topics: |  fiction | german

One of the most profoundly moving books I read in recent times.

I started on it yesterday night and all day I had a dull longing to continue
from where I was when the protagonist begins his affair with an older woman,
Hannah. The evening, when I was looking forward to curling up with it, went
in a party thrown by a student who had obtained a scholarship to MIT. After
we got back at midnight, I was dead tired and thought I would fall asleep
with the book, but after just a few pages it drove all slumber from my body
and I turned page after page until it was done. The storyline is unusual, but
the main punch - that Hanna is illiterate - struck me pretty early on, which
it would not have been to the German reader. The suicide was the only
surprise, but even this does not serve a very crucial function in the plot -
there was no great expectation which is extinguished by the tragedy. The
denouement is almost banal in its tameness.

Yet the book attracts and moves with its sinuous language, with its
observations of human relationships and the intensity and honesty of the
first person narrative. One emerges with the belief, often unreliable, that
Bernhard Schlink must have had all the experiences of Michael Berg.
[this review dates from early 2002]

An engaging chronicle of love and denial, of guilt, both
individual and collective, of atonement, and of a young man's coming
of age. I seem to have read "The Reader" primarily as a story of
disavowal, guilt and atonement in a relationship. [AC]

Excerpts

"Then I began to betray her. Not that I gave away any secrets or
exposed Hanna. I didn't reveal anything that I should have kept to
myself. I kept to myself something that I should have revealed. I
didn't acknowledge her.  I know that disavowal is a form of
betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are
disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being
considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of
irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what
you are doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a
relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of
betrayal." (p.74)

We have on our hands a guilt born out of the protagonist's
adolescent passion and subsequent denial of a woman - a guilt that
will get even more convoluted when the woman is found implicated
in war crimes by the lover turned historian of law. It is then
that the guilt of an individual gets interwoven with that of an
entire generation, and I quote:

"At the same time I ask myself, as I had already begun to ask myself back
then: What should our second generation have done, what should it do with
the knowledge of 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 inquire 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? It was not that I
had lost my eagerness to explore and cast light on things which had filled
the seminar, once the trial got under way. But that some few would be
convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by
revulsion, shame, and guilt - was that all there was to it now?" (p.104)

It is now a story of the collective guilt born out of a generation's
willful complicity in genocide. What ensues is an attempt at atonement
- at the personal level. The twist about illiteracy is a gentle
attempt at irony - it is unexpected for the protagonist while the
reader has known it all along. The tragic denouement does not
embellish the story in any way - it does perhaps make the personal
atonement that much more acceptable. But what of the collective guilt
of the community? Can there be penitence for it?  Perhaps not - or so
"The Reader" suggests. -- AR]

. . . she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive
-- a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and
legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the
body.  - p.16

The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination
turns the sickroom in to someplace new, both familiar and strange
. . . Through the long hours of the night you have the church clock
for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws
its headlights across the walls and ceiling. These are hours without
sleep, which is not to say that they're sleepless, because on the
contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they're rich and
full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we
lose and find and then lose ourselves again. They are hours when
anything is possible, good or bad. - p.18

I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision,
and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else
entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then
again it may not.  - p.20

Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it
concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage
turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all
those years? - p.37

I am amazed at how much confidence Hanna gave me. My sucess at school
got my teachers' attention and assured me of their respect. The girls
I met noticed and liked it that I wasn't afraid of them. I felt at
ease in my own body. - p.41

The Hanna who could cry was closer to me than the Hanna who was only
strong. - p.57

Then I began to betray her.
Not that I gave away any secrets or exposed Hanna. I didn't reveal
anything that I should have kept to myself. I kept something to myself
that I should have revealed. I didn't acknowledge her. I know that
disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal. From the outside it is
impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising
discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of
irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you're
doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationshp
just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal. - p. 74

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her
stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind as a train
pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could
go back and make sure of it. But why would you? (p. 87-88)

It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after
month and becomes accustomed to life, while he registers with an objective
eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness
that he brings to murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature
talks about this numbness in which life functions are reduced to a
minimum, behaviour becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others,
and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences. In the rare accounts by
perpetrators, too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenery, the
perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental
paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or
drunk. The defendants seemed to me to be trapped still, and forever, in
this drugged state, in a sense petrified in it. (p.102-103)

My father's study was a capsule in which books, papers, thoughts, and
pipe and cigar smoke had created their own force field, different from
that of the outside world. - p. 141

. . . Hanna pulling on her stockings in the kitchen, standing by the
bathtub holding the towel, riding her bicycle with skirts flying, standing
in my fathers study, dancing in front of the mirror, looking at me at
the pool, Hanna listening to me, talking to me, laughing at me, loving me.
Hanna loving me with cold eyes and pursed mouth, silently listening to me
reading, and at the end banging the wall with her hand, talking to me with
her face turning into a mask. The worst were the dreams in which a hard,
imperious and cruel Hanna aroused me sexually; I woke up from them full of
longing and shame and rage. And full of fear about who I really was.
(p.146 -147)

Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have,
morally and legally - for my generation of students it was a lived
reality. It did not just apply to what had happened in the Third Reich.
The fact that Jewish gravestones were being defaced with swastikas, that
so many old Nazis had made careers in the courts, the administration, and
the universities, that the Federal Republic did not recognize the State of
Israel for many years,  that emigration and resistance were handed down as
traditions less often than a life of conformity - all this filled us with
shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through on account
of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity,
aggression. (p.169-170)

Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself,
were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure
uip during the Third Reich, or after it ended. How could those who had
committed Nazi crimes or watched them happen or looked away while they
were happening or tolerated the criminals among them after 1945 or
even accepted them -- how could they have anything to say to their
children? - p.169

I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing
to accuse them of. . . . I had to point at Hanna. But the finger that
pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved
her, I had chosen her. (p.170)

How could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my love
for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate, and
that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to
manage than for others. (p.171)


How could the Greeks, who knew that one never enters the same river
twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay,
but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both
purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. - p. 182

The exchange of notes and cassettes was so normal and familiar, and Hanna
was both close and removed in such an easy way, that I could have
continued the situation indefinitely. That was comfortable and selfish, I
know. (p.191)

Precisely because she was both close and removed in such an easy way, I
didn't want to visit her. I had the feeling she could only be the way she
was to me at an actual distance. I was afraid that the small, light, safe
world of notes and cassettes was too artificial and too vulnerable to
withstand actual closeness. How could we meet face to face without
everything that had happened between us coming to the surface? (p.193)

I had granted Hanna a small niche, certainly an important niche, one from
which I gained something and for which I did something, but not a place in
my life. (p.198)

"And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to
account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can.
They don't even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand
even better. Here in my prison they were with me a lot. They came every
night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial I could still chase
them away when they wanted to come." (p.198-99)

At first I wanted to say that I wasn't able to chase anything away. But it
wasn't true.  You can chase someone away by setting them in a niche.
(p.199)

At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the
memories wouldn't come back for that. Then I realized our story was
slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that
didn't coax up the memories either. For the last few years I have left our
story alone. I have made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail
and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own
sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I
thought for so long. Not that I think it was happy. But I think it is
true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning
whatever. (p.217)

NOTE: Schlink, who was born in 1944, was 15 in 1959 and 21 in 1965, and
	Nuremberg had been over a long time ago.  However, he may have had an
	older lover, which he has dovetails into the plot.

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the
reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and
compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg
is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his
lover-- then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a
young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her
refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna has a
dark secret, which she does not reveal even at the trial.