SOURCE: Hoffman, Eva. “The Uses of Illiteracy.” New Republic 218, no. 12 (23 March 1998): 33-6.

[In the following review, Hoffman praises Schlink's narrative in The Reader, but cites shortcomings in Schlink's study of Hanna's subjective states and the novel's suggestion that literacy engenders moral cultivation.]

Several years ago I was asked to participate in a public discussion with a German author who had written a memoir about the anguish and the guilt of growing up as a daughter of a minor Nazi functionary. I spent some time wondering whether I could work up the requisite sympathy for her plight; and I came to the conclusion that sympathy was warranted. As I read more memoirs and studies on this subject, I began to think that the difficulties faced by the “second generation” in Germany were in their way as painful as the problems often experienced by children of Holocaust survivors. For the inheritors of the Nazi legacy, a moral life seemed to require a condemnation of their parents—an excruciating, an almost impossible, conflict. How do you feel about someone you love whom you have a duty to hate?

This predicament is at the heart of The Reader, a brief, restrained novel by Bernhard Schlink. It has been published to great acclaim in several European countries; and its success—following on the enraptured reception of The Emigrants, another semifictional work by a German writer, W. G. Sebald, that obliquely explores Holocaust themes—undoubtedly reflects the new fascination with the role and the responsibility of ordinary Germans in that terrible crime.

Most fiction about the Holocaust begins with the experience of victims and survivors. Schlink proposes to examine, from the perspective of the second generation, the mind and the darkly ambiguous past of a perpetrator. And unlike many novels on that subject, which attempt to recreate the inner world of their characters through linguistic and imaginative intensity, The Reader works more like a fictionalized essay, or even a polemic, about the figure at its center. Schlink, who was born in 1944, is the author of crime fiction, as well as a professor of law at the University of Berlin and a judge, and his new work bears the hallmarks of his favored genre. The prose (in an admirably controlled translation by Carol Brown Janeway) is clear and spare, the chapters short, the plot tight and streamlined. But the crime in this novel is enormous enough to call for philosophical investigation; and within the stylistic framework of a swiftly paced detective story, Schlink has indeed composed a kind of philosophical parable.

In a way, The Reader is a very old-fashioned work. Its tone is sincere to the point of earnestness, its formulations are classical, its mode of address frankly direct. It is as if the gravity of the subject precludes fictive games or a purely aesthetic suspension of disbelief. But such a strategy carries its own dangers. The novel is serious, searching, sometimes daring; and its meditations gratifyingly combine highmindedness and accessibility. Yet the seeming transparency conceals an odd opaqueness. There are unspoken implications and narrative gaps that leave this reader, at least, very uneasy.

The events in The Reader are recounted by one Michael Berg, the novel's governing consciousness as well as its narrator, through a series of compressed, sharply etched recollections. Act One, as it were, takes place in an unnamed German city in the 1950s. It opens with an infection and an illicit love affair. The narrator, who is 15 years old at the time, suffers a racking attack of hepatitis on the street and is rescued by an older woman named Hanna. He finds himself almost hypnotically drawn to her, and when he goes back to thank her, she offers herself sexually, without fuss or apology. Despite the disparity in their ages—Hanna is 36 and old enough to be his mother—the liaison unfolds with a sense of rightness, with a fierce inevitability.

Hanna is convincingly portrayed as a woman whose attractiveness resides in her sturdiness and her physical ease, in a lack of selfconsciousness that amounts either to obliviousness or a kind of integrity. The romance takes place in an encapsulated space in which ordinary rules of social intercourse are suspended. Hanna tells the narrator almost nothing about herself, except that she works as a streetcar conductor. He can carry on the affair only if she remains sealed off from his family and schoolmates. Their meetings consist mostly of bathing and lovemaking. Then, at her behest, the ritual begins to include intimate literary sessions, in which the narrator reads to her as a prelude to sex.

Schlink evokes the atmosphere in which the affair takes place—the shabby grandeur of Hanna's building, the odorous languor of her apartment, the slow luxury of the erotic encounters—in deft, economical strokes. In a way, the fictional apparatus of the novel is minimal. There are few extended scenes, few moments of heightened metaphoric density or “thick description.” Indeed, for all the sensuality of the early tableaux, The Reader gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view.

