The Reader
A Novel
By Bernhard Schlink
Category: History | Reading Duration: 19 min | Rating: 4.4/5 (26 ratings)
About the Book
The Reader (1995) tells the story of Michael Berg’s love affair with an older woman, Hanna, and his subsequent discovery that she was a concentration camp guard. How could a woman capable of arousing such passion, warmth, and joy have been complicit in the Holocaust? Michael’s question is the question that haunted an entire generation of Germans born after the war: what drove ordinary men and women to commit such extraordinary horrors?
Who Should Read This?
- Readers drawn to morally complex love stories
- Anyone interested in postwar German identity
- Fans of introspective literary fiction
What’s in it for me? A gripping tale of generational conflict in a nation haunted by its past
The Reader tells a universal tale: the struggle of one generation to free itself from its parents and fashion its own sense of self. This kind of psychological “regime change” is fraught at the best of times. In post-war Germany, the novel’s setting, it was a powder-keg. Michael Berg, the novel’s narrator, belongs to a generation of Germans whose quarrel with their parents became a reckoning with the latter’s role in the genocide of European Jews.
Michael condemns that generation: those who weren’t perpetrators, he says, were wilfully blind “accommodators and accepters. ” Of course, we don’t choose where we’re born or who our parents are. Germans of Michael’s age – he was born in 1944 – are sometimes called die glücklichen Nachgeborenen, “the fortunate ones born after. ” It’s an ambivalent formulation. It’s their fortune not to have been complicit in the Holocaust, but their inheritance is nonetheless a burden. They can’t undo what was done and they must condemn people they loved for crimes they can’t comprehend.
Michael’s fate, though, is different. His confrontation with the past doesn’t run through his parents, but through a maternal stand-in: Hanna, the 36-year-old tram conductor with whom he begins an affair at the age of 15. Hanna, he later learns, was a concentration camp guard. Wracked by guilt, he wonders what kind of wilful blindness allowed him to freely choose to love this perpetrator.
Michael’s attempt to answer that question frames the novel’s paradox: that those who seek to understand struggle to judge while those who judge fail to understand. “When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. ” Thus begin the memoirs of Michael Berg, a successful – though dissatisfied – 45-year-old legal scholar.
Chapter 1: Frau Schmitz
It’s an unlikely introduction to the erotically charged account of an affair with an older woman that follows. But it’s ultimately a fitting one: sickness, albeit of the moral kind, haunts Michael’s memories. Our story starts thirty years earlier, in the fall of 1958, in a German town near the French border still pockmarked by American bombs. Michael was walking home from school one afternoon when he began to feel faint.
He collapsed against the crumbling facade of a once-grand townhouse and vomited. When rescue came, it was “almost an assault. ” A woman heaved him up, dragged him into the courtyard, and washed him under a pump. He started crying and she became tender, hugging him until he stopped. Then she walked him home. He spent the next six months in bed.
It was spring when he finally left it. His mother sent him back to his rescuer with a bunch of flowers. He climbed the stairs in a hallway that smelled of boiled cabbage and fresh-washed laundry and knocked on the door a neighbor had told him belonged to the woman he’d described. On a brass plaque were the words Frau Schmitz. He can’t recall what he said to her, but he can still picture the cramped kitchen with its window looking out onto the old train station, now a pile of weed-choked rubble. Frau Schmitz, who he guessed was in her mid-thirties, was ironing bedding.
He remembers her ash-blond hair fastened with a clip, her high forehead and cheekbones; her blue eyes and pale arms. He was about to leave when she stopped him. She needed to run an errand; they could go down together once she’d changed. Her bedroom door was ajar and Michael could see her reflection in a mirror. If he’d been at the swimming pool, where he’d seen naked women often enough, he wouldn’t have stared. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
It wasn’t just her body. Later, he would sometimes ask his girlfriends to put on stockings the way she had, but it was never the same. They teased and performed. What had fascinated him, though, was the absence of seductive intent; the way she’d withdrawn into herself and become entirely oblivious to her surroundings – an invitation, he’d felt, to forget the world entirely.
When she looked up, their eyes met in the mirror. She looked surprised, sceptical, knowing, and reproachful all at once. Michael’s face blushed. He ripped open the door and fled.
Chapter 2: First love
He dreamt of her every night for a week; when he woke, he was drenched in sweat and tormented by shame. Desire to sin, he’d been taught, was as bad as the thing itself. He wanted to atone – and so he went back to Frau Schmitz. She didn’t look surprised when she found him waiting in the stairway.
She said she was tired and asked him to fetch her some coal from the cellar. When he returned, he looked like a chimney sweep. She burst into laughter and said he couldn’t go home like that. She ran a bath and told him to undress – a matter-of-fact command he obeyed. She beat the coal dust out of his clothes as he lay in the tub. Then she told him to get out and began drying him.
