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 BERNHARD SCHLINK'S DER VORLESER
AND THE PROBLEM OF SHAME

Bernhard Schlink's novel Der Vorleser, which appeared in 1995, has enjoyed
huge international success.' Yet, equally, it has come in for some stern criti-
cism, principally for its portrayal of a former concentration-camp guard, Hanna
Schmitz, as someone who suffers through her illiteracy. In the words of William
Collins Donahue, 'Der Vorleseris more concerned to establish Hanna as victim
than as perpetrator',2 while the historian Omer Bartov even perceives in the
figures of both Hanna and the narrator Michael Berg a view of 'Germany as
victim'.3 Schlink's novel thus apparently fits into what some see as a worrying
new trend in German culture, whereby Germans are presented as victims, of
circumstance, of Nazism, and last but not least of the Allies.4 Principally, it has
been and is Americans and Britons who have criticized Der Vorlesermost vigor-
ously; in addition to Donahue and Ernestine Schlant,5 the London Germanist
Jeremy Adler, as well as the novelists Frederic Raphael and Lawrence Norfolk,
have pronounced dismissive opinions.6 Criticism of Schlink in Germany has
been less forceful. But Adler's scathing comments in the Times Literary Sup-
plement, claiming that Der Vorlesercreates 'a single, homogenized condition of
victimhood' (p. 17), have been received in Germany with agreement as well
as indignation. In an article for the Siiddeutsche Zeitung, the journalist Willi
Winkler described Schlink's novel as 'Holo-Kitsch'.7 Moreover, one reader
pointed out in a letter to a leading daily that awkward questions, such as how
an illiterate could have signed up to become a concentration-camp guard, had
been asked of Schlink in Germany at a reception given by the Federal Presi-
dent in December 2000.8 Strikingly, while there was some initial criticism of
' Bernhard
Schlink, Der Vorleser(Zurich: Diogenes, 1995). Referencesto this novel are indicated
in the text by the abbreviation V and the relevant page number. For a good overview of the impact
of the novel, see Sally Johnson and Frank Finlay, '(Il)literacy and (Im)morality in Bernhard
Schlink's The Reader', Written Language and Literacy, 4 (2001), 195-214 (pp. 196-97).
2 William Collins
Donahue, 'Illusions of Subtlety: Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser and the
Moral Limits of Holocaust Fiction', GLL, 54 (2001), 60-8I (p. 72).
3 See Omer Bartov, 'Germany as Victim', New German Critique, 80 (2000), 29-40.
4
Examples of such texts cited by critics include: Giinter Grass's Im Krebsgang (Gottingen:
Steidl, 2002), which takes as one of its themes the agony of East Prussian fugitives who drowned
when the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Russian submarine in I945; W G. Sebald's lecture
Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1999), which focuses on the supposed
neglect of the theme of Allied bombing raids in German literature; and Dieter Forte's novel Der
Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1995), which describes the horrors of the
bombing of Diisseldorf. One should stress that in Grass's novel, however, the notion of German
victimhood is not treated uncritically.
5 Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New
York and London: Routledge, I999), p. 213.
6 Jeremy Adler, 'Bernhard Schlink and "The Reader"' (reader's letter), Times Literary Sup-
plement, 22 March 2002, p. 17; Frederic Raphael, 'Bernhard Schlink' (reader's letter), ibid., 8
March 2002, p. I7; Lawrence Norfolk, 'Die Sehnsucht nach einer ungeschehenen Geschichte',
Siiddeutsche Zeitung, 27/28 April 2002, p. i6.
7 Willi
Winkler, 'Vorlesen, Duschen, Durcharbeiten', SiiddeutscheZeitung, 30/3 I March-i April
2002, p. i6.
8 Heiner Lichtenstein, 'Zwei Fragen ohne Antwort' (reader's letter), Siiddeutsche Zeitung, i6
May 2002, p. 40.
382 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

