First edition of the novel in English
Geetha & Thommo at home during the corona virus lockdown
We sorely missed the warmth of being with one another, an island of literary calm and detachment amidst our quotidian lives – provoking one another to insights and sharing our enthusiasms. We had to think ahead and write out our thoughts on the characters and their predicament in the novel, as well as the issues raised by the author, and the overarching theme of the communal guilt of a nation.
The novel begins with the sexual abuse of a young 15-year old, Michael Berg, whose overhang persists until the end. He writes the book – hoping the telling will assuage multiple feelings of guilt: for his juvenile seduction, for his act of omission during the trial of Hanna, and for not being able to save Hanna in the end. Hanna addresses him as ‘Juengchen’ in the German text, translated as ‘kid’ by the American translator. The diminutive noun has a hint of endearment in the German; therefore it needed something more intimate than ‘kid’ to convey the sense.
Michael Berg & Hanna
It would strike any reader of the novel that Michael is left to his own devices to a great extent, and there is hardly any interaction with his own family. Not only is family life lacking, but there seems to be no community to notice the comings and goings of Michael Berg, and what’s happening to him.
The illiteracy of Hanna escapes notice throughout the first part; we take the oral readings as just the expression of Hanna’s eagerness to hear stories through the voice of a dear person. Gradually Michael and we realise a number of events in the narrative stem from Hanna’s inability to read or write – we are incredulous. How could there be illiterates in Germany? – Europe's most cultivated, certainly its best-educated country, with the world's finest elementary school system, the highest literacy rate, and the best universities.
Michael Berg reading to Hanna
The first part is a ritual of Reading Aloud, Showering, Making Love, and Lying Down Beside each Other. And then it ends. Hanna disappears. Michael makes remarkable progress in his profession of law, which leads to the second part where he joins an ongoing criminal prosecution in 1966 in Heidelberg as part of a university-led observer team. The female guards had put concentration camp prisoners on a forced march (to escape approaching Red Army liberators in Jan 1945). En route the prisoners were sheltering locked in a church when it was bombed. The church burst into flames but the guards did not unlock the doors, and allowed the prisoners to perish in the burning church.
This was the charge and Hanna who is one of the guards self-indicts herself by admitting to writing the report that validated the act subsequently. But she could not have written the report, for she was illiterate. Michael as a trained law-student could have intervened to prevent a miscarriage of justice, but he does not, figuring that Hanna's loss of dignity at being exposed for illiteracy outweighed in her mind the pain of the penal servitude she would undergo.
The trial brings home the guilt of the German nation and its complicity in what had been going on since the early thirties when Hitler took power. After the War, Nazis survived in Germany and other countries like Argentina, with assumed lives and identities. Generations grew up in Germany learning of things their parents preferred to forget. The author in an interview is at pains to point out that this novel is not about the Holocaust, it is about post-war Germany, and the impact of past events on 1960's Germany and on Michael’s life. It is also unique in not being about the victims, but having a perpetrator as the protagonist. In a short talk Bernard Schlink observes that even forgetting something painful, is painful. He goes on to say, “The danger of evil is that very banal, very normal, people once they make this decisive step to cross the line, they just go down, and all the rest are just numbers. That is frightening, the banality.”
Hanna in the bath
At a press conference with the cast of The Reader during the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, Kate Winslet commented on her acting role:
“The illiteracy informs us as an audience about who Hanna is in every thing, and this shame, an unbelievable shame. She first learns about her own guilt during the trial, but most certainly while she is in prison. … I knew I had to make her a human being. I had to make her a woman who was capable of great love and affection and warmth, as well as show the vulnerability and the shame that she feels. And she also had to be a woman who had some level of courage, certainly from the moment she starts serving her prison sentence.”
Press conference with the cast of The Reader during the 2009 Berlin Film Festival
It is illuminating to hear the entire half hour interview with the cast, the director, scriptwriter, and the author at
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2133000985?playlistId=tt0976051
The author Bernard Schlink was asked at one point if the book was based on personal experience. He replied: “Every book is based on personal experience, this one as well.”