In describing the emotional calculus of the affair, Schlink keeps turning the lens so that the picture falls into different configurations. Initially Hanna easily dominates her young lover, whom she calls “kid,” through sheer sexual authority. In worldly terms, however, the advantage is all on his side. He comes from a proper, chilly, middle-class family—his father is a philosopher, an expert on Kant—and he is on his way to a good education and a successful career. Hanna envies and admires his access to these goods, and she is hungry for the books he shares with her. As the affair progresses, the balance of power shifts. She allows him to take the lead in various activities and suffers moments of inexplicable pique. He learns that he has the power to hurt her. As he is gradually drawn into the life of his peers, he begins, in imperceptible ways, to distance himself from her, to “disavow” her. Then one day, for no apparent reason, Hanna leaves her job and vanishes.

Act Two consists of detection and discovery; and in order to make the book intelligible, some of the surprises must be disclosed here. A few years after Hanna's disappearance, the narrator, who has started studying law, recognizes her as one of the defendants in a trial of former concentration camp guards that he is observing. It transpires that Hanna served as a guard in Auschwitz and in a “small camp near Cracow.” Even more horribly, she was one of several wardens accompanying a group of Jewish women on a death march. Along with the others, she failed to come to the prisoners' rescue when they were set on fire during a night-time bombing raid and burned to death in a locked village church.

But Hanna has also another secret, which the narrator deduces from various retrospective clues. It is that she is illiterate. Once he stumbles on the solution to this riddle, much that was puzzling about his former lover—her bafflement, her rage—begins to make sense. The narrator also realizes that, while by any overt measure her wartime deeds are the far more awful fact, for Hanna her illiteracy is her really shameful secret, the prior wound that determines all her subsequent decisions. It is her illiteracy that induces her to sign up with the SS in the first place, rather than risk exposure in the Siemens factory where she works. It is the same dread of humiliation that forces her to flee her street conductor's job when she is offered promotion, and leads her to incriminate herself in court for transgressions that she did not commit and to accept a harsher sentence than her less honest and more brazen codefendants.

Is she, then, a kind of victim herself? The narrator is careful to avoid this equation; but the two revelations about Hanna leave him with a distressing double vision. She emerges as a perpetrator of atrocities, and she is someone driven to protect her dignity and her psychic survival. The ambiguities of her actions converge on the charged trope of reading, as a witness testifies that in the concentration camp Hanna singled out the most frail inmates and ordered them to read to her before they were transported to Auschwitz. To the audience and the jury at the trial, this seems like a particularly perverse form of cruelty. To the narrator, the twisted rite carries suggestions of Hanna's vulnerability, and perhaps even of her kindness: he believes that she chose the most delicate inmates in order to make the last months before their deaths more bearable.

Who, then, is Hanna, and which evidence is the narrator to trust? Is she a temperamental sadist, or a marginal person acting out of defensiveness and fear? A callous manipulator who abused him during their affair, or a woman moved by confusion and need? The narrator believes that Hanna's crimes deserve punishment; and yet he cannot see her as wholly culpable or wholly evil. The latter part of the novel is given over to Michael Berg's struggle, as he tries to come to terms with these wrenching paradoxes and the history that Hanna signifies.

To some extent, the stages of his journey parallel the wider postwar response to the Holocaust. His first encounter with the details of life in the camps plunges him into a state of shock, followed by a kind of deadly numbness—a state of paralysis, he provocatively suggests, that characterized everyone in the camps themselves, from the inmates to the guards. He has distressing fantasies of Hanna as a pornographic Nazi mistress. He becomes alert to signs of nastiness and to traces of Nazism in the ordinary world around him. He visits a concentration camp and is ashamed of his inability to envision what happened there, and of his desire afterwards to find a good restaurant. A few years after the trial, the narrator withdraws from the active practice of law, because he is unable to play the part of the prosecution or the defense; he has witnessed a public miscarriage of justice in Hanna's trial, and he finds private truth too complex for unequivocal judgment. For all his attempts to purge Hanna from his mind, his marriage and his other relationships fail as a consequence of her primacy in his psyche.