She let the towel fall and put her hand on his erection. “That’s why you’re here! ” she exclaimed. They slept together twice more that week. Only then did she tell him something about herself. She was called Hanna.
She was 36. She used to work in the Siemens factory in Berlin; when the war started, she enlisted. She was a tram conductor now. He told her his name, but she continued calling him “Kid. ” She guessed he was 17; flattered, he lied and said that he was. They settled into a routine.
He skipped afternoon classes to see her. They always showered before making love – she insisted. Afterwards, he read aloud. Tolstoy, Goethe, Hemingway: he narrated every book he’d been assigned at school to her. She listened attentively, her ear attuned to the rhythm of the prose, her mind to the motivations of the characters. The memory of a happiness fades when we know that things ended badly, Michael writes in the novel’s present.
But he was happy that summer. The affair remained a secret, but people sensed a change. He was more confident; he made new friends and was popular at school; his parents gave him more freedom. Most of all, though, he was in love. But it didn’t last. Love’s proverbial blindness is notorious, but even Michael saw the signs that something was wrong.
Hanna could be controlling and cruel. She flew into rages and refused to talk to him as an equal. She coldly withdrew her affection. Suddenly, a scared child took the place of the man Michael was becoming. He began taking the blame for arguments he hadn’t started and apologized for things he hadn’t done – anything to retain Hanna’s love. But it only made things worse, each concession nurturing a growing resentment.
Chapter 3: Confronting the past
An airplane continues to glide through the air long after its engines cut out. Their relationship was like that: it continued even after its failure. The ritual – the showering, love-making, and reading – went on, but he thought of her less often when he wasn’t with her. And there was always a reason not to tell his friends about her – a betrayal worse than cheating.
And then it was over. Hanna was gone. She left no note, no clue, no forwarding address. She gave her employer enough notice to cover her shift but said no more. It was a mystery, her boss told Michael: she was about to be promoted. He wouldn’t see her again for seven years.
Germany was a different place in 1965. The first post-war generation had come of age; their rebellion, which reached its crescendo in the 1968 student uprisings, was underway. It was time, they said, to fling open the windows and stir up the dust society had allowed to settle over the horrors of the past. Michael had done well at school and been admitted to a prestigious university to study law, but success left him cold. Everything did. Relationships with other women inevitably failed because they weren’t Hanna.
His partners thought he was callous and he encouraged that perception – better that than the truth, which was that his first love had left him heartbroken and haunted. Numbed to the present, he immersed himself in the past. He read Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, historical monographs, war diaries, official reports – anything he could find about the camps. What had motivated the murderers – and how had their silent enablers justified their inaction? He rejected the self-serving notion that Germans hadn’t had a choice – that the Nazi regime had been akin to a foreign occupation that had allowed a small number of monsters to wreak havoc. No, what was truly perplexing about the horror was the very ordinariness of the killers.
But if inexplicable evil hadn’t motivated them, what had? Michael’s search for an answer led him to Frankfurt. In 1963, the city’s court began trying 25 low-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp for their role in the Holocaust. A complex case, it was still in its early stages two years later; it would take another three for the court to reach its final verdict.
Michael attended each session of the court. One afternoon, something made him look up from the notebook in which he was scribbling notes. His gaze was drawn to the defendants sitting below him, their backs turned to the public gallery. It was Hanna’s ash-blonde hair, tidily fastened with a clip.
Chapter 4: The trial
Hanna gave precise answers to the prosecutor’s questions. She mostly confirmed his outline of events; when she contradicted him, it was to set the record straight, not to defend herself. Michael understood the words and followed the legal arguments, but it was like watching a hand pinch an arm that’s been numbed by anesthetic: he felt nothing. The numbness helped, though – he could pretend it was someone else who’d loved and desired Hanna, not him.
The prosecution said that Hanna volunteered to become a concentration camp guard. Near the end of the war, the camp she’d been assigned to had been bombed. Over 300 inmates were moved to a nearby church. The next night, a bomb fell on its tower, starting a fire that gradually engulfed the whole building. The doors remained bolted. Only two women survived, a mother and her daughter.
The prosecution had built its case on their testimony. Hanna’s co-defendants claimed she’d been in charge and refused to unlock the doors. Hanna denied it. The guards’ quarters had also been hit and she’d been attending to the wounded. By the time she noticed the fire, it was too late. She didn't have the keys.
And even if she had, she didn’t have the authority to make those kinds of decisions. The prosecution produced an internal report of the incident. It proved beyond doubt that someone had made a calculated decision to keep the doors locked – as the report noted, the inmates would have overwhelmed the guards if they’d been released. Had Hanna written it? The judge suggested that an expert compare the report’s handwriting with hers. She froze.
