[In the following review, Zimmerman praises Schlink's characterization in Der Vorleser, calling the novel “powerful and poignant.”]

Bernhard Schlink has made a reputation for himself as a master of mysteries grounded in the realities of past and present Germany. In Der Vorleser (The Reader) too there is a pivotal element of mystery, but it is subordinated to the profounder dilemmas of living German history.

The story is that of the fifteen-year-old Michael, who, in the late 1950s, is taken in by Hanna, a thirty-six-year-old woman, because he gets sick in front of her apartment house. He and Hanna drift into an affair of intense mutual dependence. As the title indicates, one of the central features of their ritual is that he reads to her before they proceed to showering and having sex. The affair culminates in a bicycle tour, for which she asks him to make all the arrangements—routes, meals, inns (where, of course, he must register them as mother and son for a room). Shortly after their return, she suddenly and inexplicably gives up her job as a streetcar conductor, leaves town, and disappears without a trace.

Years later Michael is studying law. One professor gives his seminar the assignment of following the prosecution of five female concentration-camp guards who had allegedly let several hundred Jewish women burn to death in a church, which they could have unlocked. Among the five women is Hanna, whose codefendants reveal that she had held back from the groups routinely shipped to Auschwitz several of the more delicate young Jewish girls to visit her in the evenings. Though these girls had only read to Hanna on those evenings, as one of the guards admits, the codefendants gang up on Hanna in accusing her of having written the cover-up report of the fire and implicating them. She admits to having done so and receives a life sentence.

Michael wonders why she had let the SS recruit her from a Siemens factory, where she was about to be promoted to supervisor. When he discovers that she had likewise quit her job in his hometown at the very moment she had been offered a chance to become a driver and combines these instances with similar behaviors he had observed, the answer dawns on him. I won't reveal it (if it's not evident already), but this knowledge does not make it any easier to understand why the otherwise good, normal, and decent Hanna—or anyone else—would let an inadequacy like hers drive her into participating in crimes as monstrous as those of the Nazis. Or worse, perhaps it does: perhaps we are most of us so socially and emotionally insecure that we will indeed do almost anything not to reveal any of our failings.

This is only one of the moral quagmires Schlink presents the reader. In addition to Hanna's guilt, there is the more ambiguous guilt by association (and by heredity) that Michael feels, and Schlink makes genuinely palpable just how much Vergangenheitsbewältigung really exacts as he brings Michael's life up to the present, when Hanna is finally pardoned. Germans of Michael's age will find themselves in singular empathy with the narrator and his tale, but the utter artlessness Schlink has given its telling will, I think, likewise completely take in other readers and compel them to unprecedented reflection. Not much fiction on “mastering the past” has been more powerful and poignant than this unassuming-looking little volume.