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.”
Full Account and Record of Mar 27, 2020 Session
to read Bernard Schlink’s The Reader
Author Bio (provided by Arundhaty from the reference below)
Schlink is perceived by many as a spokesman for Germany’s past, specifically for Germany’s attempts to ‘master’ and get over that past.
Born in 1944, Schlink would have been easily placed to become a poster-boy for a new, thoughtful Germany, coming to terms with its past. But the career he has carved out is more multi-faceted, and in many ways his truest equivalent in English-language literature would be Julian Barnes who won the Man Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending, called ‘a meditation on memory and ageing’ by one reviewer.
Schlink began his writing career with a series of crime novels and still draws on his other life, as a professor of law and a practising judge. His books range from the overtly political – for example The Weekend, which focuses on the legacy of the Red Army Faction, Germany’s homegrown terrorists of the 1970s – to the very intimate, Flights of Love and The Woman on the Stairs which brim with the melancholy of loves lost and lives unlived.
Success came to Schlink relatively late – The Reader was published when he was fifty-one – and his novels speak mostly of the autumn of life, with all the reflection and regret that entails. And perhaps that is the key to his success in the Anglophone world.
By eschewing the heady experimentalism which characterised much of post-war German literature, and training his precise, lawyerly eye on clear, straightforward prose, he could speak to an audience which responds better to ambiguity in content than in form.
Bernard Schlink is perceived by many as a spokesman for Germany’s past
Schlink has never shied away from writing strong and complicated female protagonists. His novel Olga, is the story of a rebellious woman whose life spans the key events in twentieth-century German history. The basic scenario is similar to that of The Reader: an older woman falls in love with a younger man. A portrait emerges of a woman at odds not only with her times but also with the realities of her life-long love.
And so, while there are parallels with The Reader, Schlink is more concerned with psychology than with the history of textbooks – history here is contingent, often shuffling off the page at key moments.
Schlink did not let the international hype surrounding The Reader dictate the course of his career. His immediate follow-up was a short story collection, Flights of Love. And while the 2008 film of The Reader – directed by Stephen Daldry and featuring an Oscar-winning performance from Kate Winslet – cemented his international fanbase, he doesn’t seem to write with an international audience in mind.
Reading his novels, you get more of a sense that he is writing for himself, perhaps even writing himself, probing his past, allowing the parallels between collective history and personal history to speak for themselves.
(This is taken largely from the reference http://www.new-books-in-german.com/profile-bernhard-schlink)
Further references:
1. Bernhard Schlink’s the Reader, the Trauma of Second-Generation Germans in The Reader
2. Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and the Problem of German Victimhood – Introduction by Eva B. Revesz Denison University
3. The Guardian Review of The Reader
Devika
I chose this passage as it was a turning point in Michael's life when Hanna leaves and an emptiness comes into his life. He cannot connect with people. It made him callous, and gave him an attitude of alienation that affected his whole life.
Some other memories
– I remember visiting the Dachau concentration camp some years ago. It was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in 1933, intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich in the southern state of Bavaria. I couldn't bring myself to take pictures; everything was so stark and heartbreaking. You can read about its fearsome reputation at the linked wiki site above.
– After the destruction of the cities in Germany during the WWII they were rebuilt. Germans being meticulous, had all the blueprints of the buildings that were destroyed. When one walks past the buildings they look extremely old, but were actually built after WWII.
Devika’s passage
end of Part Two Ch 1 (408 words)
I remember my last years of school and my first years at university as happy. Yet I can't say very much about them. They were effortless; I had no difficulty with my final exams at school or with the legal studies that I chose because I couldn't think of anything else I really wanted to do; I had no difficulty with friendships, with relationships or the end of relationships — I had no difficulty with anything. Everything was easy; nothing weighed heavily. Perhaps that is why my bundle of memories is so small. Or do I keep it small? I also wonder if my memory of happiness is even true. If I think about it more, plenty of embarrassing and painful situations come to mind, and I know that even if I had said goodbye to my memory of Hanna, I had not overcome it. Never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose — I didn't formulate any of this as I thought back then, but I know that's how I felt.
I adopted a posture of arrogant superiority. I behaved as if nothing could touch or shake or confuse me. I got involved in nothing, and I remember a teacher who saw through this and spoke to me about it; I was arrogantly dismissive. I also remember Sophie. Not long after Hanna left the city, Sophie was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent three years in a sanatorium, returning just as I went to university. She felt lonely, and sought out contact with her old friends. It wasn't hard for me to find a way into her heart. After we slept together, she realised I wasn't interested in her; in tears, she asked, "What's happened to you, what's happened to you?" I remember my grandfather during one of my last visits before his death; he wanted to bless me, and I told him I didn't believe in any of that and didn't want it. It is hard for me to imagine that I felt good about behaving like that. I also remember that the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was directed at me or at someone else. Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.
KumKum
Let me first thank the three members Kavita, Geetha, Arundhaty, who selected The Reader by Bernhardt Schlink for KRG’s March, 2020 Session. A slim book, easy to read and it has a rather disturbing story.
We read the book in the English translation by Carol Brown Janeway. The translator did an admirable job; the book reads flawlessly, keeping the author’s spare tone intact.
The story is divided into 3 parts. The first part explicitly deals with the extended sexual encounter between Michael Berg, a fifteen year old school kid and 36-year old Hanna Schmitz, who was a tram conductor at the time. I was rather uncomfortable with this section of the novel, for it describes an ‘unnatural affair.’ She was a mature older woman, taking advantage of an underage child for a forbidden affair. Hanna disappears from Michael’s life at the end of this part.
The second part deals with Michael, and his development as an adult; Hanna barely figures in it.
She appears again in the third part of the book. Here we learn about two secrets of Hanna’s life, that she was a Nazi concentration camp guard and had taken part in a war crime. Secondly, that Hanna was illiterate.
She paid for her crime according to the judgement of the court. She even accepted the falsehood that she wrote something incriminating about burning to death the Jewish women who were under her care.
