[In the following essay, Conway examines the moral dimensions of compassion in The Reader, drawing upon Martha Nussbaum's definition of compassion as a philosophical model.]

Human relationships are shaped decisively by how we respond to each other's suffering. Nearly all religious traditions emphasize that compassion, defined in a preliminary way as the emotional ability to be moved by the suffering of others, marks the spiritual development of both individuals and communities. But precisely because compassion is so widely praised, questions about its limits are often neglected. Are there instances when compassion must be checked or set aside? Is there something misguided about responding compassionately to people in certain situations? Are there, in short, appropriate limits to compassion?

In a recent, highly acclaimed German novel, The Reader,¹ Bernard Schlink probes one possible limit: moral condemnation. The narrator (and main character of the story) struggles with the tension between compassion and condemnation as he witnesses the suffering of a proud woman desperately trying to hide the fact that she cannot read, an inability causing profound shame that dominates her entire life. His impulse to condemn her arises from moral outrage over the fact that this same woman willingly participated in the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust as a concentration camp guard. Complicating an already combustible emotional mix is the fact that, years earlier, when he was fifteen and she in her mid-thirties, the two were lovers.

Part of the appeal of The Reader stems from the fact that its struggle with the issue of compassion and moral condemnation is a salient one. We wrestle with this problem in our everyday lives, our judicial system, our public policy. Compassion for friends, associates, even strangers, is sometimes difficult, but compassion for those who commit moral crimes is extraordinarily rare, provocative, and questionable. The popularity of this novel and other works similar to it, such as Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking,² is rooted in the unsettled and largely unexamined tension between the claim of compassion and the need for moral judgment.

I want to investigate such contested, emotional terrain from two starting points: by summarizing the analysis of compassion set forth by Martha Nussbaum in several of her recent books, and then by testing her understanding against the grain of The Reader.³ I focus on Nussbaum's analysis of compassion for several reasons: primarily because it is a prominent one in contemporary philosophy; additionally because Nussbaum herself finds it necessary to test her understanding of compassion against particular and provocative cases in literature and in the courts—precisely the kind of case The Reader provides; and, finally, because Nussbaum's analysis addresses the issue of the limits of compassion. My interest in comparing her analysis with The Reader stems from the suspicion that this novel challenges Nussbaum's understanding of compassion in some significant ways. I think the author comes to a different conclusion than Nussbaum and shows the possibility of reconciling moral condemnation and compassion on grounds other than she indicates.

Nussbaum traces her understanding of compassion back to Aristotle.⁴ Following him, she argues that compassion involves three key recognitions. First, it entails the belief that another person is suffering some significant pain or misfortune. We feel compassion for someone who undergoes a serious illness or bears the loss of a loved one but not for a motorist who is ticketed or a person who sneezes. Second, compassion entails the belief that the other person is suffering “some significant pain or misfortune in a way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame” (CH [Cultivating Humanity], pp. 90-91). The claim here is that we do not feel compassion for those who are responsible for their own misery. Third, compassion requires a sense of one's own vulnerability to misfortune. “To respond with compassion, I must be willing to entertain the thought that this suffering person might be me” (CH, p. 91). Compassion arises from the recognition of a shared humanity—that we are frail, vulnerable creatures who depend in many ways for our well-being upon circumstances not fully under our control.

I have little trouble granting the first and third criteria; the second qualification, however, is more problematic. One can appreciate, of course, the force behind the claim that in order to feel compassion the suffering of the other must not be significantly self-inflicted. In point of fact, we tend not to feel compassion for those who suffer because of their own carelessness, avoidable ignorance, or reckless behavior. Lack of compassion for the moral criminal derives, in large part, from the same logic: if people suffer as a consequence of their own moral wrongdoing, then this suffering is self-incurred. Since they are responsible for the pain they are in, compassion is diminished. I am not arguing that this logic is justified; I am simply agreeing with Nussbaum that such an Aristotelian analysis of compassion accords closely with the belief system embedded in the experience of many, if not most, people. About such circumstances, we often hear comments like the following: “Well, they should have known better,” or “They should have thought of these things before they acted,” or “They made their bed, now they have to lie in it.”