Michael saw the panic in her eyes. She was silent for a moment – and then she admitted it all. Michael suddenly grasped the truth: Hanna couldn’t read or write. She hadn’t written the report – her confession was a way of avoiding a humiliating confrontation with the handwriting expert. Was that why she’d fled seven years ago – to avoid the written test that the tram company would’ve asked her to sit before promoting her? Michael now understood why she’d asked him to read to her: it was her only way of accessing those books and the worlds they contained.
Was that all there was to it? Had Hanna really chosen exposure as a criminal over the embarrassment of admitting her illiteracy? Or had she thought she could keep everything hidden? Or was she so vain – and so morally sick – that she chose crime over shame?
Chapter 5: The reader
The final part of Michael’s memoirs looks back on the time between Hanna’s imprisonment in 1968 and the novel’s present – 1989, the year of Germany’s reunification. Michael’s life hasn’t been a happy one. He married Gertrud, a fellow law student, but the marriage faded into amicable indifference: she couldn’t understand what she was failing to give him and he couldn’t explain that it was Hanna that was missing. Affairs came and went.
He finished his studies but couldn’t decide what to do next. Both prosecuting and defending seemed overly simplistic; judging, an arrogant pretence at certainty, was even worse. Instead, he found himself a quiet position at a research institute. Gertrud called it an evasion and she was right. Michael had built himself a safe little niche far away from the “real” world. Hanna haunted him.
When he shut his eyes, she was there. In his dreams he saw her barring heavy church doors and hand-selecting inmates to be sent to gas chambers. Memories of their intimacy punctuated these gruesome scenes. He woke up drenched in sweat and tormented by shame just as he had as a boy all those years ago. In other dreams, he was on trial. He was always found guilty on all counts: for loving a perpetrator, for betraying a lover, for failing to tell the judge about Hanna’s illiteracy.
He tried to keep her away by postponing sleep for as long as possible. He left the light on and read deep into the night. When he discovered that reading aloud kept him awake longer, he bought a tape recorder. His collection of cassettes soon included everything from the Odyssey to Chekhov’s short stories, Heinrich Heine’s poems, and Theodor Fontane’s novels. Hanna, though, was still there: as he’d always known, she was his audience. He felt better after admitting as much to himself.
Around 1971, he started sending the cassettes to her in prison. He heard nothing until a few years later, when he received a one-line note. It was written with a ballpoint pen that the author had pressed into the paper with far too much force. “Kid,” it said, “the last story was especially nice. Thank you. Hanna.
Chapter 6: The tea tin
Hanna was found hanging in her cell on the morning she was due to be released in early 1986. The prison’s governor told Michael about her life there. It had largely been a purposeful one, she said. Hanna worked hard.
Her fellow prisoners respected her: when she intervened in their squabbles, it usually ended on terms acceptable to each party. Rather than take classes, she borrowed the books Michael had read onto his tape recorder and followed the text beneath her fingers. In time, she puzzled out which signs went with which sounds. The evidence of her reading was everywhere in her cell. Michael recognized the books – they were the same ones he’d read decades earlier. Arendt, Levi, Raul Hilberg’s huge study of the Destruction of the European Jews, the war diaries, the eye-witness reports – it was all there.
Among her scattered notes was a will. The money Hanna had earned in prison was stored in a small tin tea box. It wasn’t much, but she wanted the victims of the church fire to have it. Michael flew out to New York a few weeks later to meet the surviving daughter. She invited him into her elegant apartment and listened as he explained his reason for being there. She inspected the battered tea tin containing Hanna’s money and raised an eyebrow.
She had one just like that as a child, she said, albeit with Cyrillic text. She kept mementos in it – a hair from the family poodle, opera tickets her father had given her, that kind of thing. She still had it with her when she and her mother arrived in Auschwitz, but someone soon stole it. She paused. No, she said, she wouldn’t take the money: to do so would be to absolve Hanna and that was something she had no right to do given all the other victims. Instead, she proposed that Michael take it and donate it to a charity of his choosing.
If he wished, he could put the donation in Hanna’s name. The tin, though, could stay: she would keep it. When Michael got home from New York, he donated the money to the Jewish League Against Illiteracy. A computer-generated letter arrived a few weeks later thanking Ms.
Schmitz for her donation. He put it in his pocket and drove to the cemetery. It was the first – and last – time he stood before Hanna’s grave. In this Blink to The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink, you’ve learned that Michael Berg falls in love with a much older woman and later discovers her role as a camp guard.
Final summary
He struggles with guilt over loving a perpetrator and grapples with understanding and condemning her simultaneously. Okay, that’s it for this Blink.
We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Bernhard Schlink was born in 1944. He holds a doctorate in constitutional law and was a law professor in Bonn and Frankfurt. He currently holds a chair in public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin. Schlink’s first work of fiction, the crime novel Self’s Punishment, was published in 1987. The Reader appeared in 1995. Translated into forty languages, it was the first German book to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.