She did ultimately learn to read and write while in jail, and thus, got over her personal shame of illiteracy.
The passage I am about to read tells us that Hanna did recognise her biggest crime, which had so far remained undetected. She felt she had to commit suicide to redeem herself from the crime of molesting a kid, years ago, so selfishly, and secretly. This is what I take away – I may be wrong.
The conversation of the passage I am reading is between the daughter who survived the burning church, to whom Hanna bequeathed her life’s savings, and Michael who meets her in her apartment in New York City. It underscores my conclusions.
KumKum’s passage: (753 words)
“I told her about Hanna’s death and her last wishes. page 212
till “I told her what the warden had said. page 214End of Ch 11, Part 3 (723 words)
I told her about Hanna's death and her last wishes.
"Why me?"
"I suppose because you are the only survivor."
"And how am I supposed to deal with it?"
"However you think fit."
"And grant Frau Schmitz her absolution?"
At first I wanted to protest, but Hanna was indeed asking a great deal. Her years of imprisonment were not merely to be the required atonement: Hanna wanted to give them her own meaning, and she wanted this giving of meaning to be recognised. I said as much.
She shook her head. I didn't know if this meant she was refusing to accept my interpretation or refusing to grant Hanna the recognition.
"Could you not recognise it without granting her absolution?"
She laughed. "You like her, don't you? What was your relationship?"
I hesitated a moment. "I read aloud to her. It started when I was fifteen and continued while she was in prison."
"How did you . . ."
"I sent her tapes. Frau Schmitz was illiterate almost all her life; she only learned to read and write in prison."
"Why did you do all this?"
"When I was fifteen, we had a relationship."
"You mean you slept together?"
"Yes."
"That woman was truly brutal . . . did you ever get over the fact that you were only fifteen when she . . . No, you said yourself that you began reading to her again when she was in prison. Did you ever get married?"
I nodded.
"And the marriage was short and unhappy, and you never married again, and the child, if there is one, is in boarding school."
"That's true of thousands of people, it doesn't take a Frau Schmitz."
"Did you ever feel, when you had contact with her in those last years, that she knew what she had done to you?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "In any case, she knew what she had done to people in the camp and on the march. She didn't just tell me that, she dealt with it intensively during her last years in prison." I told her what the warden had said.
She stood up and took long strides up and down the room. "How much money is it?"
I went to the coat closet, where I had left my bag, and returned with the check and the tea tin. "Here."
She looked at the check and put it on the table. She opened the tin, emptied it, closed it again, and held it in her hand, her eyes riveted on it. "When I was a little girl, I had a tea tin for my treasures. Not like this, although these sorts of tea tins already existed, but one with Cyrillic letters, not one with a top you push in, but one you snap shut. I brought it with me to the camp, but then one day it was stolen from me."
"What was in it?"
"What you'd expect. A piece of hair from our poodle. Tickets to the operas my father took me to, a ring I won somewhere or found in a package — the tin wasn't stolen for what was in it. The tin itself, and what could be done with it, were worth a lot in the camp." She put the tin down on top of the check. "Do you have a suggestion for what to do with the money? Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant."
"For illiterates who want to learn to read and write. There must be nonprofit organisations, foundations, societies you could give the money to."
"I'm sure there are." She thought about it.
"Are there corresponding Jewish organisations?"
"You can depend on it, if there are organisations for something, then there are Jewish organisations for it. Illiteracy, it has to be admitted, is hardly a Jewish problem." She pushed the check and the money back to me. "Let's do it this way. You find out what kind of relevant Jewish organisations there are, here or in Germany, and you pay the money to the account of the organisation that seems most plausible to you." She laughed. "If the recognition is so important, you can do it in the name of Hanna Schmitz." She picked up the tin again. "I'll keep the tin."
Arundhaty
I chose the passage because it’s interesting how the author throws open the scene of Hanna questioning the judge. One may not really know what is one’s duty at a certain time and place in a certain circumstance and therefore act wrongly.
Schlink reinforces this by making the judge dodge the question. Is he therefore implying that Hanna was less culpable? Schlink is sort of posing the question to the reader: what would you have done in the same circumstance?
Though this book is an easy read, the suggestions that a lot of people could have been guilty, directly or indirectly, opens up a plethora of issues regarding human nature.
For example : consider the passage on p. 102 ‘The effect was strongest on the judges … I who was in court everyday observed their reactions with detachment.’
So close to reality this scene could be!
Guilt is a primary theme in this novel. And the author successfully portrays guilt of all kinds . He beautifully describes Michael’s lack of feeling, his inability to picture the horror of the camps and therefore his feelings of guilt, failure and shame. cf. p. 154 , ‘I looked at a barracks… But it was all in vain.’
And again on p. 171 ‘ the swaggering self -righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes? ’ And so on.
Arundhaty’s passage
Hanna questioning the judge (732 words)
Chapter 6 , p. 109 - 112 .
Hanna wanted to do the right thing. When she thought she was being done an injustice, she contradicted it, and when something was rightly claimed or alleged, she acknowledged it. She contradicted vigorously and admitted willingly, as though her admissions gave her the right to her contradictions or as though, along with her contradictions, she took on a responsibility to admit what she could not deny. But she did not notice that her insistence annoyed the presiding judge. She had no sense of context, of the rules of the game, of the formulas by which her statements and those of the others were toted up into guilt and innocence, conviction and acquittal. To compensate for her defective grasp of the situation, her lawyer would have had to have more experience and self-confidence, or simply to have been better. But Hanna should not have made things so hard for him; she was obviously withholding her trust from him, but had not chosen another lawyer she trusted more. Her lawyer was a public defender appointed by the court.
Sometimes Hanna achieved her own kind of success. I remember her examination on the selections in the camp. The other defendants denied ever having had anything to do with them. Hanna admitted so readily that she had participated — not alone, but just like the others and along with them — that the judge felt he had to probe further.
"What happened at the selections?"