Der Vorleser, it is only in the last eighteen months that it has really come to
predominate. It has to be said that the quality of this criticism has not been
improved by the delay in its expression. Sometimes, it is emotionally highly
charged and even moralistic. Thus Adler uses words such as 'contemptible' and
'disgusting' in his condemnation (p. I7), while Raphael denies the book's right
to a place in literature, describing it as 'the poisonous fruit of canting conde-
scension' (p. 17). Adler, moreover, throws all the rules of literary criticism to
the winds by simply assuming that the author's views are identical with those
of his narrator, Michael Berg. Referring to the novel's portrayal of victimhood,
for instance, he contends that 'Schlink plays fast and loose with the evidence',
and accuses him of 'self-righteous instrumentalization' (p. I7).
Principally, the objections to the novel are ethical in character: Schlink is seen
as relativizing the crime of the Holocaust, or even levelling out moral differences
between SS guards and camp inmates. In order to invalidate what is assumed
to be the novel's preoccupation with Hanna's victimhood, it is pointed out by
Ernestine Schlant that 'illiteracy cannot serve as an explanation for cooperating
in and committing criminal acts' (p. 213), while Johnson and Finlay object that
illiteracy does not of itself entail moral and aesthetic insensitivity (pp. 205-06).
The ethical objection is underpinned by a rejection of what is perceived to be a
naive causal explanation on Schlink's part, and by a dismissal of his supposed
identification of illiteracy with moral impoverishment. A further concern is
to demonstrate that Hanna's illiteracy does not square with the facts of her
biography, or that her psychological reactions are not consonant with those of
an illiterate (Johnson and Finlay, pp. 205-10). Thus on the grounds of realism,
too, Schlink's 'victimhood' portrayal is refuted: perhaps Schlink's professional
judicial career implies for some that, in his handling of literary characters
and narrative, he should not be allowed even a modicum of 'poetic licence'.
The overall impression created by such criticism is that it seeks to uphold the
accepted understanding of the Holocaust (here the human victims, there the
bestial perpetrators) against what is felt to be Schlink's implicit condemnation
of such divisions as too clear-cut.
Now it would not be defensible to deny that Hanna is accorded victim sta-
tus by Michael Berg. But there is no hard-and-fast evidence that Michael's
perspective is identical with that of, and thus corroborated by, the author
Schlink. Moreover, Michael is a frequently unreliable narrator. Given his con-
tinuing emotional dependency on Hanna, his understanding of events is filtered
through the wish to make excuses for her. As with Oskar Matzerath in Grass's
Die Blechtrommel (1959), the reader has the task of sifting through Michael's
comments, working to separate out what may be valid or at least defensible from
that which is distorted by self-interest. It follows that we are not necessarily
meant to accept Michael's apologies for Hanna. When he realizes that Hanna
is illiterate, he immediately formulates his realization in terms of Hanna's reac-
tion to her inability, reflecting on the apparently astonishing fact that she would
rather be exposed as a criminal in court than reveal her illiteracy (V, p. 127).
While his realization has exculpatory implications for his view of Hanna, it
need not have such implications for the reader. I shall seek to demonstrate
that Schlink's concern is not with Hanna's illiteracy in itself, but with her fear
 BILL NIVEN 383