But even as he observes his fastidious sensitivities, the narrator questions the authenticity of his sentiments. Schlink is astute about the postures adopted by his contemporaries toward the Holocaust: the reduction of catastrophe to a few stark images, the injunction not to “compare the incomparable,” the temptations of facile identification or righteousness. “That some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame, and guilt—was that all there was to it now?” the narrator rhetorically asks, and it is the chief merit of The Reader that it refuses to accept this as the end of the matter, and tries to move its inquiry beyond awe or piety.

In the last sections of the novel, 20 years are telescoped into a few dramatic turns of narrative. Eight years into Hanna's imprisonment, Michael Berg begins to read to her again, by means of a tape-recorder, and sends the cassettes to her without any comment. Some time later, he starts receiving clumsily handwritten notes from her, with remarks on the books that he has chosen. Hanna has become literate, and turns out to be a perceptive if uneducated critic.

A decade later, Hanna's plea for clemency is granted and the narrator has to contemplate, with considerable reluctance, her reentry into his life. He visits her in prison on a single occasion, to find an aging and no longer desirable woman. Then, the day before her release, he learns that she has committed suicide. Her death is yet another enigma for him to “read,” to subject to the uncertainties of interpretation. But the scheme of the novel strongly suggests that Hanna killed herself partly as a result of her late-won literacy, because she could not bear to know what she had done. The shelf in her cell contains books on the Holocaust, which presumably allowed her finally to grasp the full measure of the horror in which she participated.

There is still a further twist of the plot, which for the narrator constitutes a kind of catharsis and reconciliation. How we read this narrative as a whole depends very much on what we make of the central theme of reading and its symbolic uses in the novel. Schlink plays variations on this motif with ingenuity, and in at least two registers. In one, “reading” is treated in its metaphoric sense, as an exercise in decoding and interpreting; and in this sense the novel is about the problem of reading, the difficulties of fathoming human character, motivations, deeds. Schlink is subtle about the dynamics of power inherent in this semiotic transaction. In one sense, Hanna looms powerfully over the narrator's life; the past infects and burdens the present. At the same time, however, his generational position confers on him an advantage, since it places him in the role of the observer, the analyst, the critic—the superior reader.

He may judge; she may only be judged. Yet the narrator recognizes that his position is not only a form of safety, but also a form of bad faith. This is one of the novel's finer discriminations. He is above suspicion because he is unimplicated and untested by history. By the more intimate criteria of his conscience, however, he is neither completely self-knowing nor completely blameless. In entering into the affair with Hanna, he was driven by obscure, half-conscious impulses; and when she became inconvenient, he disowned and betrayed her. He is capable of cold detachment, which masquerades as generalized compassion. It is only when he becomes a writer as well as a reader that he puts himself on the line, in the position of engagement. And it is when he submits his stories to Hanna's readings that he accords her parity, or the right to judge him as well.

The other strand of the “reading” theme has to do with the word's literal meaning, and all its resonances of erudition, taste, culture; and it is in his treatment of this seemingly innocent motif that Schlink enters murkier waters. In linking illiteracy and brutality, Schlink is introducing explanatory ideas about the Holocaust that have been deeply discredited precisely by that event. It has been noted often enough that reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven did not prevent the Nazi elite from planning or executing genocide; and after such lessons, the uncritical belief that good books make good people is rather hard to sustain.

The Reader is clearly designed as a deliberate countermove in this argument. Culture civilizes, Schlink seems to insist; and ignorance can make us barbaric. The narrator's love of literature is closely tied to his ethical refinement. Moreover, as if to underscore his intention to reclaim literature from post-Holocaust disillusionment, Schlink weighs the narrator's list heavily toward German classics—the literary tradition which, for some, was most tainted by association. Conversely, Hanna's illiteracy in the novel is supposed to account for a moral obtuseness so extreme as to render irrelevant the notions of culpability and responsible choice. The possibility that she may have done something wrong does not occur to her until the trial, and her moral sense develops only with her access to the written word.