Hanna described how the guards had agreed among themselves to tally the same number of prisoners from their six equal areas of responsibility, ten each and sixty in all, but that the figures could fluctuate when the number of sick was low in one person's area of responsibility and high in another's, and that all the guards on duty had decided together who was to be sent back.
"None of you held back, you all acted together?"
"Yes."
"Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?"
"Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones."
"So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?"
Hanna didn't understand what the presiding judge was getting at.
"I ... I mean ... so what would you have done?" Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.
Everything was quiet for a moment. It is not the custom at German trials for defendants to question the judge. But now the question had been asked, and everyone was waiting for the judge's answer. He had to answer; he could not ignore the question or brush it away with a reprimand or a dismissive counter-question. It was clear to everyone, it was clear to him too, and I understood why he had adopted an expression of irritation as his defining feature. It was his mask. Behind it, he could take a little time to find an answer. But not too long; the longer he took, the greater the tension and expectation, and the better his answer had to be.
"There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb."
Perhaps this would have been all right if he had said the same thing, but referred directly to Hanna or himself. Talking about what "one" must and must not do and what it costs did not do justice to the seriousness of Hanna' s question. She had wanted to know what she should have done in her particular situation, not that there are things that are not done. The judge's answer came across as hapless and pathetic. Everyone felt it. They reacted with sighs of disappointment and stared in amazement at Hanna, who had more or less won the exchange. But she herself was lost in thought.
"So should I have . . . should I have not . . . should I not have signed up at Siemens?"
It was not a question directed at the judge. She was talking out loud to herself, hesitantly, because she had not yet asked herself that question and did not know whether it was the right one, or what the answer was.
(part two, chapter 4). p.99 to p.101. “Who had given me the injection ? … I didn't feel good about it and I still don’t.”
It's about the attitude of the court, including Michael’s reaction, during Hanna's trial.
It affirms my experience in grieving also. It’s as though you've been anaesthetised and you continue to eat, sleep, talk, live in this dazed mode and it's still the same. Must be an automatic survival mechanism.
Geeta’s passage
Who had given me the injection? Had I done it myself, because I couldn't manage without anaesthesia? The anaesthetic functioned not only in the courtroom, and not only to allow me to see Hanna as if it was someone else who had loved and desired her, someone I knew well but who wasn't me. In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.
After a time I thought I could detect a similar numbness in other people. Not in the lawyers, who carried on throughout the trial with the same rhetorical legalistic pugnacity, jabbing pedantry, or loud, calculated truculence, depending on their personalities and their political standpoint. Admittedly the trial proceedings exhausted them; in the evenings they were tired and got more shrill. But overnight they recharged or reinflated themselves and droned and hissed away the next morning just as they had twenty-four hours before. The prosecutors made an effort to keep up and display the same level of attack day after day. But they didn't succeed, at first because the facts and their outcome as laid out at the trial horrified them so much, and later because the numbness began to take hold. The effect was strongest on the judges and the lay members of the court. During the first weeks of the trial they took in the horrors — sometimes recounted in tears, sometimes in choking voices, sometimes in agitated or broken sentences — with visible shock or obvious efforts at self-control. Later their faces returned to normal; they could smile and whisper to one another or even show traces of impatience when a witness lost the thread while testifying. When going to Israel to question a witness was discussed, they started getting the travel bug. The other students kept being horrified all over again. They only came to the trial once a week, and each time the same thing happened: the intrusion of horror into daily life. I, who was in court every day, observed their reactions with detachment.
Starvation of Women in Auschwitz – photos taken after the Red Army liberated the camp in Jan 1945
It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness that he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's 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.
Even then, when I was preoccupied by this general numbness, and by the fact that it had taken hold not only of the perpetrators and victims, but of all of us, judges and lay members of the court, prosecutors and recorders, who had to deal with these events now; when I likened perpetrators, victims, the dead, the living, survivors, and their descendants to each other, I didn't feel good about it and I still don't.
Gopa
The theme of the selected passage is the guilt of the German people for what had been going on in the Third Reich. To a large extent, this guilt which gripped the nation in the aftermath of the Second World War, culminated in fixing the responsibility of those who had played an active role in perpetuating the Holocaust and starting WWII.
In the description of the trial of Hanna Schmidt and four others who were guards at the infamous Auschwitz extermination camp, the author juxtaposed the narrative with vivid descriptions of the revulsion and guilt amongst Germans born after the war, with regard to the treatment of the Jews, Poles, Russians, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests, Communists, Romani (Gypsies), etc who were killed. The younger generation scrutinised the role of their parents who had supported the Nazi philosophy. Especially, those who were teachers and doctors, in the judiciary and in the local government. In other words the majority of common German citizens.
The trial itself was conducted with typical German efficiency in a thoroughly competent manner. Eventually it was all about fixing blame on a few individuals.
‘It was evident to us that there would have to be convictions.’ p 90
Judges, lawyers and the local people, who were equally guilty through inaction, were seen washing their hands off from taking responsibility for their own acts, although they had supported the Third Reich. In the aftermath of the defeat, perhaps the feeling of guilt was sought to be assuaged by fixing the culpability on a few guards and enforcers. This is what the book conveys.
Hanna herself displayed remarkable self-composure and a total absence of any moral guilt in having taken part in crimes against the Jewish community. Perhaps she was a victim herself in her childhood. The reader is told that she was an orphan in Germany after WWI. This may have accounted for the fact that she lacked a formal education. However, we are not let into Hanna’s childhood experiences, which might have explained her behaviour as an adult.
The trial demonstrated her inability, and that of the other defendants, to examine their own conscience. They were just mute bystanders like most Germans, and did not take a stand against the enforcement of laws and statutes, which eventually culminated in one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
Gopa’s Passage
The Reader …a reading from chapter 2 and the last para of chapter 4. (481 words)
Gopa voice file of passage
When I saw Hanna again, it was in a courtroom.