An obvious strength of Nussbaum's understanding of compassion is that it accords so well with common experience, with how we actually feel. We do distinguish situations that seem to warrant compassion from others that do not. We do find it difficult to feel compassion for those judged guilty of morally heinous acts. But while I grant the correspondence of Nussbaum's (and Aristotle's) analysis of compassion to the way many people feel, the “correctness” of this correspondence may constitute more of a weakness than a strength. Her understanding of compassion reflects rather than challenges established patterns of feeling. On Nussbaum's account, compassion is selective; some instances of human suffering evoke and merit compassion; others do not. She excludes compassion for the moral criminal in proportion to the degree that the person intentionally and knowingly acted wrongly.

The problematic nature of this kind of exclusion resides at the heart of The Reader, as a more detailed account of the book may show. Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has a short but passionate affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmidt, in post-war Berlin. It is the boy's first sexual experience—thrillingly sensual, yet strange. Its strangeness lies partly in the fact that in the midst of tender baths, meals, and love-making, the relationship centrally revolves around the act of reading. Michael becomes Hanna's reader; they spend countless hours moving though Homer's Odyssey, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and other works from Michael's high school curriculum. Then, as accidentally as the affair began, the relationship ends for no apparent reason. Without good-bye or explanation, Hanna leaves for an unknown destination.

Years later, Michael is studying law. For one of his seminars, which focuses on the legal issues surrounding the trials of Nazi war criminals, he attends the trial of five women accused of crimes committed while they were concentration camp guards. In addition to selecting women no longer fit for work to be dispatched from the work camp to Auschwitz (where they would almost certainly be gassed), the guards stand accused of leading camp inmates on a horrendous “death march” during the last stages of the war. The march resulted in the fiery death of nearly all the prisoners within a bombed church, whose doors the guards do not unlock. On the first day of the trial, Michael immediately recognizes one of the defendants as Hanna.

The courtroom is the first stage of a lifelong trial in which Michael wrestles with reconciling his love for this woman with the undeniable horror of her acts. His love forces him to question how she could have participated in these acts; his horror at these deeds forces him to question how he could have ever loved her and what this love says about him. Part of the power of the novel is that it operates in the midst of this conflict, refusing to simplify the tension. It does not dismiss the need for moral judgment about Hanna's acts, yet it also refuses to sacrifice compassion.

Michael's compassion for Hanna evidences itself in many ways. Throughout her trial, he is acutely aware of her emotional pain—her shame, anger, and exhaustion. After her sentence and incarceration, he again becomes her reader, recording and sending her tapes of books. Even after Hanna's death, he carries out her final wishes. Nonetheless, his compassion for her is conflicted, uneasy, and partial. He sends the tapes but never includes a letter or personal message. He thinks of her often but does not visit her in prison for eighteen years, except, finally, when he is asked by the warden to help Hanna prepare for her release. When he visits Hanna's grave at the very end of the novel, he does so, as the text so pointedly puts it, for “the first and only time” (TR [The Reader], p. 218). Michael's compassion, while genuine, is fragile.

This fragility, this tension, keeps both Michael and the reader rooted in an uneasy gray area between compassion and condemnation, a place where neither answers nor emotions are clear or simple. The novel questions the hard and fast distinction that one is either responsible or one is not. The more closely Michael pays attention to Hanna's life, the more complex his understanding of “responsibility” becomes. Hanna certainly knew that as a consequence of her actions people would be killed. She knew, for example, that the selection of inmates least capable of working would mean their certain death in Auschwitz. She certainly was not mentally incompetent. To this extent, she was clearly responsible for her acts. Yet Michael seeks to comprehend the broader context in which these acts took place. He pays attention to the fact that Hanna had been raised in a specific moral world that emphasized certain virtues, such as order, obedience, and duty. He also dwells upon the fact that the actions for which she is charged took place in the midst of the terrifying madness of war. He struggles to imagine the confusion, the weariness, the fear that Hanna must have faced during the death march and begins to appreciate the extent to which she was engulfed in a madness that had become pervasive and numbingly usual. He reflects on the uncanny power of this numbness: how, when death and terror surround human beings on a daily basis, they succumb to an indifference that protects them from feeling. Within this circle of apathy, all manner of cruelty is possible precisely because emotions shut down. These combined factors—the numbing madness of war, her fear of panic and disorder, a cultural emphasis on order and obedience to authority—leave Hanna particularly susceptible to carrying out what she is told, thoughtlessly and unquestioningly, even and especially when the world she presupposes is disintegrating.

