"The Reader" is an intensely moving novella in which Michael, a fifteen-year old German boy, falls in love with a thirty-six-year old woman, Hanna, a streetcar conductor. A story as old as the hills, yet their affair became a life-altering event for both of them. The narrative is divided into three sections: one, the affair, two, Hanna's trial as the perpetrator of war crimes atrocities while she was serving as an SS guard in concentration camps, and three, Hanna's years of imprisonment following the trial and Michael's half-life seeking answers and salvation.
In Part One Michael thinks he has betrayed Hanna by disavowal, by not admitting her existence to his friends. That is nothing compared to his betrayals of her during the trial and in her prison years. In the sections of the book in which Michael is trying to probe his own moral predicaments and dilemmas, his philosophical positions, his reasoning is complicated and convoluted.
He goes to the judge to give him information, and he chickens out. He goes to his father and is satisfied with non-answers to his problems. He lacks moral courage and conviction and is willing to let events take their course. It is not a story of redemption, and no one gets off easy in this sad story.
Michael attended all of Hanna's long trial and watched her tortured and damaging testimony. She realized he was in the courtroom but didn't acknowledge him. Hanna had a cold-blooded streak, and Michael had a selfish, cowardly stripe.
When they first met he could see her tough side, her coldness at times. She called him, at first sarcastically "kid," but it becomes obvious that she loved him. She loved to be read to, and he read serious stuff to her. When she left him, he vowed "never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose." In later life he can't get over two parts of his life: Hanna and the trial.
The book gives no easy answers. We cannot forgive Hanna for what she did. She had a secret that she tried desperately to keep.
I think each reader will come away from this book with a different outlook, different opinions, different conclusions, but with a recognition of how real the two people have become and how they continue to inhabit and haunt our minds.
The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink