[In the following review, Cheyette offers a generally positive assessment of The Reader, but asserts that the novel's evocation of Jewish victimhood is inadequate.]

At one point in The Reader, the book's narrator, Michael Berg, fears that he has descended into platitude. Berg, at the age of sixteen, has fallen in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. The sentimental version of boyish sexual awakening (sometimes with an older woman) is a staple of Hollywood cinema, though it also informs much serious nineteenth-century European literature. As he looks back on his intense affair with Hanna, after a thirty-year gap, Berg is aware that his memories have been undermined by “fantasized images”. Later on, he calls on “reality” to “drive out the clichés”. What makes this novel so compelling is precisely the quality of rereading past events so as to avoid turning agonized recollections into comfortable banalities. Bernhard Schlink, a professor of law at the University of Berlin, is also a crime writer, which is presumably one reason why he is so suspicious of the merely formulaic.

Berg is completely transformed by his relationship with Hanna and, at the beginning of their love-making, forgets “the world in the recesses of the body”. Their undiminished ardour, which takes the form of incessant bathing, reading the classics and occasional brutality (from Hanna), is subtly erotic and begins to resonate with a broader set of preoccupations. Salvific waters and a civilizing literacy, coupled with an underlying violence, gradually develop into a story about postwar Germany and its supposedly redemptive relationship with the past. Berg matures and becomes overly cerebral, but the gruff Hanna is able to control him in much the same way that an overbearing mother manipulates her son. Hanna calls Berg “kid” throughout their liaison (a nice touch in this excellent translation), and they even check into a hotel as mother and son. Their break-up eventually becomes symbolic of a wider generational divide.

At the end of the first part of this triptych, Hanna mysteriously disappears. Virtually overnight, she leaves her run down apartment and her job as a tram-conductor. Berg is permanently deformed by his time with Hanna, and he learns “never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose”. The coldness of his subsequent romances and marriage, and his own self-alienation, all begin to speak to a wider post-war German malaise. “Waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you”, we are told, but is this about Berg or his homeland? His conflicted sense of feeling “perpetually confident and insecure” also has an extended resonance. The emotionally crippled Berg has “no difficulty with anything. Everything was easy; nothing weighed heavily.” But it is this soothing weightlessness, both national and personal, which Schlink wishes the reader to question.

By Part Two, Hanna is standing trial as a concentration-camp guard, and Berg, a law student, is coincidentally studying the case. This takes place in the mid-1960s, seven years after the end of his relationship with Hanna, about whom he is still guiltily obsessed. The refusal to come to terms with the past, beyond the usual clichés, is now skillfully embodied in Berg's darker understanding of Hanna. The mature Berg mocks his youthful need to “explore the past”, and contrasts such banal certainties with his troubled, ambiguous and often amoral attachment to Hanna. Even when he hears the worst of her crimes, he can hardly separate himself from her, for she has, on a psychic level, shaped his emotional life. But Schlink cleverly avoids easy allegory. The point is that Berg's recollections of Hanna are “overlaid” by the “faces she had later”. The novel becomes a palimpsest of memory, bringing together different versions of the past which have to be painfully weighed one against the other.

Schlink is all too conscious of the dangers of understanding the past, both from Hanna's viewpoint and from that of those murdered in the concentration camps. In one reading of her exploits—which gives the novel its final twist—Hanna is essentially a victim of her own unwarranted pride and shame. Her penchant for uniforms again guiltily attracts Berg, and he is well aware of her pornographic counterparts in this regard. But Schlink wants his readers to work hard at having an emotional involvement with the past that goes beyond the customary pieties or the commonplace images which disable feeling.

The only false note comes in the final section, when Schlink, rather forcedly, introduces a Jewish witness to the horrors of the camp, so as to give the novel some moral ballast. If morality, however, only resides in the victims of Nazism, then his account of contemporary Germany seems unnecessarily cynical. Perhaps the point is that readers of history must make themselves vulnerable in connection with the past. But if this is the case, why exclude the Jewish victims (as the novel's ultimately banal conscience) from this struggle? Such is the importance of The Reader that, in the end, we expect far more from it than any work of fiction could possibly offer.