Michael's compassion makes him inclined to understand Hanna's actions before he attempts to judge or condemn. This simple act of careful attention vastly complicates the issue of moral responsibility, which, he finds, cannot be neatly divided into two distinct categories: either one is or is not responsible. There are immense differences of degree, which are overlooked in this stark distinction of kind. Michael's compassionate understanding leads him to recognize how Hanna's actions are embedded within vast cultural and historical circumstances of which she had precious little control and scant awareness.

His compassion also makes him willing to penetrate more deeply into the messy particularities of Hanna's life. It leads him, for example, to unravel the secret which Hanna has been compulsively hiding from the court and from everyone throughout her life: she cannot read. His recognition of her illiteracy further complicates the issue of her moral responsibility. Of course, an inability to read does not rob a person of the capacity to make moral judgments. Nonetheless, it is not incidental to the conduct of Hanna's life. Indeed, the full and particular impact of illiteracy upon her life is immense. Michael recognizes that Hanna's illiteracy has been a terrible imprisonment, structuring the mindlessness of her work, giving shape both to her shame and her pathetic attempts to prove herself. At her trial, Hanna risks a longer sentence, even a chance of acquittal, in order to conceal what she regards as the indignity of her illiteracy. She prefers to lie about writing a report concerning the death march than to reveal her secret. This is but one instance in a lifelong pattern of shame, flight, and deception, the pain of which evokes Michael's compassion. As solidly as any wall, Hanna's shame isolates her, forcing her from job to job, city to city, relationship to relationship.

But her “prison” is more confining still. It isolates her not only from others but also from herself in many ways. Her inability to read diminishes her perspective on her own life; she has less chance to step back from her immediate situation, to question and reflect about it. This was especially the case within a political regime that so ruthlessly and efficiently managed popular opinion. Of course, reading per se means little or nothing as a prophylactic against complicity in atrocities such as the Holocaust. It is worth remembering that among the fourteen men summoned to attend what would later be known as the Wannsee Conference, the purpose of which was to work out the details of the Final Solution to the “Jewish problem,” nine held doctorate degrees, and all were educated in the finest universities of Central Europe. Reading alone is insufficient. But reading is a first and necessary step to what truly does matter: the critical examination of one's culture and oneself. Reading as a technical skill makes possible reading as the act of critically interpreting and assessing one's situation in the world. Illiteracy blocks Hanna's access to questions, critiques, and alternatives. Her world is circumscribed in a particular way.

Precisely because he cares about Hanna, Michael is constantly attentive to the chasms between her experience and his own. He realizes, for instance, that he knows nothing of Hanna's childhood, her parents, her birthplace. This awareness of the fractured nature of human interaction permeates the novel as a whole. The work emphasizes the extent to which we are strangers to each other and to ourselves. While the court examines Hanna from an impersonal distance that sometimes glosses over these gaps, Michael approaches Hanna with a personal attentiveness that often results, not in any presumption of knowledge, but in a recognition of the degree to which Hanna remains a mystery. Eventually, brooding upon peculiarities in her behavior, he is able to piece together the web of Hanna's shame and deceit about her inability to read. Michael's inexplicable love for Hanna teaches him to become a skillful interpreter, that is, a reader—one who recognizes how everything hangs upon interpretation and disclosure.

Reading in the sense of questioning and reinterpreting himself and his culture does not make Michael's life easier or more comfortable. In many ways, it complicates matters. At the same time, the novel shows that an absence of such reading robs life of its richness, texture, and nuance. Unless questioned and reinterpreted, things get simplified and overlooked or are passively accepted in terms of singular interpretations that are handed down. The human costs of such simplification are enormous. Toward the end of the novel, Hanna admits to Michael: “I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account” (TR, p. 198). When there is no sense that anyone understands, or even cares to, there is no sense of accountability. Because she thinks that no one has any idea of who she is, Hanna discounts anyone's ability to judge her fairly. Without real relationship, responsibility atrophies.

