The Reader 2008

 

 

 

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 the city of Heidelberg, West Germany in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductress Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely on his way home. He spends the next several months absent from school battling scarlet fever.

 

He visits her to thank Hanna 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 directs him to retrieve coal from the cellar, he is covered with coal dust. She watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and begins a heated affair. They develop a ritual 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, wrestling with her own guilt, is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael.

 

Months later, Hanna suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had grown as Michael spent more time with his school friends. He 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 SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in 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 America after the war; she is the star witness at the trial.

 

To Michael's stunned surprise, 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 but then in panic admits it in order to not have to give a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes that Hanna has a secret she considers worse than her Nazi past — she is illiterate.

 

This realization explains many of Hannah's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have put her in the position to directly kill these people, and also her panic the rest of her life over being discovered. During the trial, it comes out that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael decides she wanted to make their last days bearable; or did she send them to their death so they will not reveal her secret? She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He could have revealed her secret & so spared her that, but cannot master his emotions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part III: Michael, trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. 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 20 years, Hanna is about to be released, he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. on the day of her release in 1984, though, 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 is angry with him for not communicating with Hanna in any way other than the audio tapes. Hannah left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.

 

In a dénouement, Michael visits the Jewish woman now living in New York who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions & he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hannah. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He reveals his short, unloving marriage, and the distant daughter. The woman, comprehending but unable to resolve her own loss of family, refuses to take the savings Hannah had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "That would mean giving absolution, which I cannot do". She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a charity for aiding illiteracy, in Hannah's name. The woman does, however, take the old tin tea box in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos, "to replace the similar tea box which was stolen from me as a child in the camp"—a small gesture towards her former guard, and healing her own memories. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first time. He takes his daughter along and begins to tell her their story, finally opening his painful emotions to healing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author	Bernhard Schlink
Translator	Carol Brown Janeway
Cover artist	Kathleen DiGrado (design), Sean Kernan (photo)
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Vintage International
Publication date	1995
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	218 pp
ISBN	0-375-70797-2

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The film version, directed by Stephen Daldry, was released in December 2008.

Kate Winslet played Hanna,

with David Kross as the young Michael and Ralph Fiennes as the older man.

Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin played supporting roles.

It was nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Winslet won the Oscar as leading actress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reader