1st July 2025
When the 15 year-old Michael Berg is taken ill in the street, he is comforted by Hanna Schmitz, a neighbour in her mid-30s. She cleans him up and then accompanies him back to the home that he shares with his parents and three siblings in the suburbs of Heidelberg in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.
It is some time later, during Michael’s second return visit to Hanna’s apartment, that the pair begin their affair. They meet during the afternoons or evenings – depending on the timings of Hanna’s shifts as a tram conductress – with, for the former, Michael initially skipping school until admonished by her for doing so.
The relationship develops: Michael steals a silk nightdress for her from a department store; they go on a 4-day cycling holiday posing as mother and son; their afternoon rituals incorporate Michael reading aloud some of the literature that he studying at school. He is The Reader.
The first-person narration is given by an older Michael, looking back across several decades from the perspective of the present day (i.e. the mid-1990s). He notes the specific memories he has of those early weeks: Hanna putting on her stockings; Hanna on her bicycle with her skirt blowing in the slipstream; Hanna wearing the nightdress for the first time… Interspersed with this are Michael’s wistful reflections on the disappointments associated with the general passage of time: the failure to meet expectations, the yearnings for past happiness, the life unfulfilled…
The other reader – you or I – sense that, at some point, Michael and Hanna’s carefree and liberating relationship must be threatened, if not terminated. There is an early reference to “the knowledge of what came later and… what came out afterwards” which suggests that the affair will not just be compromised by the differences in their respective ages or by their desire to enjoy the here-and-now rather than make any medium or long-term commitment. When Hanna leaves the area without warning, Michael is both puzzled and distraught.
At the beginning of the second act, several years have passed and it is 1965. (The earlier part of the story is thus revealed to have taken place in the late 1950s). When Michael comes across Hanna again, he is a law student at university and she is one of five defendants being tried for war crimes. As a member of the SS, she was a guard at Auschwitz and then at a smaller camp near Cracow before, near the end of the war, being involved in a murderous forced march of prisoners.
I shall refrain from describing the evolving narrative any further from this point. It is here that Bernhard Schlink begins to address the profound philosophical and moral questions that, twenty years after the end of the War, were being confronted by Germany’s wartime generation (Hanna) and the generation that followed (Michael and, by implication, Schlink himself).
For the accused in the dock, there is a simple question, addressed directly to the judge – “So what would you have done?” – to which there is only a floundering and hapless reply.
For the complacent and self-righteous student, the perspective initially appears much more straightforward: “We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst”. However, when reflecting back later on the generational discord that characterised German society in the 1960s, Michael’s thoughts are clearly inconsistent. The view that “the real theme of the student movement [was] coming to grips with the Nazi past”, is immediately contradicted by “[s]ometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the general conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took”.
For Michael, the failure to resolve these philosophical/moral issues arises at a personal – as well as societal – level. At the trial, whilst he has no residual feelings for his former lover, there is a clear inner tension: “[e]ven as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her… I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks – understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both”.
Likewise, when Michael realises that he is in possession of evidence that would shorten Hanna’s inevitable prison sentence – though not exonerate her completely – he is faced with the appalling dilemma of whether or not to reveal this to this judge, when Hanna herself quite evidently does not want it to be produced.
The role of The Reader itself becomes more complicated in the third act – in different ways, it is both Michael and Hanna – as the narrative moves towards its inevitable conclusion and Schlink examines the layering of generational experiences, not only between the different age cohorts but also within the same individual at different points of time.
The translation by Carol Brown Janeway is efficiently undertaken. The only note that jarred with me was Hanna’s use of “Kid” when affectionately speaking to her young lover. I thought that this sounded rather too American: too Humphrey Bogart, perhaps. I wonder if “My Boy” or “Young Man” might have been better options.
JR Alexander 