Unlike the judges of the court, Michael allows his questioning of Hanna's actions to become a form of self-questioning. Thinking about Hanna's detachment from others, he meditates on the extent to which his confinement of their relationship to an exhilarating but separate niche in his life was also a form of distancing. He is willing to admit that he shares Hanna's detachment from others: “In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement” (TR, p. 101).

Converse examples of judgment without self-examination occur throughout the story. Michael notices the glib hypocrisy of his generation's assumption that it would have acted differently during the Third Reich, while displaying arrogant disdain to those labeled Nazis. He sees Hanna's judges retreating to formalities as a way of avoiding personal questions. At one significant point in Hanna's trial, while she was being grilled by the presiding judge about the reasons for her actions, Hanna asks him: “‘I … I mean … so what would you have done?’ Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done” (TR, p. 111). The passage describing the judge's response is telling:

Everything was quiet for a moment. It is not the custom at German trials for defendants to question the judge. But now the question had been asked, and everyone was waiting for the judge's answer. He had to answer; he could not ignore the question or brush it away with a reprimand or a dismissive counterquestion. It was clear to everyone, it was clear to him too, and I understood why he had adopted an expression of irritation as his defining feature. It was his mask. Behind it, he could take a little time to find an answer. But not too long; the longer he took, the greater the tension and expectation, and the better his answer had to be.

“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”

(TR, pp. 111-12)

As the book points out, the judge's response is hapless and pathetic. Pronouncements about what “one” must or must not do, while refusing to speak to the particularities either of Hanna's case or his own life, underline the fact that Hanna's questions are not seriously endured by those sitting in judgment.

It would be unfair to equate the legal treatment of Hanna and the other camp guards with the caricatures of justice that occurred during the Third Reich. The differences between the two legal systems are vast. Nonetheless, the novel raises faint yet disturbingly real similarities between the failure to see beneath the stereotypical mask of the “camp guard,” “Nazi,” or “Jew.” The book thereby suggests that the seeds of the Holocaust are ever-present: in the triumph of abstraction over attention to particulars, in the ability of procedure to ride roughshod over the questionable, in the capacity to distance ourselves from others, in the longing for scapegoats, and in the seductive power of belonging to the “right” group. By detailing these tendencies, not merely in the past, but in democratic, postwar German society and in Michael himself, the novel is not “whitewashing” the Holocaust by making it seem less extraordinary; rather, it honors the true horror of the event by refusing to diminish the Holocaust as the machination of a few easily identifiable Nazis.

The impersonality of the judge's response, quoted earlier, is significant in another respect: Michael's analysis of Hanna's actions is based strongly on his feelings for her. In contrast, the judge's remarks about what “one must and must not do” according to enormously abstract principles indicate the extent to which Hanna's trial is being conducted within the parameters of an ideal of dispassionate reasoning. This is neither strange nor accidental. There is a long legal and philosophical tradition holding that reason operates better, more clearly and objectively, when distanced from the biases of the sentiments. It contends that emotions are inappropriate guides in public decision-making and should be excluded from deliberative processes as much as possible. Emotions, it argues, are not even-handed; they threaten impartiality: they often resist the force of argument and evidence.

While Michael worries about the possibility that his feelings may blind him, he is also aware that they are perceptive and instructive. They move him to the discovery of Hanna's illiteracy; they enable him to appreciate more clearly the force of Hanna's emotions in her behavior; they spur him to imagine what it is like to lead a life such as hers. His emotions are essential in enabling him to envision possible explanations for Hanna's behavior that the court never entertains. When the court learns that Hanna ordered the weakest female inmates to read to her in the evenings during their last month before being deported to Auschwitz, for example, the suspicion in the courtroom is that this is motivated by some sadistic sexual desire. But Michael's feelings lead him to consider a completely different possibility, that “she had chosen them to read to her because she wanted to make their last month bearable before their inevitable dispatch to Auschwitz” (TR, p. 133). This is, of course, pure speculation on Michael's part; he may be wrong. But the point is that Michael is capable of generating interpretive possibilities and insights that do not derive from any set of objective facts but from empathetic attentiveness to the emotional depths of another person.