of stigmatization, a fear which binds her into a destructive system of shame

and compensation. While a certain degree of objective victimhood may indeed
adhere to her position as an illiterate, she remains responsible for her reaction
to this failing. This, surely, is what we are meant to infer from her develop-
ment in prison, where, as a result largely of her own autodidactic energies, she
overcomes her deficiency, a process which casts her previous reaction to this
deficiency in a highly critical light.
Yet even Hanna's development in prison is not as positive as critics generally
believe. Schlink has been criticized for allowing her to be transfigured into a
morally aware individual thanks to the impact of the traditional literary canon,
especially after learning to read. Thus Der Vorlesermight appear to confirm the
'liberale Lieblingsvorstellung, dass eine gute Bildung den Menschen moralisch
besser macht' (Norfolk, p. I6). By contrast, I shall argue that Hanna's newly
acquired sensitivity to moral issues is deeply compromised by an almost para-
sitic self-idealization in which she again avails herself, this time indirectly, of
concentration-camp prisoners. One implication of this somewhat warped self-
improvement is that the traditional literary canon to which she has been exposed
over the years has been of limited use. This is already clear earlier in the novel,
when she hits out at Michael in Amorbach (V, p. 54) despite regular exposure
to Homer, Cicero, Lessing, and Schiller. Schlink is not implying that morality
and literacy in the classical sense are synonymous: the essential impulses behind
Hanna's partial evolution in prison, as I shall show, lie elsewhere. Another
implication of her half-baked progress is that society has failed to support
her efforts at personal growth, abandoning her to unmediated doses of the
classics. While Hanna must bear responsibility for her deeply problematic self-
idealization, effectively a form of guilt-evasion, some blame must rest with
society for failing to provide a didactic framework for her autodidactic impulses.
That shame is the key to Hanna is made clear when Michael, trying to
talk to others about its impact while not wishing to talk too openly about
the specific case of Hanna, replaces illiteracy with other perceived sources of
shame, such as drug abuse, left-handedness, and homosexuality (V, p. I33).
However one evaluates the applicability of his alternative examples-as always,
we must be careful of his judgements-there are undoubtedly many forms of
deprivation of which the deprived can be ashamed. The choice of illiteracy is a
good one because the problem is both intensely disabling and fairly widespread
in some form or other; the psychologist Micha Hilgers describes it as a 'haufige
Schamquelle'.9 According to an OECD report referred to in one school text
on Schlink's novel, 14 per cent of Germany's population possess inadequate
literacy and numeracy skills even today.'? Donahue maintains that illiteracy
functions 'as a pliable metaphor for a more general state of deprivation that is
meant to explain why some people turn to evil' (p. 69). I would argue, rather,
that the metaphorical force of illiteracy lies in the associative resonance of being
unable to 'spell out' the basics of a moral language. Schlink has indicated in an
interview that Hanna's illiteracy is symptomatic of those who had 'forgotten
9 Micha Hilgers, Scham: Gesichter eines Affekts (Gbttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997),
p. I36.
10 See Cerstin
Urban, Bernhard Schlink: Der Vorleser (Hollfeld: Beyer, 2000), pp. 45-46.
384 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

their moral alphabet during the war'." However, we are not meant to imagine
that it is exclusively or even primarily those who cannot read who are the
forgetful. If illiteracy can provide an 'explanation' for the Holocaust, then it is
either only at this generic metaphorical level or, as implied by the motivational
structure of the text, by example of the shame it induces-a phenomenon
characteristic of a widespread social condition inspired by a range of possible
factors.
In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (I946), the American anthropologist
Ruth Benedict argued that societies can be characterized in terms of a 'culture of
shame' or a 'culture of guilt'. For Benedict, Japan was an example of the former,
the United States of America an example of the latter. Recently, the German
literary and cultural historian Aleida Assmann has sought to apply Benedict's
terms to Germany, arguing in essence that before 1945 Germany was marked
by a 'culture of shame', while post- 945 developments were towards a 'culture
of guilt', although elements of a shame culture remained."2 In a shame culture,
which principally concerns me here, the individual seeks to protect herself
or himself against possible disgrace and the concomitant loss of honour and
reputation, by conforming to social expectations. It might seem overstated to
claim that Nazi Germany could be defined as a 'culture of shame'. Nevertheless,
much of Hitler's rhetoric and, ultimately, policy certainly centred around the
theme of 'undoing the shame of the Versailles treaty'-a shame also highlighted
by Assmann (p. 93)-while this shame in turn was in all likelihood a projection
of a more personal biographical shame (for, say, his failure to achieve at school,
or his academic failure as an artist). Personal shame, and the wish to conceal or
compensate for it, may have played a part in the biographies of other leading
Nazis, not least Adolf Eichmann, one of the key players in the organization
of the Holocaust. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt points out that
Eichmann, son of the director of the StraBenbahn- und Elektrizitatsgesellschaft
in Linz, was something of a failure at school. In later life, Eichmann often
reinvented his rather indifferent biography. Claims on official documents that
he was a 'Maschinenbauingenieur' were as fanciful as his assertions that he had
been born in Palestine and spoke Hebrew and Yiddish, stories he liked to tell
not just to SS comrades, but also to Jewish victims.'3 To a significant degree,
Hitler was able to benefit from the support of the threatened sections of the
lower middle classes; if they saw in him a 'saviour', then it was one from feelings
of insecurity or shameful resentment generated by social decline. Moreover,
Hitler succeeded in mobilizing deep-seated, traditional Christian anti-Jewish
feeling among Germans in his interests, which became conflated in many cases
with the interest of individuals to compensate for envy, resentment, and shame.
"
Josephine Hart, 'The Reader, the Writer', Telegraph Magazine, 19 September 1999, pp. 60-
64 (p. 64).
i2 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1946), and Aleida Assmann, ' 998-Zwischen Geschichteund Gedachtnis: Die
Schlagworte der Debatte', in Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit,Geschichts-
versessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheitennach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, I999), pp. 53-96 (pp. 88-96).
I3 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalitat des Bosen (Munich:

