Of passion and revelations of historical cruelty
Farida Shaikh is intrigued by a narrative of love and crime
The Reader is German law professor and judge Bernard Schlink's autobiographical novel dealing with the difficulties of the young generation in understanding the origin and magnitude of the Holocaust as its witnesses and memory begin to fade away. The novel is a departure from Schlink's detective writings where the main character is selb, the German word for self. This work is his meditation on guilt, culpability and accountability. The Reader is a challenging and a moving book, with questions and moral ambiguity. Schlink's theme revolves around responsibility and the choices before an individual or a society and the burden of guilt borne by the generation of Germans that lived through the war and that which came after the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. Schlink's literary style and first-person approach impel the reader into a deep understanding of the protagonist's psyche, his perspective and the limitations leading to an overall familiarity and intimacy. The illiteracy of the lead female character is a metaphor and conveys a sense of dramatic irony. Carol Brown Janeway's English translation of the work reads beautifully. A film adaptation of The Reader by Stephen Daldry in 2008 was much acclaimed because of the performance of Kate Winslet as the main female character. The story, in three parts, takes place in different time periods and places, each part reading as complete. It is tied together by the main character, and keeps the autobiographical form of the novel. Part I of the story is in the city of Heidelberg, West Germany, 1958. A brief encounter between Michael Berg, 15, suffering from hepatitis, and single woman Hanna Schmitz, 36, tram ticket collector, sets rolling a torrid love affair beset by physical closeness entwined by reading aloud classical literature such as Homer's The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog. The title of the book is a metaphor. In the German language the verb vorleser applies only to reading aloud. The emotional distance maintained between the two lovers is stark, and gives a levelled moving tone to this highly sexual piece of writing. For Michael it is his first sexual experience, and for Hanna it is a way to ward off her intense loneliness and mental agony, in a way a form of emotional exploitation. Some months into the relationship, suddenly, Hanna disappears. Michael goes through a guilt trip thinking it is on his account that she has left. The memory of Hannah affects all his later relationships with women, and his short unhappy marriage. The burden of guilt is introduced in this part. Physical closeness over emotional distance in a love affair is questioned. Carnal desire combined with mental exhilaration does initiate the moral ambiguity that Schlink upholds in this book. Part II is about eight years later in Auschwitz, Poland. Michael, a law student, is observing a war crimes trial of some five middle aged SS women guards for allowing 300 Jewish women, trapped in a church, to die in a fire. The bombing incident is chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who immigrated to America after the war and is a witness at the trial. Hannah Schmitz is one of the defendants. She accepts supervising responsibility for the women guards, contrary to evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire which at first she denies, but later admits, in order to avoid submission of a sample of her handwriting. Michael is stunned to see Hanna .He is all shaken up by emotional eruptions, feels guilty for having loved a Nazi criminal and is even more flaggergasted at Hannah's admission of full responsibility for writing what she had not written. It is only a ploy to hide her dark secret: she is illiterate. Hannah in the past refuses promotion that would give her authority to kill the women directly. Instead she takes in the weak, sickly women and has them read to her before they are sent to the gas chambers and so makes the last days of the women bearable. She remains gripped in panic for fear of being discovered to be illiterate. As Hanna is sentenced to life imprisonment, Michael could have saved her by disclosing her secret. Instead he makes the choice to withhold what he knows to guard his own connection with a Nazi criminal. Is this betrayal or hiding connections with a war criminal? His buried emotions corrode him continuously. Michael is also confronted by legal history, his own area of research. Following the argument on the prohibition of retroactive justice '… Was it sufficient for the ordinances under which the camp guards and enforcers were convicted or 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 and that they were not applied to them.' Part III is on the end of Michael's studies, beginning of his training and interest in history and sociology. The time coincides with a students' upheaval, the real reason of which is '….coming to grip with the Nazi past.' Sometimes Michael thinks 'that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for generational conflict that drove the students' movement but merely the form it took.' More importantly, '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?' Hannah survives her twenty years of imprisonment. She is now literate and writes in a childish way and has been reading about camp history and Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Tadeusz Borowski Machael. In the meantime, Michael with fond feelings arranges for Hannah employment and a place to stay once out of prison. In 1984, after twenty years as Hannah is about to be released, she once again disappears, this time for ever. The prison warden informs Michael that Hannah has left for him an assignment: to give all her money to the survivors of the church fire. Michael is heartbroken over the loss of Hannah. He faithfully carries out her wishes. He visits the surviving Jewish woman who is then living in New York She is the writer of the book on the last death march from Auschwitz. She hears Michael, takes the tin but refuses to take the money in it, for that would mean granting Hannah absolution. She asks him to donate the money as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for aiding literacy, in Hannah's name. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first and last time. The Reader is a poignant story of love as beautiful as a well orchestrated symphony. The reading of the book is like riding a horse gracious and graceful, with an interplay of bodily sensibilities in harmony with mental capabilities within the ambit of Spinozistic philosophy.
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