As the novel makes clear, the particular trial of the five female guards is part of a larger indictment of one generation by the next, part of modern Germany's examination of its Nazi past, and a search to understand how such barbarism is possible in a well-educated, sophisticated society. “The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame” (TR, p. 92). Michael temporarily joins the persecution of his parents' generation for their actions and silence during the Third Reich. But, as his sense of distance from the “criminals” is undermined by his relationship with Hanna, he soon finds the accusatory zeal of his peers more than a little self-righteous, and their assumption of belonging to a cleaner, morally superior group both untested and naive.

According to the novel, the seeds of the Holocaust are familiar, not only in the general sense of detachment from others, remaining in abstractions, and finding comfort in blaming others, which Michael sees all about him and in himself, but also in the literal sense in that he finds the seeds in his family. Michael's relationship with his father, for example, is critical. In contrast to memories of his mother indulging, even spoiling, him (interestingly with the same warm baths and washings that figure so importantly in his relationship with Hanna), Michael's father is enormously distant. It seems to Michael that the center of his father's life was always his work. In relation to his wife and children, his life was always elsewhere. Most conspicuous, however, is the father's lack of feeling:

My father was undemonstrative, and could neither share his feelings with us children nor deal with the feelings we had for him. For a long time I believed there must be a wealth of undiscovered treasure behind that uncommunicative manner, but later I wondered if there was anything behind it at all. Perhaps he had been full of emotions as a boy and a young man, and by giving them no outlet had allowed them over the years to wither and die.

(TR, p. 139)

There are parallels between Michael's relations with his father and the question of how a society so cultured, so well educated, with such a legacy in philosophy, literature, and the arts, could have been the cause of so much human misery. Michael's father was a professor of philosophy, remarkably well educated, a reader and writer of books. He is emblematic of Germany's intellectual sophistication. But in both the novel and in actual history this sophistication makes no difference in the occurrence of compassion. Why should this be?

The story offers some pregnant hints. At one point in the novel, Michael goes to his father, seeking advice on whether he should disclose Hanna's illiteracy to the court and, in so doing, prove that she could not be responsible for some aspects of the case that the other defendants were trying to pin on her. The details of what Michael recalls of this scene with his father are significant. He remembers how, like his father's university students, he and his siblings had to make appointments to see their father, waiting their turn to enter the room where most of their father's highly compartmentalized life took place:

I knew two of my father's studies. … In both places, the windows did not open the room to the world beyond, but framed and hung the world in it like a picture. My father's study was a capsule in which books, papers, thoughts, and pipe and cigar smoke had created their own force field, different from that of the outside world.

(TR, pp. 140-41)

More is intimated here than the room of one professor. The architecture of the study hints that, at least in this case (and we are left to wonder in how many others) the relationship between academic philosophy and the lived world is remarkably thin and tenuous. Philosophy is nearly divorced from the world here, as if the world serves philosophy merely as an occasion for it's theorizing. From the perspective of the philosopher's study, the world is abstract, distant to the point that it resembles a picture, something that one stands outside of as if a spectator. Missing is any active, committed involvement. The world becomes an object of study. The personal, especially the emotional depth of one's being, is excluded. With this exclusion, philosophy becomes a professional livelihood, not a way of living. In this environment, compassion, while it might be a topic for discussion or scholarly exegesis, does not seriously matter as a lived practice.

Asked for his advice whether Michael should, hypothetically, disclose Hanna's illiteracy to the court, his father tries to resolve the problem by citing the basic principle of respect for the autonomy of persons. While the discussion of the issue occurs in a conversation painfully steeped in concealment (Michael hiding his relationship with Hanna, and the father coping awkwardly with the unspoken distance between himself and his son), the “philosopher” attempts to handle the problem on a purely abstract, intellectual level, without ever delving into either the particularities of the situation or the emotional roots of Michael's interest in the case.

Michael's disagreement with his father is never verbalized but is evident in his eventual decision, contrary to his father's counsel to respect the wishes of the other, to visit the presiding judge. Though he takes this step, Michael remains strangely and completely silent about Hanna in the judge's chamber. Why would he disagree with his father and go to the judge, yet accord, finally, with his father's advice and say nothing about the illiteracy?