Piper, 1964), p. 56.

 BILL NIVEN 385

That shame remains to this day an important motor of certain forms of social
and political behaviour is stressed by Micha Hilgers in his discussion of the
motives for right-wing radicalism in modern Germany (Hilgers, pp. 167-76).
We have little, if any, evidence that Hanna was consciouslyanti-Semitic. What
we can say is that her biography is an archetypal shame biography, and that Na-
tional Socialist anti-Semitism provided a framework in which she was able to
find psychological compensation for her deficiency. Schlink's novel provides
evidence of Hanna's low self-esteem and her desperate wish to conceal her
inability so as to avoid social stigmatization, the dreaded outer corroboration
of her inner shame. Thus we learn that, in all likelihood, she accepted the offer
of a position as camp guard to escape the prospect of promotion at Siemens
and the resulting discovery of her illiteracy (V, pp. 91-92, I28). Schlink can be
criticized for implying that her decision was not so much a positive choice for
the SS as a negative one against remaining at Siemens. But not all women who
were drafted in as guards joined because they were ideological fanatics. Irma
Grese, for instance, the 'hyena of Auschwitz', joined the SS out of frustration at
being unable to get a placement to train as a nurse.14 Not that Hanna's reasons
for joining exonerate her. Once in the camps, moreover, she benefits from the
inhumane SS system in a way she could not have foreseen. In his book Die
Ordnung des Terrors (1997), the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky describes the SS
organization within the camp-guard system as strictly hierarchical and gov-
erned by precise codes of discipline to the point of over-regulation; at the same
time, however, the individual guard was expected to take personal initiative
in practising brutality, and indeed had considerable freedom to develop such
brutality (pp. 121-36). The hierarchy of the SS thus enables Hanna to become a
follower of orders; she 'loses herself' in her function among the guards. Yet she
is also able to exercise her own personal brand of authority by forcing prisoners
to read to her. In this way, she is able to invert the power relationship which ex-
isted in the outside world, where the literate would have had an advantage over
her. She therefore engages in a system of shame compensation, at no risk to her
social image. On the contrary, such exploitation is a measure of her success as
a camp guard. If any of her 'readers' should suspect her illiteracy, she can have
them quietly disposed of. It may be, as Michael wants to believe (V, p. 113),
that she chose the weak prisoners as 'readers' to make the period preceding
their inevitable death more tolerable. But impulses of empathy do not make
her exploitation anything less than exploitation. Besides, Hanna's choice of the
14
See Claudia Taake, Angeklagt: SS-Frauen vor Gericht (Oldenburg: bis Oldenburg, 1998),
pp. 50-52. Michael Berg's suggestion that Hanna 'drifted' into the SS (V, p. 128), while ex-
culpatory in intention, may not be wrong. According to Wolfgang Sofsky, many women 'wur-
den iiber die Arbeitsamter dienstverpflichtet oder in den Kriegsbetrieben angeworben'. The
women were promised high wages and lighter conditions of work. Paths to the SS, Sofsky con-
cludes, were often taken by chance: 'man spiegelte den Bewerbern falsche Tatsachen vor oder
drohte ihnen mit Frontversetzung' (Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors: Das Konzen-
trationslager (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1997), p. 129). Taake even contends that some women
were recruited quite literally by means of coercion (Angeklagt, p. 35). According to Freya Klier,
women on being drafted as guards for Ravensbriick had if anything only a vague idea of what
was happening in the camp and of what their role would be: see Freya Klier, Die Kaninchen von
Ravensbriick: Medizinische Versuchean Frauen in der NS-Zeit (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1994),
pp. 96-98.
386 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

