telling him to leave all of her money to the woman who wrote the memoir that led to Hanna's trial and conviction. She is able to accept her guilt towards the dead, but not towards the living.
At the end of the novel, Michael visits the woman, now living in New York - who refuses to take the money, saying "She cannot buy my forgiveness so cheaply" and tells him to donate it to a Jewish charity of his choice. He chooses one that focuses on combating adult illiteracy. The woman does, however, take the old tin tea box where Hanna had kept her papers and mementos, "to replace the similar tea box which she herself had until being sent to the camp" - a small ambiguous gesture towards her former guard. After that meeting, Michael goes to visit Hanna's grave for the first and only time.
[edit] Characters
Beyond Michael and Hanna, none of the significant characters who actually appear in the mimetic sense have names.
- Michael Berg, a middle-aged German baby boomer who works as a researcher in legal history. He is divorced with one daughter, Julia. Like many of his generation, he has struggled to come to terms all his life with his country's recent history. The character begins as a 15 year old boy and is revisited at different parts of his life.
- Hanna Schmitz, illiterate and former SS guard at Auschwitz. She is working as a tram conductor in Heidelberg when Michael, 21 years her junior, first meets her. 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, he 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 her effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retellings of her 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.
[edit] Literary elements
[edit] 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, Hanna 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."
He also deftly uses chiasmus ("I didn't reveal anything I should have kept to myself. I kept to myself something I should have revealed") at times to accentuate Michael's confusion.
[edit] Guilt and the German generation gap
The novel's take on the Holocaust is doubly unusual among Holocaust fiction in that not only does it put historical distance between its narrative and the wartime period, it has as its main contact with those events a perpetrator instead of a victim.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical (and illegal, then and now) relationship enacts, in microcosm, the pas de deux of older and younger Germans in the postwar years. "My love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate," Michael concludes.
A starker 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.[citation needed]
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.
[edit] Illiteracy
[original research?] 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).[citation needed]
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.
Her choices become far more problematic after we are aware of her situation. Many of Hanna's decisions, Michael realizes, are inexplicable without this understanding. 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 taking 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.
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, like 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?
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
Schlink's novel was a huge commercial success not only in his native country but in the English-speaking world, becoming the first-ever German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list when it was translated two years later.
[edit] 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.[citation needed]
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."
Its success has been attributed to contemporary German readers, who usually prefer foreign writers, finding Schlink's style much more accessible than most other literary fiction in that language.
[edit] English translation
In the pages of the Times itself, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." [1]. 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." [2]. It went on to sell 750,000 copies, many of them after Oprah featured it in her book club in 1999.
That same year, Sir Claude 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.
[edit] 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 Süddeutschen 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 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."
Interestingly, Schlink has said, most of the criticism he hears and reads over Michael's inability to fully condemn Hanna comes from those closer to his own age. Older generations, he said, that lived through those times are less critical, regardless of how they actually experienced them.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Anthony Minghella has been seriously interested in filming the project, possibly with Juliette Binoche as Hanna, but admits it would be a difficult story to tell, and so far has not been able to begin.
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] Reference
Some of the content of this article comes from the corresponding article on the German-language Wikipedia, accessed January 28, 2006.
- Wroe, Nicholas; February 9, 2002. Reader's guide to a moral maze, The Guardian.
- Results of German pupils about Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (language: German)
