learned to read and write. In the novel's conclusion, Hanna is granted early release, but, the day before Michael arrives to pick her up, she hangs herself. Michael notices that Hanna has amassed a small library of Holocaust literature in her cell and realizes that, presumably, her newly gained literacy has been used to understand the horrifying implications of her Nazi collaboration.

Schlink followed The Reader with Flights of Love, a volume of seven short stories nominally grouped around the theme of love but mainly concerned with unsavory aspects of obsession, conflicts of conscience, and infidelity. In “Das Mädchen mit der Eidechse” (“Girl with Lizard”), a young law student is preoccupied with a mysterious painting. He soon discovers that the painting was produced by a well-known Jewish artist and was stolen by his father, a former Nazi, during the German invasion of Strasbourg, leaving the son to grapple with issues of guilt and complicity. Another story, “Beschneidung” (“The Circumcision”), revolves around the strained relationship between an American Jewish woman—a descendant of Holocaust survivors—and a German law student who, after facing damning criticism of his German heritage, undergoes circumcision in a futile effort to placate the woman and her disapproving family. “Der Seitensprung” (“A Little Fling”) involves a man from West Germany and his friendship with a couple from the East, which disintegrates after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revealing Cold War political betrayals between the friends. In “Der Andere” (“The Other Man”), a widower learns that his late wife has been unfaithful and, in an effort to understand the relationship, he writes to her former lover in the guise of his deceased wife. In “Zuckererbsen” (“Sugar Peas”), a successful German architect and artist is unfaithful to his wife and two lovers and, after he is accidentally handicapped, must atone for his duplicity by relinquishing his work and fortune to his scornful lovers, who have unified to take their revenge.

Although The Reader and Flights of Love are his only two fictional works to receive English translation, Schlink began his literary career in the 1980s with Selbs Justiz (1987), the first in a trilogy of German-language crime novels that includes Selbs Betrug (1992) and Selbs Mord (2001). Selb, the protagonist of each work in the series, is a former Nazi prosecutor turned private detective whose investigations are set against the historical background of postwar Germany and the moral complexities of the Holocaust and reconstruction. In Selbs Justiz, Selb learns of his unwitting role in the use of Jewish slave labor and several unjust executions during the war. In the tradition of American pulp detective fiction, Selb lives dangerously and exhibits a weakness for cigarettes, alcohol, and female companionship. The punning titles of this series play on the German word “selb,” which means “self,” and each novel draws attention to the German dilemma of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, or coming to terms with the past. In Die gordische Schleife (1988), another of Schlink's crime thrillers, the protagonist, a lawyer named Georg Schlink, discovers his complicity in an industrial espionage scheme and struggles to understand the true identity of those around him and, significantly, his own identity. Schlink has also published several nonfiction works regarding German law including Abwägung im Verfassungsrecht (1976) and Die Amtshilfe: ein Beitrag zu einer Lehre von der Gewaltenteilung in der Verwaltung (1982) as well as co-editing Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (2000), a collection of constitutional theory from the Weimar period.

Critical Reception

Schlink has earned a wide audience in Germany with his popular mysteries, and the publication of The Reader has brought him international fame and recognition as one of Germany's finest contemporary authors. The German newspaper Der Spiegel has even hailed The Reader as one of the greatest German literary works since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. The English translation of Schlink's novel, buoyed by the endorsement of American talk show host Oprah Winfrey's popular book club, has garnered enthusiastic reviews in the United States, with critics praising Schlink's scrupulous, earnest prose and his powerful examination of the moral ambiguities facing postwar Germans. Though some reviewers have regarded the novel as an unflinching national allegory, others have found serious flaws in its implicit suggestion that Hanna's illiteracy, a point of readerly sympathy, accounts for her poor life choices and, ultimately, her barbaric wartime deeds. Several commentators have noted that Germany boasted one of the highest literacy rates in Europe and many top Nazi officers were highly educated and eminently cultured, thus debunking any notion that the Holocaust was the work of unsophisticated, uneducated German dupes. In addition, some critics have found the novel's moral center to be so ambiguous and equivocal that no serious conclusions about the culpability, or innocence, of individual Germans can be drawn from the work, thus trivializing Holocaust guilt altogether. Most reviewers, however, have commended Schlink's method of raising difficult questions and allowing his readers to draw their own ethical conclusions. Flights of Love, though treated by many as a companion to The Reader, has received mixed critical assessments. While some critics have approved of Schlink's minimalist style and his investigations into the influence of modern German history on individual lives and relationships, others have found his stories to be emotionally insubstantial, unconvincing, and artlessly didactic.