weak can be read more cynically: if their death is inevitable, this serves as a
guarantee that they will not survive to voice any suspicions.
Under Nazi rule, the order of civilization was turned on its head, enabling
individuals such as Hanna to compensate for weaknesses by manipulating and
destroying others. The post-war period saw a return to that order: now, it was
the victims of Nazism who sought and received compensation (albeit somewhat
haltingly and inadequately). But this did not mean that the need of the per-
petrators to indulge their impulses ceased overnight. Not least because both
Germanies were slow to face their Nazi past, many former perpetrators were
able to use their authoritarian impulses within the new post-war societies. After
the war, Hanna returns to the outside world, where she leads an insignificant
life until her trial. By chance, however, she is provided with an opportunity to
transfer elements of her concentration-camp lifestyle to this outside world. She
engages a boy, Michael, in a ritual of reading, showering, and sex which, while
apparently pleasurable for him, nevertheless constitutes an instrumentalization
of his abilities not dissimilar to her instrumentalization of concentration-camp
prisoners, quite apart from representing the psychological and sexual viola-
tion of a minor. Thus Hanna continues to seek compensation for her feeling
of inferiority, a feeling expressed in the scene where she bitterly parodies her
lowly job as a conductress (V, p. 36). In her relationship with Michael, Hanna
further uses a whole range of hurtful mechanisms-ignoring him, setting con-
ditions, going cold on him, threatening him, blaming him-in order to assert
her power and ensure his subservience. During a bicycling holiday, she even
strikes him with her belt in a hotel room (V, p. 54). In an intertextual reference
to Theodor Adorno's essay 'Amorbach', Schlink sets the scene for her act of
violence in a village whose name might be ironically associated not just with
romance, but also, in the light of Adorno's essay, with the tense conflux of past
and present, history and modernity, the unique and the standardized, utopia
and (pre-)echoes of Fascism.'5 In Amorbach, Hanna is violent at the moment
Michael brings her a rose: she has been unable to read the note he left for her
when he crept out to buy the flower and bring breakfast. Her violence is trig-
gered by a potent mixture of vulnerability, helplessness, fear of exposure, and
resentment. The scene prefigures Michael's later discovery of her SS past, and
his eroticized images of her as a concentration-camp dominatrix. Violence and
sexuality, romance and aggression are conflated, in an ambivalence reminiscent
of the spirit of Adorno's essay.
Hanna's shame also controls her behaviour during her trial. Until we learn
of her illiteracy, we find her conduct in court a bizarre mixture of evasion and
self-incrimination. In retrospect, it becomes clear why she offers no explanation
for not replying to letters from the police and the state prosecutor, and why
she admits to writing a report she at first denied having written (V, p. 124).
Her desire for concealment also explains the fact that she makes no attempt
to tell the judge why she would like the surviving daughter's account of her

