The Reader

It was, in many ways, anomalous that I had never previously read this important piece of Holocaust literature. It is told in a sparse and often quite emotionless manner, but it is all the more powerful in being so. At its heart is the metaphor of Hanna's illiteracy representing the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities during the war, or rephrased, Germany suffered from a moral illiteracy or profound inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name by their fellow citizens. Similarly, it can be argued that Michael's relationship with Hanna, part erotic and part maternal, stands for the ambivalent relationship of present-day Germany and its Nazi past, the past as ‘mother’ to Michael's generation. Eventually he finds out that his parents, like other Germans of his generation, were guilty. Just as Michael only gets well (at the novel's outset) with Hanna's help, so can Germany only move on through healing and dealing with its Nazi past. Eight out of ten.

By Bernhard Schlink