Der Vorleser

Bernhard Schlink

3 ideas

1. Hanna conceals illiteracy, accepts greater guilt

   At the 1960s trial of former SS camp guards, Hanna Schmitz is accused of writing the report on a church fire in which locked-in women prisoners burned to death during a death march. Rather than submit a handwriting sample that would expose her illiteracy, she confesses to authorship and receives a life sentence while the other defendants get lighter terms. Michael, the law student who was her lover and knows her secret, stays silent and never tells the judge.

2. Loving a perpetrator raises questions of complicity

   Michael, having loved Hanna before learning what she had done, cannot condemn her from clean ground and asks whether that love entangles him in her guilt. He connects this to his generation's attachments to parents and teachers, but the novel leaves open whether guilt can pass through love and whether collective guilt holds morally or legally.

3. Understanding and condemning cannot coexist comfortably

   The more fully you understand why a person committed an atrocity, the harder it becomes to condemn them, yet condemnation is required. Understanding makes judgment feel like betrayal, and judgment makes understanding feel like excuse. Michael wants to do both and finds that he can do neither with a clear conscience, so he withdraws into numbness instead.

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