The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

Published by Phoenix. 216 pages

Books open up different possibilities, take one into lives that we'd otherwise not experience. And many like this one challenge our habitualised perceptions and cause one to pause and take notice. 

Fifteen year old Michael Berg's chance meeting with Hanna Schmitz, an older woman who had helped him when he was ill, soon leads to an affair. He spends a lot of time with her, blames himself for any fight that springs up between them. Hanna however is a closed book, irritable and loving in turns and very eager to have Micheal read to her. Then one day she just disappears. All this has a huge impact on young Michael who takes upon himself the guilt for the way things turned out. Years later when he's in law school, Michael sees Hanna at a trial for war crimes and learns that she had been a guard at the Auschwitz camp. The guilt and anger at his parent's generation for being mere spectators to the Holocaust and so passively aiding it, is only enhanced by this discovery. He learns things about Hanna during the trial, some that pain him more and some that could actually help clear her of certain false charges. And that's all I can mention without revealing more of the plot. 

So The Reader is about .. adolescence, relationships, the German guilt about the Final Solution. An analysis of post war Germany, of society during Nazi rule and its impact on future generations. It does this in a straightforward manner. So while it isn't a Holocaust novel, this book attempts to address the aftermath. The narrative is from Michael's perspective, so we never learn why Hanna made certain choices, or get access to her consciousness except through the few direct conversations. We 'know' the Holocaust visually through movies like Schindler's List and through Anne Frank's journal, fiction like The Book Thief. A POV from the other side, like that of SS guards like Hanna or of ordinary stoic German citizens who lived through it all is what I'd like to read about.

It's a well written book anyway, simple style yet complex for the issues it talks about. One to be read and discussed rather than be reviewed.

Excerpts

I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such antipication when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill?
~

Regaining my confidence had nothing to do with success; every goal I set for myself, every recognition I craved made anything I actually did seem paltry by comparison, and whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.
~

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 adopted a posture of arrogant superiority. I behaved as if nothing could touch, shake or confuse me.
~

'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.