It wasn’t the first trials dealing with the camps, nor was it one of the major ones. Our professor, one of the few at that time who were working on the Nazi past and the related trials, made it the subject of a seminar, in the hope of following the entire trial with the help of his students and evaluate it. I can no longer remember what it was he wanted to examine, confirm or disprove. I do remember that we argued the prohibition of retroactive justice in the seminar. Was it sufficient that the ordinances under which the camp guards and the enforcers were convicted were already on the statute books at the time they committed their crimes? Or was it a question of how the laws were actually interpreted and enforced at the time they committed their crimes.
The seminar began in winter, the trial in spring. It lasted for weeks.
We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure that people could breathe and see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship/it was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was also evident that conviction of this or that camp guard or enforcer was only the prelude. 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 could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame.
Our parents had played a variety of roles in the Third Reich. Several amongst our fathers had been in he war, two or three as officers in the Wehrmacht and one as an officer in the Waffen SS. Some of them had held positions in the judiciary or local government.
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.
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. Should we 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?
Priya
The conversation between Michael and the taxi driver on way to Natzweiler- Struthof camp .
COMMENTS
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink works on several levels:
1. Human – betrayal, forgiveness, guilt, love
2. Societal – literacy programmes, social justice institutions, courts, etc
3. Political – fascism, racism, empire, war
This makes it a profound and political novel.
The novella-length book of about 45,000 words can be read in a day. It is divided into three parts and moves easily. The straightforward writing belies the gravitas of the subjects dealt with.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the protagonist Humbert Humbert is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze or Lolita. The Reader opens with scenes of the sexual attraction between 15-year-old Michael Berg and 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmidt. It takes the reader through explicit scenes of their passionate encounters.
In Lolita an underage girl is kept by an adult male for sexual gratification, in the name of love. It is the reverse of The Reader. Michael may have really invested himself in his attraction for Hanna, but he seems to have been a plaything for her.
Here one can debate the larger question of child marriage (wherein boys and girls were married in their pre-teen years and sexual activity was sanctioned). It was prevalent at one time in Indian society, and even now children are sometimes promised in marriage before they have any say in the matter.
Is there an age when sex between boy-man and girl-woman becomes legitimate? When is it acceptable? Is it medically right? Did Nature intend a certain age before which sexual activity should be repressed? If so, Michael seems ripe and ready for the physical stuff; but what about his mental and psychological readiness to make that transition? Was Hanna a pedophile like Humbert Humbert?
Did Hanna exploit the young boy, or was Michael just growing up according to Nature? If so, why does their relationship leave a disturbing sense in readers?
Theme of Illiteracy
The author masterfully keeps this surprise, of Hanna’s inability to read and write, from the readers, till the second part of the story; its revelation is a high point of the novel. At the end when Michael Berg offers the money saved by Hanna to the concentration camp victim who survives the burning church, her response is: “Illiteracy is hardly a Jewish problem.” She stipulates the money should be donated to an organisation for the spread of education. If she had accepted the money, it would signify giving absolution to Hanna for her misdeeds.
In the trials of Nazis for war crimes many were convicted, but many remained free, and some were unjustly convicted like Hanna.
Other important trials for war crimes in modern times were held by The Truth and Reconciliation Commmison (TRC) at the end of Apartheid in South Africa. In a short talk Bernard Schlink speaks about what his mother taught him regarding the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1WQML0hfl4
At the end of the Kosovo War when Serbian leaders were accused of atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia they were tried and convicted (Ratko Mladić, Slobodan Milošević, and Radovan Karadžić) by the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Priya’s passage
I DECIDED TO go away. If I had been able to leave for Auschwitz the next day, I would have gone. But it would have taken weeks to get a visa. So I went to Struthof in Alsace. It was the nearest concentration camp. I had never seen one. I wanted reality to drive out the cliches.
I hitchhiked, and remember a ride in a truck with a driver who downed one bottle of beer after another, and a Mercedes driver who steered wearing white gloves. After Strasbourg I got lucky; the driver was going to Schirmeck, a small town not far from Struthof.
When I told the driver where I was going, he fell silent. I looked over at him, but couldn't tell why he had suddenly stopped talking in the midst of a lively conversation. He was middle- aged, with a haggard face and a dark red birthmark or scar on his right temple, and his black hair was carefully parted and combed in strands. He stared at the road in concentration.
The hills of the Vosges rolled out ahead of us. We were driving through vineyards into a wide-open valley that climbed gently. To the left and right, mixed forests grew up the slopes, and sometimes there was a quarry or a brick-walled factory with a corrugated iron roof, or an old sanatorium, or a large turreted villa among tall trees. A train track ran alongside us, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right.
Then he spoke again. He asked me why I was visiting Struthof, and I told him about the trial and my lack of first-hand knowledge.
"Ah, you want to understand why people can do such terrible things." He sounded as if he was being a little ironic, but maybe it was just the tone of voice and the choice of words. Before I could reply, he went on: "What is it you want to understand? That people murder out of passion, or love, or hate, or for honour or revenge, that you understand?"
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp – Jewish women and children from Hungary walking toward the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, May-June 1944
I nodded.
"You also understand that people murder for money or power? That people murder in wars and revolutions?"
I nodded again. "But . . ."
"But the people who were murdered in the camps hadn't done anything to the individuals who murdered them? Is that what you want to say? Do you mean that there was no reason for hatred, and no war?"
I didn't want to nod again. What he said was true, but not the way he said it.
"You're right, there was no war, and no reason for hatred. But executioners don't hate the people they execute, and they execute them all the same. Because they're ordered to? You think they do it because they're ordered to? And you think that I'm talking about orders and obedience, that the guards in the camps were under orders and had to obey?" He laughed sarcastically. "No, I'm not talking about orders and obedience. An executioner is not under orders. He's doing his work, he doesn't hate the people he executes, he's not taking revenge on them, he's not killing them because they're in his way or threatening him or attacking him. They're a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not."
He looked at me. "No 'buts'? Come on, tell me that one person cannot be that indifferent to another. Isn't that what they taught you? Solidarity with everything that has a human face? Human dignity? Reverence for life?"