The narrative here seems to be based on some highly questionable assumptions. Is it plausible to suppose that this woman did not understand the meaning of her work in the camps because she did not get a proper education? That she would have been less willing to inflict suffering if she had gone to high school? That she could not respond to the suffering around her because she had not read poetry?

To be fair, this is not quite what the novel suggests; illiteracy in the story stands not only for the deficiency of book-learning, but also for the inability to decipher the world and the attendant helplessness. Owing to her insulation, Hanna gets caught in situations that she has not chosen, and whose wider context, meanings, implications she cannot grasp. Nor is this a premise to be dismissed too glibly. Culture may not be a reliable agent of benignness; but severe cultural deprivation may certainly have malign effects. And yet Schlink's invention remains hard to justify. The notion that Hanna literally did not know what she was doing, that she was blind to the extremities of brutality around her, because she could not read, is a dubious premise for a novel, and for a view of the catastrophe.

The problem with The Reader is that Hanna's illiteracy remains an empty sign, a notional explanation much too cool for the novel's diabolical subject. Hanna's character in the entire story is filtered through the narrator's vision and voice; but her wartime past in particular is presented so sparsely, and at such a speculative remove, that the force of her ignorance in that situation is never persuasively shown. In order to give credence to the connection between illiteracy and character, we would need a fuller, more strenuous recreation of her activity in the camps, her feelings, her impressions, her reactions, the clash of her naïveté with her complicity in the horror.

When Schlink does give us glimpses of Hanna's inner life, he can be very effective. He describes the crucial episode in the death march both from her standpoint and from the standpoint of her victims, and has the narrator conjecture about her fear and confusion, as the locked church turns into a burning inferno. This is harrowing to read. Our first instinct is to recoil from having to imagine Hanna's part in this scene; and yet the unflinching calm with which her minute calculations are reconstructed forces us to acknowledge the possibility of someone in her position making deadly mistakes out of disorientation, choicelessness, panic. Evil works in many ways, and can be the result of an individual's weakness as well as an individual's strength. From fragments of her own testimony, it is clear that Hanna isn't sure even in the courtroom how she could have acted differently, nor can anyone tell her.

But such close-ups are rare. Most of the time, Hanna is observed in a neutral middle distance, which obviates the necessity of full engagement. Schlink has created a protagonist endowed with a conveniently partial knowledge of the “problem” character. The narrator knows Hanna enough to see her as fleshly, frightened, human; but he does not have enough access to her subjectivity or her past to allow him to grapple directly with the reality of her actions. In purely fictional terms, Hanna is most vividly portrayed as a lover, but we see nothing of her sinister work in the camps. This is an evasion, and it undermines the novel's case for, or about, Hanna. The novel's presentation of that case is unsupported by the kind of exploration that would permit us to see Hanna as a three-dimensional figure; and therefore we are left with the suspicion that the impulse to exonerate her, so palpable in the novel, is based on spurious grounds and partial evidence.

Still, the quandary posed in Schlink's novel is real enough, and it does not admit of easy resolution. How are we to understand someone such as Hanna—an ordinary person capable of desire and yearning, who turns her hand to monstrous work for a time? By what criteria is she to be appraised, and what would constitute true justice toward her? What is demanded of us in retribution or compassion? The conclusion of the book does not entail simple forgiveness. Instead, the narrator decides to treat Hanna as a free person in the Kantian sense—that is, as someone responsible for all her choices. (This is a novel for which the Prolegomenon to a Metaphysics of Morals would make useful background reading.) But he also realizes that he cannot undo the ties that bind him to Hanna. He must accept the consequences of his Oedipal love, even if he didn't know who it was exactly that he loved.

Schlink is at his best in analyzing the symptoms and the syndromes of the second generation: its convolutions of conscience, its tormented search for truth, its comfortable self-deceptions. He has the courage to say a few honest things about delicate and difficult matters, and to admit ambivalence about a subject which in our time stands for moral absolutes. The Reader does not carry its investigation into the destructive side of the human soul far enough, but in trying to come to terms with the most forbidding aspects of the Holocaust, it offers a gravity of purpose, an acknowledgment of complexity, and a sober, measured tone. It deserves a commensurate reader.