Book review:

The Reader (Der Vorleser)

by Bernhard Schlink (b. 1944) (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

218 pages

You might say “Why bother re-hashing the Nazi atrocities and ‘the final solution’ of World War II?”

Here’s one reason: it’s not satisfactory to say, simply, “never again.”

Here’s another reason: Bernhard Schlink has created a noble and compelling illumination of one aspect of the horrific, barely imaginable realities of the second great war: the mindset of the good people of Germany who allowed Hitler and the Nazis to take power and do their evil, and the confusion of younger Germans who came of age afterward.

The Reader offers some insight into a tiny slice of the German mindset, with an abbreviated biography of Hanna Schmitz. Her life is the personification of pathos. She is fiercely self-sufficient, but she is a puppet of the Nazi regime. She passionately savors literature, but she is illiterate. She is instinctively kind and generous, but she can admit without remorse that, as an SS concentration camp guard, she allowed several hundred women to burn to death in a church.

Michael Berg, an unworldly teenager, is the reader in Schlink’s telling. Hanna entices him to read good books to her, long before he realizes that she cannot read or write. Michael’s relationship with Hanna metamorphoses in fantastic and soul-destroying ways. He struggles with his growing awareness that he has been seared, tainted, and transformed by his consuming involvement with her.

Ultimately, at Hanna’s war crimes trial, Michael stares into the abyss: he explores her guilt, his feelings about intervening to mitigate her sentence, the ineffable mystery of who should share guilt for the war horrors: “…that some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame, and guilt….”

Michael reflects on his irresolvable dilemma: “When I tried to understand [Hanna’s crime], 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.”

Michael works at his own expiation. He sends recorded books on tape to Hanna while she is in prison.

Finally, he learns that his effort was too self-protective, too little, too late to do the right thing.

I think that’s the reality Schlink had in mind.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

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They didn’t care much about each other…

click here

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