Books - The Reader

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	Books - The Reader

The Reader (Der Vorleser) is an award-winning novel by German 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 partly 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 36 other languages, and been assigned in college-level courses on Holocaust literature.

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 city in the Rhineland 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 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 he returns, and 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 (hence the title). However, both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally.

It ends months later when she suddenly leaves without a trace. 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. She tells him to donate the money to a Jewish charity of his choice. He chooses one that focuses on combating adult illiteracy, and goes to visit Hanna's grave for the first and only time.

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.
Hanna Schmitz, lifelong illiterate and former SS guard at Auschwitz. She is working as a tram conductor in Berlin 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 two 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.

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