When Michael thinks about his love for her there are lots of images of submerging, which also connects to fascism’s demands for a loss of self and identification with the state. She is “single-minded” – there’s a lack of internality to her, something Adorno describes as common to the authoritarian personality type. Michael gives it to her, accepting horrible conditions in the name of love (for the state). Hanna is controlling, violent, and demands devotion. In some way, their relationship plays out in miniature the experience of a nation under fascism. During their bicycle holiday, one morning she even hits him with her belt. Michael starts apologising for things he never did, taking on blame, surrendering. The relationship quickly becomes abusive. She “took possession of as a matter of course” during sex (I’m not critiquing anybody’s sexual preferences, but it’s an important point), and seems to view everything as a “power game”. But even beyond hindsight, there’s a lot going wrong. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily”. He already knows what will happen to their relationship, and he struggles to fully enjoy even these recollections, knowing what he eventually does about her. Michael narrates The Reader from far in the future. Of course, things aren’t as wonderful as they seem. The Relationship – Dating a (literal) Nazi Michael even has the cute habit of reading her stories, mostly significant Enlightenment works by stodgy German authors. He starts skipping lessons at school to go and see Hanna, and even plans a biking holiday for them both at Easter, which they both actually end up doing. The two create a ritual of showering and making love, and when he goes back to school it is with newfound confidence, because he now feels comfortable around girls. After the bath she puts her hands on his erection and initiates their physical relationship.īeing a modern reader who tends to value consent, this struck me as an inauspicious start to a relationship. He gets covered in black dust and she suggests he has a bath. But he comes back, and this time helps her move some coal. When he sees her changing her stockings he goes red and runs away. Except instead of just thanking her, he falls in love with her. When Michael recovers, after a long time in bed at home, he finds Hanna to thank her for her trouble. This woman is Hanna Schmitz, an ideal German beauty and in her thirties. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault”. Luckily, however, a woman is there to help him. He collapses vomiting on the way home from school. Young Michael Berg, aged just 15, gets hepatitis. How far can we blame Hanna for her actions, and all of that. In particular, The Reader raises questions about guilt and responsibility. Anyway, the novel forms part of the German postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) tha t I’ve written about elsewhere. This forces Michael to re-evaluate their relationship and confront a kind of complicity for having loved her. One day she suddenly disappears, and when he meets her again it is in a courtroom, where she is being tried for working in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, a young man who falls in love with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Still, I was in Russia, and my German copy is at home, so I read Der Vorleser in English on my Kindle to save myself time. But now my German’s better and I do, sometimes, read things in that language now, and even occasionally enjoy doing so. I actually bought myself a copy of the German while still at school – the book is short, and at the time I thought that I’d have plenty of time, energy, and desire to read German literature in the original language. However, I’d been meaning to read it for a while. I read The Reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink, because – surprise, surprise – it was on my reading list.
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