I was outraged and helpless. I searched for a word, a sentence that would erase what he had said and strike him dumb.
"Once," he went on, "I saw a photograph of Jews being shot in Russia. The Jews were in a long row, naked; some were standing at the edge of a pit and behind them were soldiers with guns, shooting them in the neck. It was in a quarry, and above the Jews and the soldiers there was an officer sitting on a ledge in the rock, swinging his legs and smoking a cigarette. He looked a little morose. Maybe things weren't going fast enough for him. But there was also something satisfied, even cheerful about his expression, perhaps because the day's work was getting done and it was almost time to go home. He didn't hate the Jews. He wasn't . . .
"Was it you? Were you sitting on the ledge and . . ."
He stopped the car. He was absolutely white, and the mark on his temple glistened. "Out!"
I got out. He swung the wheel so fast I had to jump aside. I still heard him as he took the next few curves. Then everything was silent.
I walked up the road. No car passed me, none came in the opposite direction. I heard birds, the wind in the trees, and the occasional murmur of a stream. In a quarter of an hour I reached the concentration camp.
Joe
p.121 “The daughter thinks the women … up to p.123 gave them clothing and food and let them walk on.”
COMMENTS
There are some central issues raised in the novel The Reader by Bernard Schlink. But first it is worth pointing out the title in English does not provide the clarity of the German title, Der Vorleser. German has two verbs, leser, to read, and vorleser, to read to another person. The noun form of the latter verb is Vorlesung, which means a lecture in German. So the English title, The Lector, would have been more accurate to describe the role of the Michael Berg in the first part.
The novel begins as an engrossing tale of the seduction of a young teenager by an older woman; we might be fooled into believing this will mature and grow. But it remains as it began, a sexual seduction and obsessive abuse by the older woman, an easy exploitation of a young boy’s fantasies to give her comfort in her lonely life. Sexual abuse always damages the victim and has long lasting effects on future relationships. It is difficult to tell whether after his marriage, having a daughter and then divorcing, and now pursuing law, Michael has become whole again and cast off the impact of the sexual trauma in his youth.
Map of World War II Concentration Camps and Ghettos – Poland had been divided by a pact between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union
Michael takes up the law as a career and later follows the criminal case against a group of concentration camp guards (all women) who are accused of the murder of escaping women prisoners by locking them inside a bombed church in flames. A point of law, namely the responsibility for intervening in a case by a third party when you know justice has miscarried, is countervailed by the desire of the victim to retain her dignity by not revealing she was illiterate (and therefore could not have written the report that was the proof of her guilt). Michael decided to respect her dignity and not intervene to overturn the verdict.
But consider: what is the Law for if not to secure justice to the extent possible, given the facts? As a student of law should Michael not have striven for justice above all, and set aside the inclination to self-victimhood of the accused? Very possibly Hanna’s life could have worked out in a more benign way.
The question of the culpability of ordinary German citizens for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany is a contentious one. Technically a soldier may refuse to carry out an order that violates the laws of war (such as killing unarmed civilians), and indeed a soldier may report a superior who gave such an order. But in the context of Nazi Germany, where a wholesale criminal enterprise of mass killing was sanctioned at the highest level, what does a lowly soldier do if ordered to shoot a company of men in the back and push them into their graves? Or turn the poison gas on to exterminate people? Can every one be a hero, disobey the order, and risk being shot himself for refusing to carry out an order?
The same conundrum appears in academic circles. A Jewish professor is ordered to be dismissed from a German university. Does the entire faculty resign in protest? Do you let the professor go and help him find a position in another country and manage his family’s escape? Or does one meekly accept that the rules have changed and kowtow to the new gods?
In our own country there is the famous case of Justice H.R. Khanna of the Supreme Court, who cast the lone dissenting vote in a 1976 Habeas Corpus case, when the majority (Chief Justice A.N. Ray, Justices M.H. Beg, Y.V. Chandrachud, P.N. Bhagwati) agreed with the GOI submission that even the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India, like the right to life and liberty, stood abrogated during the period of national emergency. Justice Khanna is celebrated today for his courage and independence, and his doctrine that the basic structure of the Constitution cannot be amended by Parliament. The other four justices are seen today as time-servers, but Justice Khanna suffered for his display of judicial independence by being superseded for CJI seven months later by direct order of the then PM, Indira Gandhi; whereupon he resigned.
Ordinary folk may not be subjected to war-time fascist dictatorships ordering us to shoot unarmed people, but everyday in civilian life we face the choice of living according to the dictates of our professional integrity, our dignity, and our conscience; or to bend to our bosses and become tools to aid the ambitions of unscrupulous careerists.
Pamela
From end of Ch 10, pages 131 to 133. Hanna could neither read nor write … up to …then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.
COMMENTS
I have chosen some questions which I found thought-provoking.
1. Who does ‘The Reader’ refer to?
In the first part I thought it must be Michael Berg, but as the story advanced I felt that Hanna could also be ‘The Reader’, as she would request for books she wanted Micheal to read to her.
Later in the concentration camps, she would choose the weaker inmates to read to her. The readers were many. In a larger sense ‘The Reader’ could refer to anyone who is oppressed.
2. Why does Michael find it difficult to make his relationship with women work? How did the affair with Hanna affect him as an adolescent?
Michael always felt guilty about his relationship with Hanna. He did not share anything about Hanna with his first wife and he felt they broke up on account of this. His wife could not understand him because she was ignorant of his past. With the second wife he tried being very open, and found that didn’t work either. Maybe he shared too much and that led to a absent person's shadow looming large over their relationship.
As an adolescent he longed for Hanna physically, but he was never comfortable psychologically. He was enslaved by her because of his physical longing for her and he knew it.
3. How do you feel about the images of war which come through the newspapers and TV?
Images of war are always horrifying and I don’t think they become ‘frozen into clichés.’ It does have a painful impact momentarily, but the ordinary person is helpless and can’t do anything about it. Many are even unaware.