An answer to why Michael never reveals Hanna's secret resides, I think, in the confluence of two factors: first, Michael's recognition of a lifelong pattern in his behavior; second, the specific character of his conversation with that judge. The pattern that Michael recognizes concerns the relation between his thinking and his behavior:

Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; “it” goes to the woman I don't want to see anymore, “it” makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, “it” keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I've accepted the fact that I'm a smoker and always will be.

(TR, p. 20)

Michael recognizes, of course, that thinking certainly influences behavior. But he is equally clear that his behavior does not simply enact what he has thought through and decided. His behavior has sources which lie buried in the depths of human emotion. When thought fails to engage and effect feeling, when feelings are unattended, behavior can belie the most definite and resolute rational decisions. Thus, while Michael eventually acts as his father advises, the basis for his action is different. Michael acts on the basis of what he feels, not just on the basis of what he thinks. What he feels for Hanna is the desire that she should suffer the least amount of pain, and he fears that disclosure of her illiteracy would mean betraying her again. At bottom, he wants to help and protect. The fact that he visits the judge shows that the abstract principle of respect for another's autonomy is an insufficient basis for whatever action he may take; this principle must be balanced carefully against his deep desire that Hanna not suffer unnecessarily. His father's purely intellectual approach to this problem and to life in general is too one-dimensional.

Michael goes to the judge's chamber in hope that information about Hanna's illiteracy might make a substantial difference to the sentence she will receive. What becomes evident in the pleasant chitchat with the judge, however, is the subtle, but nonetheless powerful, realization that this judge is a man whose concern with career and advancement has always been keen:

I answered all his questions. Then I listened while he talked about his studies and his exams. He had done everything the right way. He had taken the right classes and seminars at the right time and had passed his final exams with the right degree of success. He liked being a lawyer and a judge, and if he had to do it all again he would do it the same way.

(TR, p. 159)

The recurrence of the word “right” underscores Michael's perception of someone who is scrupulously attentive to doing what is expected and, correspondingly, someone who is very unlikely to let the disclosure of Hanna's illiteracy—at this late date and from this unlikely source—upset the widely anticipated, severe punishment of a war criminal. The judge is neither heartless nor unintelligent, but there are definite indications that he is a person whose capacity to resist the numbing pressures of the everyday—prevailing popular opinion, the desire to end an already drawn-out case—is not great. Michael's hope that he could spare Hanna pain by obtaining leniency is dashed by the realization that, given this judge and the particularities of this situation, information about Hanna's illiteracy would not penetrate the thickness of everyday routine and opinion. Disclosing this information would cause her harm and probably not help her case significantly.

Michael's dilemma regarding the tension between abstractions and emotions is reflected in both his father and Hanna. Michael's father segregates his thinking as a philosopher from his thinking and acting as a parent. He is capable of writing ethical treatises on Kant and Hegel but is clueless about relating to his son. If this disconnection is in any way suggestive of philosophy's failure to address the actual circumstances of life during the Third Reich, then it is completely without surprise that Germany's long and distinguished intellectual legacy seems to have made remarkably little difference to the event of the Holocaust. With few exceptions, German philosophers accommodated themselves quite well to conditions of fascism.

At the opposite extreme from Michael's father is Hanna. While the father seems to live through his intellect and have sacrificed his emotions, Hanna personifies someone whose feeling is largely divorced from thinking. Her actions are so tethered to the fulcrum of her shame that she turns persistently and blindly on this axis.

Both ways of being are not only stunted but dangerous. Hanna's unthinking feeling renders her substantially oblivious to her participation in gross cruelty and inhumanity. But the father's theoretical acumen, absent connection with his own and other's feelings, is equally powerless in coping with life's complexities. Interestingly, both Hanna and Michael's father end up in substantially the same place: Hanna's failure to respond to the human horror taking place in her midst is paralleled by the father's obliviousness to the pain of a son seeking a parent who is “elsewhere.” The certainty of Hanna's feeling is undaunted by questions; correspondingly, the theoretical “principles” of the father/philosopher are untroubled by emotional complexities. Michael, of course, finds himself caught in the middle of these two extremes.

In its portrait of these equally disastrous models of adulthood, the novel offers clues to the question of how the Holocaust was possible in such a well-educated society. It suggests that reading and the associated activities of thinking and education are insufficient safeguards against such atrocities as long as these intellectual activities are pursued primarily as “academic” matters, as a means of escape from the world or as technical tools for professional advancement. Reading can be a diversion. Thinking can be an exercise of calculated shrewdness or a professional pastime. If reading and thinking are to make any difference, then ways must be found to avoid framing “the world like a picture.” Reading must be a form of self-questioning, an act of cultural engagement and criticism. Thinking must risk the personal and the emotional.

The Reader makes this plea about reading indirectly but, nonetheless, powerfully in its very form of discourse. Its style is suggestive, invitational, leaving its audience to struggle with questions and problems rather than providing conclusions. It deftly turns Hanna's question to the judge around to the novel's readers: if you had been in this situation, what would you have done? It refuses to settle the problem but pushes readers to work out their own answers. Given this rhetorical framework, it is not immediately obvious how to address the guiding question of this paper: whether The Reader confirms or questions Nussbaum's understanding of compassion. An argument could be made that Michael's effort to understand Hanna actually illustrates Nussbaum's Aristotelian position: Michael could have compassion for Hanna, despite her complicity in wartime atrocities, because he saw the significant extent to which she was not responsible for her actions and, hence, for the suffering resulting from them.

But, on balance, I do not think this analysis would be a plausible interpretation of the novel. Michael accepts that Hanna is responsible for her actions. If he did not, his lifelong struggle to reconcile his love for her and his horror at her deeds would have never materialized. He has compassion for Hanna in spite of her responsibility for her actions. This is what makes the novel so compelling, and it is in this respect that the novel questions Nussbaum's understanding of compassion. The accident of an adolescent love affair leads Michael, admittedly with great difficulty and struggle, to glimpse the possibility of compassion for the moral criminal. Compassion, he comes to understand, is due even to those who suffer by their own fault.

This recognition comes from the fact that he is aware of the particularly poignant and painful condition of not being able to blame someone or something else for one's suffering. Such blame placing may be small comfort, but it is infinitely preferable to having only oneself to blame. The pain that Michael witnesses in Hanna is that of someone standing alone in the midst of the horror she has helped create. One does not have to dismiss the act committed to feel compassion for the pain of such a position; indeed, the degree of pain is proportionate to the heinousness of the act; one cannot be aware of one without the other. But beyond his awareness of her pain, Michael is able to identify with it on the basis of his experience. While he has never faced the horror of being responsible for the death of others, he is honest enough about his own moral weaknesses and callousness not to think himself distinguished by his lack of participation in the Holocaust. He knows that to a lesser but, nonetheless significant, degree he has been a moral criminal as well. He recounts how he cultivated a posture of arrogant superiority during his years at the university, how he formed relationships, sexual and otherwise, in which he was completely uninvolved, how he refused the blessing of a dying grandfather by coldly announcing his disbelief in anything religious. Remembering these incidents, Michael sees that Hanna's unthinking shame finds its parallel in his unquestioned decision, following the loss of their relationship, “never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose” (TR, p. 88). Whereas Hanna tries to shield herself from the disclosure of her illiteracy, Michael shields himself from the pain that loving entails. Both defenses become forms of blindness. Ironically, in running from their pain rather than facing it, Hanna and Michael both succeed in causing further misery.

Michael's compassion for Hanna exposes the limits, the powerful constraining conditions, within which we exercise our moral judgments and responsibility—even though we may share great similarities with those we wish to condemn. It reveals how enormously difficult, perhaps impossible, it is for one human being to know another. It leads Michael beyond the comfort of stereotypes and confronts him with what he cannot presume to judge. But while Nussbaum might see all of these qualifications diminishing the degree of Hanna's moral wrongdoing, thereby laying appropriate grounds for compassion for her, I think the novel works in another way. It never backs off the judgment that Hanna acted knowingly and wrongly. It never finds excuses for her deeds. Michael never contests, for example, the eighteen-year sentence that Hanna receives. The story acknowledges Hanna's moral guilt and finds room for compassion nonetheless. It intimates that moral condemnation is possible without distancing criminals from us so greatly that we fail to recognize ourselves in their midst. It maintains, as Nussbaum does not, that compassion is possible, indeed necessary, for the moral criminal.

The conclusion of The Reader helps underscore the peculiar power that compassion can exert in situations of moral condemnation. Briefly, let me set the context of the novel's ending. As I have mentioned, Michael continues to send Hanna tapes of books he is reading throughout her prison stay. To his surprise and delight, he eventually receives words of thanks from Hanna, laboriously penned out in her own hand. Hanna has learned to read and write in prison! As the completion of her prison sentence nears, Michael is contacted by the warden, who asks him to visit Hanna in order to help prepare her to return to society. Michael and Hanna meet. Yet on the night before her release, Hanna hangs herself. A note for Michael contains no explanation, only a request that a tin containing seven thousand marks be delivered to a Jewish woman who had survived the fire in the church during the death march.

This ending poses many questions that the novel never directly answers. Why does Hanna kill herself at the moment of her liberation? Is she afraid to rejoin the company of society? Does she fear freedom? Why, if Michael could have compassion for Hanna, could Hanna not have compassion for herself? In conclusion, let me suggest an interpretation for this ending and how it bears upon the topic of compassion and moral condemnation.

Hanna's imprisonment is really her liberation. Her life prior to prison had been dominated by illiteracy and frantic shame; in prison she learns to read. For the first time in her life, she could review and examine the conduct of her life instead of running and feigning toughness. For the first time, she could interpret herself by studying the words and thoughts of others, especially those outside her circle. Visiting Hanna's prison cell after her suicide, Michael notices the contents of Hanna's bookshelf: “Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry—the literature of the victims, next to the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, Hannah Arendt's report on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and scholarly literature on the camps” (TR, p. 205). Hanna becomes a student of her own experience by revisiting her deeds through the eyes of others, especially those of her victims. Through reading she is freed to confront what she had lived and what she had done. Reading allows her to become more fully human, which leads, of course, to her discovery of guilt and anguish.

I suspect that Hanna commits suicide at the very end of her sentence for several reasons. First, learning to read gives rise to a deepening of her thinking. This deepening, in turn, makes her more powerfully aware of her responsibilities as a person. Whereas her prison term was her responsibility to society and was imposed by it, Hanna discovers another responsibility in prison: the claims of the dead. Speaking in the prison yard during his first visit, Michael asks Hanna whether, prior to her trial, she had thought much about her actions in the war. She answered that neither before the trial nor at it had she felt called to account:

Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.

(TR, pp. 198-99)

Learning to read allows her to hear the voices of those she had killed and those to whom she had been indifferent; it reveals the enormity of the suffering she helped inflict. Reading is the path by which the dead could finally make their claim upon her. Hanna serves her prison sentence to fulfill her responsibility to society; she takes her life as a way of fulfilling an obligation to the dead.

If this interpretation of the novel's conclusion is correct, then it adds an interesting twist to the consideration of compassion for the moral criminal. Compassion is often considered a form of softness, an emotional response which seems too easy or complacent in relation to serious moral wrongdoing. In terms of this assumption, The Reader ought to give us pause. Michael's compassion for Hanna is instrumental in helping her learn to read. Ironically, this gift leads Hanna to be more critical and severe with herself than even the legal system deemed necessary. Michael's compassion for Hanna gives her the chance to reach self-judgment. Compassion brings her to realize the enormity of the suffering she helped cause. Compassion enables her to become the reader of her own acts.

Notes

1. Bernard Schlink, The Reader, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Vintage International, 1998), p. 157; hereafter abbreviated TR.

2. Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of The Death Penalty in the United States (New York: Random House, 1993).

3. See Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); hereafter abbreviated CH, and Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

4. Two of Nussbaum's most substantial discussions of Aristotle's understanding of eleos (translated as both compassion and pity) are “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” in Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, ed. Amelia O. Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 261-90, and “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996): 27-58.

I would like to thank Wanda Whitten, David and Carol Compton, and Trudy Conway for their constructive criticism of this paper as it developed.