Now a professor of legal history, Michael researches the question of law in the Third Reich and comes to appreciate how the German present is pregnant with the past, "the legacy of the past which brands us and with which we must live." He also suffers from insomnia and begins to read his favorite books aloud into a tape recorder, starting with the Odyssey, in which "Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again." He sends these tapes to Hanna in prison and thus resumes the old bond between the two of them. The third part chronicles Michael's increasing emotional numbness, which ruins his marriage-he had not told his wife about Hanna, and his continued feelings for her imprison him. That was why she had had people read to her … That was why she had admitted to writing the report in order to escape a confrontation with an expert." She is sentenced to life in prison. Belatedly, Michael understands: "Hanna could neither read nor write.
THE READER BY BERNHARD SCHLINK CITE TRIAL
During the trial it becomes clear that Hanna has a secret that is, to her, more shameful than murder, something she could use in her self-defense to invalidate some of the charges but that she chooses not to divulge. Five former concentration camp guards are on trial, and to Michael's surprise, Hanna is amongst them. Later, Michael is studying law and his professor asks a seminar group to attend one of the belated Nazi war crime trials.
The novel's second part begins with Michael describing the emotional aftermath of his relationship with Hanna and his subsequent inability to commit to anyone or anything possibly important enough to lose. Why hadn't I jumped up immediately when she stood there and run to her! This one moment summed up all my halfheartedness of the past months, which had produced my denial of her, and my betrayal." After a moment that confronts Michael with his own ambivalence regarding his loyalty to Hanna, she disappears, and Michael is overcome with guilt and loss: "But even worse than my physical desire was my sense of guilt. Soon a routine develops that consists of a ritual of reading aloud (Michael reads to Hanna, at her request), taking showers, and making love. I fled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the street." For a fraction of a second I stood there, face burning. I can't describe what kind of look it was-surprised, skeptical, knowing, reproachful.
As she was reaching for the other stocking, she paused, turned towards the door, and looked straight at me. Prompted by his mother, Michael later visits the woman to thank her and is drawn into a love affair with her: "She felt me looking at her. He is rescued by a stranger, a woman about 20 years his senior, who helps him to wash up and walks him home. The novel begins in 1958 with the 15-year-old protagonist, Michael Berg, suffering from hepatitis and becoming sick in the street one day on his way home from school.
This aspect had emerged by 1995 as the proper theme of the narrative: Germany's relationship to its own past and the concomitant examination of questions of culpability and transmission of cultural memory.Īs Ernestine Schlant, in The Language of Silence (1999), her seminal examination of contemporary German literature engaging the Holocaust, writes: " shows a thorough acquaintance with all the issues addressed in the 'literature about fathers and mothers' and recapitulates and simultaneously criticizes them." Schlant is alluding to the novel's position in a larger cultural dialogue that, as a belated continuation and intensification of efforts first made in the later 1960s, focused on examining the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust questions of individual and potential collective guilt the silence maintained about the Nazi era in early post- World War II (West) Germany and the attempts to discuss appropriate channels for the future transmission of Holocaust memory. The Reader (1997 Der Vorleser, 1995) expands on an ancillary aspect of Bernhard Schlink's earlier work in the genre of detective fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