4. Why do you think Hanna does what she does at the end of the novel? How do you think learning to read in prison might have changed her view of what she had done in the concentration camps?
After reading books she must have realised the larger consequences of what she had done. As long as her illiteracy cast a pall of oblivion, she thought she was only doing her assigned job for a living. After learning to read and write, and going through books about the cruelties in the concentration camps, it must have dawned on her that her actions were a part of a larger system that had a huge impact on the victims, and on the German people. Her guilt at that point was beyond consolation. She also knew that she had no future with Michael Berg who refused to write back to her. She saw a dead end – she couldn’t live with herself.
COMMENTS
I have chosen some questions which I found thought-provoking.
1. Who does ‘The Reader’ refer to?
In the first part I thought it must be Michael Berg, but as the story advanced I felt that Hanna could also be ‘The Reader’, as she would request for books she wanted Micheal to read to her.
Later in the concentration camps, she would choose the weaker inmates to read to her. The readers were many. In a larger sense ‘The Reader’ could refer to anyone who is oppressed.
2. Why does Michael find it difficult to make his relationship with women work? How did the affair with Hanna affect him as an adolescent?
Michael always felt guilty about his relationship with Hanna. He did not share anything about Hanna with his first wife and he felt they broke up on account of this. His wife could not understand him because she was ignorant of his past. With the second wife he tried being very open, and found that didn’t work either. Maybe he shared too much and that led to a absent person's shadow looming large over their relationship.
As an adolescent he longed for Hanna physically, but he was never comfortable psychologically. He was enslaved by her because of his physical longing for her and he knew it.
3. How do you feel about the images of war which come through the newspapers and TV?
Images of war are always horrifying and I don’t think they become ‘frozen into clichés.’ It does have a painful impact momentarily, but the ordinary person is helpless and can’t do anything about it. Many are even unaware.
4. Why do you think Hanna does what she does at the end of the novel? How do you think learning to read in prison might have changed her view of what she had done in the concentration camps?
After reading books she must have realised the larger consequences of what she had done. As long as her illiteracy cast a pall of oblivion, she thought she was only doing her assigned job for a living. After learning to read and write, and going through books about the cruelties in the concentration camps, it must have dawned on her that her actions were a part of a larger system that had a huge impact on the victims, and on the German people. Her guilt at that point was beyond consolation. She also knew that she had no future with Michael Berg who refused to write back to her. She saw a dead end – she couldn’t live with herself.
Pamela’s passage
Hanna could neither read nor write.
That was why she had had people read to her. That was why she had let me do all the writing and reading on our bicycle trip and why she had lost control that morning in the hotel when she found my note, realised I would assume she knew what it said, and was afraid she'd be exposed. That was why she had avoided being promoted by the streetcar company; as a conductor she could conceal her weakness, but it would have become obvious when she was being trained to become a driver. That was also why she had refused the promotion at Siemens and become a guard. That was why she had admitted to writing the report in order to escape a confrontation with an expert. Had she talked herself into a corner at the trial for the same reason? Because she couldn't read the daughter's book or the indictment, couldn't see the openings that would allow her to build a defence, and thus could not prepare herself accordingly? Was that why she sent her chosen wards to Auschwitz? To silence them in case they had noticed something? And was that why she always chose the weak ones in the first place?
Was that why? I could understand that she was ashamed at not being able to read or write, and would rather drive me away than expose herself. I was no stranger to shame as the cause of behaviour that was deviant or defensive, secretive or misleading or hurtful. But could Hanna's shame at being illiterate be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp? To accept exposure as a criminal for fear of being exposed as an illiterate? To commit crimes to avoid the same thing?
How often I have asked myself these same questions, both then and since. If Hanna's motive was fear of exposure — why opt for the horrible exposure as a criminal over the harmless exposure as an illiterate? Or did she believe she could escape exposure altogether? Was she simply stupid? And was she vain enough, and evil enough, to become a criminal simply to avoid exposure?
Both then and since, I have always rejected this. No, Hanna had not decided in favour of crime. She had decided against a promotion at Siemens, and fell into a job as a guard. And no, she had not dispatched the delicate and the weak on transports to Auschwitz because they had read to her; she had chosen them to read to her because she wanted to make their last month bearable before their inevitable dispatch to Auschwitz. And no, at the trial Hanna did not weigh exposure as an illiterate against exposure as a criminal. She did not calculate and she did not manoeuvre. She accepted that she would be called to account, and simply did not wish to endure further exposure. She was not pursuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice. Because she always had to dissimulate somewhat, and could never be completely candid, it was a pitiful truth and a pitiful justice, but it was hers, and the struggle for it was her struggle.
She must have been completely exhausted. Her struggle was not limited to the trial. She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
I was oddly moved by the discrepancy between what must have been Hanna's actual concerns when she left my hometown and what I had imagined and theorised at the time. I had been sure that I had driven her away because I had betrayed and denied her, when in fact she had simply been running away from being found out by the streetcar company. However, the fact that I had not driven her away did not change the fact that I had betrayed her. So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.
Shoba
Guilt is a central theme. First, there is the guilt experienced by Michael. He feels that he betrayed Hanna when he did not acknowledge her at the swimming pool.
Did Hanna feel guilty? We are not told what her feelings were.
Then there is the collective guilt of the German nation, regarding the atrocities committed against the Jews. They seem to have been infected with a virus that made a majority of them blind, insensible, and even cruel. But the seeds of the Nazi racial policies, including the notion that people who were racially inferior had no right to live, date back to the earliest days of the Nazi party and are discussed in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf in 1925.
Heinrich Himmler became chief of the SS, or Schutzstaffel, German for ‘Protective Echelon,’ which initially served as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards, and later became one of the most powerful and feared organisations in all of Nazi Germany. Himmler was the person put in charge of exterminating the Jews, starting with concentration camps established in captured Poland, like Auschwitz. The infamous Zyklon B gas used was his choice when it was demonstrated by the chemical firm IG Farben.
Heinrich Himmler became chief of the SS, or Schutzstaffel, German for ‘Protective Echelon,’ which initially served as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards, and later became one of the most powerful and feared organisations in all of Nazi Germany. Himmler was the person put in charge of exterminating the Jews, starting with concentration camps established in captured Poland, like Auschwitz. The infamous Zyklon B gas used was his choice when it was demonstrated by the chemical firm IG Farben.
Auschwitz concentration camp, a defining symbol of the Holocaust – The sign above the front gate reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ or ‘Work Sets You Free’
Hanna and Michael meet when the latter is 15 and Hanna is in her mid-thirties. For Michael it was not a casual affair. It became imprinted on his mind, affecting his future relationships with his wife and daughter, Gertrude and Julie, whole lives were adversely affected.
Why did Hanna kill herself? Maybe she felt by that she was atoning for her actions. After the long imprisonment she did not see any purpose in life after getting out. That Michael never wrote to her was a great source of pain to Hanna. But Michael did not want the sort of intimacy that would come of writing to her. He is conflicted. He is traumatised by the relationship; what happened is such a shock he can’t engage with her.
The importance of literacy is another theme, for it has a drastic effect on Hanna’s life. Instead of aspiring to a rising career in a civilian job that would require mastery over documentation, she chose to become a prison guard – a life that would expose her to the physical cruelties inflicted by the Third Reich on Jews. She does becomes literate late in life while in prison. She gets a better understanding of herself. But it is a dead end, for she lacks human contact.
Shoba’s passage
Chapter 16, starting...I lay near the others listening to them....Till the end of the chapter… That is another picture I have of her. (195 words)
I lay near the others, listening to them, and found what they said silly and pointless.
Eventually the feeling passed. Eventually it turned into an ordinary afternoon at the swimming pool with homework and volleyball and gossip and flirting. I can't remember what it was I was doing when I looked up and saw her.
She was standing twenty or thirty meters away, in shorts and an open blouse knotted at the waist, looking at me. I looked back at her. She was too far away for me to read her expression. I didn't jump to my feet and run to her. Questions raced through my head: Why was she at the pool, did she want to be seen with me, did I want to be seen with her, why had we never met each other by accident, what should I do? Then I stood up. And in that briefest of moments in which I took my eyes off her, she was gone.
Hanna in shorts, with the tails of her blouse knotted, her face turned towards me but with an expression I cannot read at all — that is another picture I have of her.
Zakia
Part two ch 11 p. 136-137 I had had enough too ....just imagine that he is. (491 words)
Zakia’s passage
I had had enough too. But I couldn't put it behind me. For me, the proceedings were not ending, but just beginning. I had been a spectator, and then suddenly a participant, a player, and member of the jury. I had neither sought nor chosen this new role, but it was mine whether I wanted it or not, whether I did anything or just remained completely passive.
"Did anything" — there was only one thing to do. I could go to the judge and tell him that Hanna was illiterate. That she was not the main protagonist and guilty party the way the others made her out to be. That her behaviour at the trial was not proof of singular incorrigibility, lack of remorse, or arrogance, but was born of her incapacity to familiarise herself with the indictment and the manuscript and also probably of her consequent lack of any sense of strategy or tactics. That her defence had been significantly compromised. That she was guilty, but not as guilty as it appeared.
Maybe I would not be able to convince the judge. But I would give him enough to have to think about and investigate further. In the end, it would be proved that I was right, and Hanna would be punished, but less severely. She would have to go to prison, but would be released sooner — wasn't that what she had been fighting for?
Yes, that was what she had been fighting for, but she was not willing to earn victory at the price of exposure as an illiterate. Nor would she want me to barter her self-image for a few years in prison. She could have made that kind of trade herself, and did not, which meant she didn't want it. Her sense of self was worth more than the years in prison to her.
But was it really worth all that? What did she gain from this false self-image which ensnared her and crippled her and paralysed her? With the energy she put into maintaining the lie, she could have learned to read and write long ago.
I tried to talk about the problem with friends. Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him — do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there's an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anaesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anaesthesiologist — do you talk to the anaesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn't admit to being left-handed — do you tell the judge what's going on? Imagine he's gay, and could not have committed the crime because he's gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn't a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay — just imagine that he is.
Thommo
COMMENTS
My selection considers the guilt felt by Germans – both those who were adults during the Nazi era and present day citizens – about Auschwitz and other concentration camps and their complicity in, and silence about, the atrocities that took place there.
The novel also dwells on the generational conflict that drove the student movements. Michael's sense of guilt about his feelings for Hanna pervades the second half of the book.
I was quite a bit into the book before understanding what the title meant. I then thought that it was a love story, but neither Michael nor Hanna were in love. Michael was infatuated with Hanna.
There is the Mrs Robinson element in the book. Recall the 1967 film The Graduate which tells the story of 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a young college graduate with no purpose in life, who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) walking around the house in a negligé. But it's much more than that, for The Reader deals with morality and the guilt felt by successive generations of postwar Germans on account of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany (and perhaps abetted by ordinary Germans).
One reviewer queried: Could there be a connection between literacy and morality? The Germans were undoubtedly among the most literate, educated, and talented nations of Europe before WWII. So how did the fascist ideology take hold?
Thommo’s passage (674 words)
Sometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took. Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up 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? But on the other hand, the Nazi past was an issue even for children who couldn't accuse their parents of anything, or didn't want to. For them, coming to grips with the Nazi past was not merely the form taken by a generational conflict, it was the issue itself.
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 recognise 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, even when we could point at the guilty parties. Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from 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. And coming to grips with our parents' guilt took a great deal of energy.
I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of. The zeal for letting in the daylight, with which, as a member of the concentration camps seminar, I had condemned my father to shame, had passed, and it embarrassed me. But what other people in my social environment had done, and their guilt, were in any case a lot less bad than what Hanna had done. I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.
And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self -righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self- righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?
These thoughts did not come until later, and even later they brought no comfort. 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. All the same, it would have been good for me back then to be able to feel I was part of my generation.