15 See Theodor W. Adorno, 'Amorbach', in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann,

x/i: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, I: Prismen. Ohne Leitbild, 2nd edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
996), pp. 29 -309. A longer discussion of the intertextual references to Adorno's essay will appear
in my article 'Intertextuality in Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser', in press.
 BILL NIVEN 387
experiences read out in court (V, p. 104). However, this 'explanation' of her
conduct does not necessarily place her in an apologetic light. As throughout
her life, Hanna operates a strategy of avoidance and compensation with a self-
referential solipsism in which there is no place for moral concerns or for the
interests of the truth. Her readiness to prioritize this strategy, even to the point
of taking on a bigger prison sentence than she might otherwise have been given,
is demonstrated in court; had she revealed her illiteracy, severely incriminating
behaviour would have been shown to be less so. 'Might she not have gone
to night school?', Frederic Raphael asks in a bitter criticism of the 'idea that
the "heroine" had no alternative to being discovered as illiterate other than
joining the SS' (p. 17). But this is the very point: Schlink's book sets out to
demonstrate how irrational, self-negating, and indeed destructive a reckless
fear of shame can be when the individual makes no attempt to face it. The
first step to overcoming shame is exposure, yet it is precisely this exposure that
Hanna dreads the most-which is why, pace Raphael, she would presumably
have baulked at the idea of going to night school. An absurd energy, sweeping
everything out of its path such as ethics and any sense of proportion, is invested
in an end which, in comparison to the ends sacrificed to maintain it, seems
incommensurate indeed.
Another example of intertextuality underpins, I believe, this critical view of
Hanna. Homer's Odyssey features several times in the novel. Thus it is the first
work of literature Michael reads to Hanna, and readings from it are on the first
recorded cassette he sends to her in prison (V, pp. 42, 174). Hanna has much in
common with Odysseus, though with a major difference. Odysseus is returning,
in a circular pattern, to a point of inception, while Hanna, moving as she does
from place to place and job to job to hide her illiteracy, is running away with no
end in sight'6-a form of response to difficulties also adopted by Michael, who
comes to see his life as 'Flucht' (V, p. I72). The intertextuality here involves
another Adorno reference, in this case to Dialektik der Aufklirung from 1944,
which Adorno wrote together with Max Horkheimer and which devotes a whole
chapter to 'Odysseus oder Mythos und Aufklarung'. 7 This chapter presents
Odysseus as constantly striving to outwit the mythical forces which threaten
him. He cannot escape them, but in apparently submitting himself to their
power, he avoids any actual submission. While Odysseus uses his skills in
subterfuge to survive and achieve a return home ('Heimat' is presented in the
chapter as the countervailing concept to myth), Hanna, by contrast, uses a
rather primitive strategy to avoid an unpleasant revelation, the fear of which
condemns her to rootlessness. While illiteracy may be stigmatized in society,
the threat to Hanna is not as objectifiable as is the threat to Odysseus, and
certainly its extent is disproportionate to her fear. Yet, viewed from another
perspective, Hanna is but a pathological expression of the problem diagnosed
16 Schlink's
portrayal of Hanna as constantly engaged in flight is psychologically convincing. In
his book on shame, the psychoanalyst Leon Wurmser identifies shame as a form of anxiety and
argues that 'anxiety in general has the "aim" of flight, whether it is actual or only metaphorical'
(The Mask of Shame (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, I981), p. 84).
17
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkldrung: Philosophische Frag-
mente (1944) (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1988), especially pp. 50-87. References to this work are
henceforth indicated in the text by the abbreviation DA and the relevant page number.
388 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

