(average rating from 1 reviews) » Write a review and go into the draw to win our monthly book review prize - a $50 Boomerang Bucks credit!

by Boomert - The Reader 11 Jan 2010
The Reader

(Bernhard Schlink, London: Phoenix House, 1997) Translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway.

“Why did you not unlock the doors?” … “What would you have done?”

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (Der Vorleser) is a novel about fifteen year old Michael Berg, his intense and infatuated relationship with Frau Hanna Schmidt, a woman twice his age, and the complexities and moral dilemmas faced when the atrocities of the past are revealed. Michael meets Hanna when he falls ill as a schoolboy, and over time she becomes his lover and then inexplicably disappears. As Michael matures from schoolboy to university student, he discovers Hanna’s disappearance is due to her appearing before a war crimes trial, charged with committing a crime while a prison guard during World War II. As the secrets from Hanna’s past emerge, Michael is confronted with the realisation his first love is harbouring a secret she is prepared to take to the grave.

For a book of its size, The Reader explores a remarkable range of complex themes and issues. The relationship between Michael and Hanna is delicately explored through the intimate act of Michael reading aloud to Hanna. A year or so passes, and Michael’s preoccupation with Hanna continues. Writing of his relationship, Michael states “When an aeroplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight…They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. That summer was the glide path of our love”. (p67-68).

After Hanna’s disappearance, Michael withdraws into himself, finding the raw wounds of a first love lost difficult to bear. Michael’s next encounter with Hanna is the courtroom, where it emerges that Schlink has written “another Holocaust story”—or has he?

I would argue that this book is not centred the Holocaust as much as the generation that was born into the fragments following it. Through the eyes of Michael, as a young legal student, Schlink depicts this with simplicity and grace: “The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it wcould have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame” (p.90).

Partially due to his passionate adolescent relationship with Hanna, a more mature Michael now finds himself infused with the zealousness of pursuing the war crimes trial in which Hanna is a defendant. As details of unacceptable and inexcusable acts emerge, Michael asks of himself: “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 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?”

Michael and his professor confront the dilemma of retroactive justice, asking:“Was it sufficient that the ordinances under which the camp guards and enforcers were convicted were already on the statute books at the time they committed their crimes?” (p.89).

And so, Schlink raises the moral dilemmas and complexities faced when our loved ones have committed atrocities ; can we love those who have committed such crimes? Can we forgive?

Re-reading this review, I realise that perhaps Schlink raises more questions than he provides answers. A brilliant piece of uncomfortable reading.

-----------------

The Reader was translated into 39 languages, and was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. For associated articles, click here and here.

Author Biography: Bernhard Schlink
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany is 1944. A professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the major international bestselling novel and movie The Reader, short story collection Flights of Love and several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Berlin and New York.

Recent books by Bernhard Schlink » View all books by Bernhard Schlink

» View all books by Bernhard Schlink