The Reader
Bernhard Schlink (1995)
“A fifteen-year-old boy's affair with an older woman becomes a reckoning with the Holocaust, illiteracy, and the moral inheritance Germany's second generation cannot escape.”
At a Glance
In 1958 postwar Germany, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg begins a passionate affair with Hanna Schmitz, a thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor who asks him to read aloud to her before they make love. She vanishes without explanation. Years later, Michael — now a law student — watches Hanna stand trial as a former SS guard at Auschwitz. During the trial, he realizes her terrible secret: Hanna is illiterate. She allowed herself to be convicted of a crime she may not have solely committed rather than reveal her shame. Michael must decide whether to intervene. He doesn't. The novel follows Michael through decades of paralysis as he sends Hanna recordings of books he reads aloud, reconnecting through the medium that first bound them. She teaches herself to read in prison. Before her release, she hangs herself. Michael is left carrying the weight of silence, complicity, and love that was never adequate to the moral demands placed upon it.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Reader became the first German-language novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list (1997, in English translation). It won the Hans Fallada Prize and the Italian Laure Bataillon Prize, was translated into 39 languages, and was adapted into a 2008 film starring Kate Winslet, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Hanna. The novel brought the 'second generation' problem — how do the children of perpetrators process inherited guilt? — to an international audience that had primarily encountered the Holocaust through survivor testimony.
Diction Profile
Spare, unsentimental prose with legal precision — the German Kahlschlag tradition filtered through a jurist's discipline
Deliberately low