Kavita
Ch 10 end – p.132 “ Hanna could neither read nor write. … up to p.134 victories that were concealed defects.
Kavita’s passage (590 words)
Hanna could neither read nor write.
That was why she had had people read to her. That was why she had let me do all the writing and reading on our bicycle trip and why she had lost control that morning in the hotel when she found my note, realised I would assume she knew what it said, and was afraid she'd be exposed. That was why she had avoided being promoted by the streetcar company; as a conductor she could conceal her weakness, but it would have become obvious when she was being trained to become a driver. That was also why she had refused the promotion at Siemens and become a guard. That was why she had admitted to writing the report in order to escape a confrontation with an expert. Had she talked herself into a corner at the trial for the same reason? Because she couldn't read the daughter's book or the indictment, couldn't see the openings that would allow her to build a defence, and thus could not prepare herself accordingly? Was that why she sent her chosen wards to Auschwitz? To silence them in case they had noticed something? And was that why she always chose the weak ones in the first place?
Was that why? I could understand that she was ashamed at not being able to read or write, and would rather drive me away than expose herself. I was no stranger to shame as the cause of behaviour that was deviant or defensive, secretive or misleading or hurtful. But could Hanna's shame at being illiterate be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp? To accept exposure as a criminal for fear of being exposed as an illiterate? To commit crimes to avoid the same thing?
How often I have asked myself these same questions, both then and since. If Hanna's motive was fear of exposure — why opt for the horrible exposure as a criminal over the harmless exposure as an illiterate? Or did she believe she could escape exposure altogether? Was she simply stupid? And was she vain enough, and evil enough, to become a criminal simply to avoid exposure?
Both then and since, I have always rejected this. No, Hanna had not decided in favour of crime. She had decided against a promotion at Siemens, and fell into a job as a guard. And no, she had not dispatched the delicate and the weak on transports to Auschwitz because they had read to her; she had chosen them to read to her because she wanted to make their last month bearable before their inevitable dispatch to Auschwitz. And no, at the trial Hanna did not weigh exposure as an illiterate against exposure as a criminal. She did not calculate and she did not manoeuvre. She accepted that she would be called to account, and simply did not wish to endure further exposure. She was not pursuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice. Because she always had to dissimulate somewhat, and could never be completely candid, it was a pitiful truth and a pitiful justice, but it was hers, and the struggle for it was her struggle.
She must have been completely exhausted. Her struggle was not limited to the trial. She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
Geetha
In this passage Michael seems to be weaning himself off his infatuation for Hanna. The natural instincts and interests of his age are overtaking his juvenile passion for the older woman.
His love for Hanna, like all first loves, lingers in the recesses of his mind, and affects his future relationships. Healthy relationships are judged against the unhealthy one he experienced with her at an immature age. This is perhaps a fact of life. In true long lasting love within a marriage both parties sacrifice something to keep the other happy.
Does the way Michael feels for Hanna in the later chapters speak of a caring beyond that of a mere infatuation? Or is it a sense of sympathy/empathy for a woman trapped by her will to protect her dignity under all circumstances, that eventually leads to her suicide?
Geetha’s passage (638 words)
Ch15 in part 1....'Then I began to betray her......But there never was another time.'
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 relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.
I no longer remember when I first denied Hanna. Friendships coalesced out of the casual ease of those summer afternoons at the swimming pool. Aside from the boy who sat next to me in school, whom I knew from the old class, the person I liked especially in the new class was Holger Schliiter, who like me was interested in history and literature, and with whom I quickly felt at ease. He also got along with Sophie, who lived a few blocks behind our house, which meant that we went to and from the swimming pool together. At first I told myself that I wasn't yet close enough to my friends to tell them about Hanna. Then I didn't find the right opportunity, the right moment, the right words. And finally it was too late to tell them about Hanna, to present her along with all my other youthful secrets. I told myself that talking about her so belatedly would misrepresent things, make it seem as if I had kept silent about Hanna for so long because our relationship wasn't right and I felt guilty about it. But no matter what I pretended to myself, I knew that I was betraying Hanna when I acted as if I was letting my friends in on everything important in my life but said nothing about Hanna.
The fact that they knew I wasn't being completely open only made things worse. One evening Sophie and I got caught in a thunderstorm on our way home and took shelter under the overhang of a garden shed in Neuenheimer Feld, which had no university buildings on it then, just fields and gardens. It thundered, the lightning crackled, the wind came in gusts, and rain fell in big heavy drops. At the same time the temperature dropped a good ten degrees. We were freezing, and I put my arm around her.
"You know . . ." She wasn't looking at me, but out at the rain.
"What?"
"You were sick with hepatitis for a long time. Is that what's on your mind? Are you afraid you won't really get well again? Did the doctors say something? And do you have to go to the clinic every day to get tests or transfusions?"
Hanna as illness. I was ashamed. But I really couldn't start talking about Hanna at this point. "No, Sophie, I'm not sick anymore. My liver is normal, and in a year I'll even be able to drink alcohol if I want, but I don't. What's . . ." Talking about Hanna, I didn't want to say "what's bothering me." "There's another reason I arrive later or leave earlier."
"Do you not want to talk about it, or is it that you want to but you don't know how?"
Did I not want to, or didn't I know how? I didn't know the answer. But as we stood there under the lightning, with the explosions of thunder rumbling almost overhead and the pounding of the rain, both freezing, warming each other a little, I had the feeling that I had to tell her, of all people, about Hanna. "Maybe I can tell you some other time."
But there never was another time.
That was good, Joe. We read and discussed a nice book at the time of Coronavirus, rather elaborately. You did an excellent job collating our pieces.
ReplyDeleteSorry, my passage is too long, I should have cut it short. Did not all that text to prove my point.
Very interesting to read the comments by several readers.
April is the month when KRG Celebrates Shakespeare. Since, Coronavirus is still with us, we may not be able to meet at the Yacht Club Library for the April Session.
But, why not try to meet over Zoom? We miss seeing our Readers.