by Horkheimer and Adorno in Odysseus himself. In Odysseus's dissimulation

lie the seeds of a self-denying formalism and a degree of surrender to the
irrationality of myth. In pretending to fulfil contracts while breaking them,
Odysseus instrumentalizes reason in a manner which leads him to exploit and
manipulate others, and to become alienated from himself. For Adorno and
Horkheimer, he is, therefore, the prototype of modern man. Hanna's subterfuge
similarly results in manipulation, exploitation, and self-alienation. Worst of
all, surely, is her near-complete alienation from principles of humanism and
morality.
In Hanna's case, the scheming characteristic of Odysseus has mutated into
something simultaneously desperate, pathetic, monstrous, and self-denying. If
Hanna is typical, then she typifies a society whose aim is not the domestic bliss
sought by Odysseus, but the preservation of a social mask, the energetic main-
tenance of which hinders moral and intellectual awareness. In the commitment
to appearances, all sense of inner growth, or of respect for others, is lost. On this
view, the success of National Socialism depended not just on an Odysseus-style
contract between the cold rationalism of capitalism and myth, but also on one
between a 'culture of shame' and myth. While Odysseus is compromised only
by his manipulative allegiance to myth, Hanna fails to outwit the irrational
mythology of National Socialism, and even functions as one of its murderous
instruments. To hide her lack of education, she becomes a willing tool of a
regime which systematically annuls all that civilization stands for. In court, she
insists that all she did was follow orders, thus fulfilling her part of the bargain,
as did Odysseus on his travels. In return, she was able to hide and compensate
for her illiteracy. In a 'culture of shame', the individual will do anything to
uphold whatever external social value is perceived as life-sustaining.
This critical view of Hanna will come across to a reader able to distance
himself or herself from Michael, who is only too ready to make excuses for
her, despite occasional anger and moral condemnation. The text provides clues
that this distancing process is desired by the author. In his article on the novel,
Donahue contends that Berg tells his story from the 'wiser, more seasoned
perspective' of adulthood' (V, p. 73). But the text itself suggests a different
reading. Michael's very precise narration of his recurrent dream of Hanna's
apartment building, the door handle of which he presses down without then
opening the door (V, pp. 9- I), hardly demonstrates, as Donahue suggests it
does, a sovereign sense of maturity. Rather it evinces an almost resigned acqui-
escence in a continuing sense of homelessness, his endless odyssey; a similar
dream in the train from Boston to New York towards the end of the book sug-
gests that images of Hanna and houses become for Michael a metaphor for a
general sense of homelessness: the sequence has moved beyond Hanna to refer
to a state of being ( V, pp. 199-200). Nor does the final chapter conclusively sug-
gest detachment through narrative. 'Ich habe meinen Frieden mit ihr gemacht',
writes Michael in reference to the story of his relationship with Hanna. This,
he continues, has enabled the story to re-emerge in a rounded and complete
form. Yet in the following paragraph he talks of the interweaving of past and
present, the return of feelings of guilt, hurt and longing, and the possibility
that he has written the account of himself and Hanna 'weil ich sie loswerden
 BILL NIVEN 389

will, auch wenn ich es nicht kann' (V, p. 206). The best we can say of Michael
is that he is objective in identifying his sense of fragility and susceptibility; his
tendency when recounting his tale to 'lapse' into past positions and emotions,
as well as his obsessive use of interrogative sentences, directed at no one but
an imagined reader and left without answer, indicate, however, that he is often
unable to keep this susceptibility under control.
Michael's narrative is a constantly oscillating, often inextricably intercon-
nected admixture of present-day reflection and impressions with re-enactments
of past experiences and feelings. If Michael cannot ultimately distance him-
self from Hanna, that is not because Schlink wishes to determine definitively,
through the eyes of a 'sovereign' narrator, her victim status, but because he
seeks to demonstrate Michael's failure to overcome his own tendentious and
apologetic view. The force of Schlink's book lies in its undermining of any clear
'Bildungsroman' agenda. Not only do Michael's attempts to educate Hanna
result, as I shall show, in an ambivalent development. It is also the case that
his zeal in recording literary classics for Hanna is informed as much by the
need to resume pubescent ritual at a time of emotional disorientation in his
marital life as it is by a commitment to growth through enlightenment on his
part or Hanna's. It could even be argued that Michael, deprived of the element
of sexual intercourse which in the past would follow on from the act of reading
aloud, rechannels unfulfilled sexual desire into an equally obsessive, almost
manic, commitment to Hanna's improvement. Instead of positing in Der Vor-
leser a kind of uncomplicated redemption through Vergangenheitsbewdltigung,
Schlink highlights the psychological difficulties involved in coming to terms
objectively with Nazism. One reason for this difficulty as far as the second
generation is concerned is its emotional dependency on the war generation, a
dependency sharply illustrated by the manner in which Michael's life is inter-
twined with Hanna's.
Hanna is everything to Michael: older lover and seductress, second mother
(who cleans up after him when he is sick), second father (in that it is her
authority which motivates him to catch up on schoolwork), and child (who
is dependent on Michael's reading skills). This totality makes of Hanna an
overpowering emotional reference point in his life. Moreover, as already stated,
Hanna binds Michael into an authoritarian ritual of service, submission, and
humiliation which cripples his chances of true autonomy.'8 Hence the feeling
of shame and betrayal which complicates his emotions towards Hanna when
he turns away from her towards his peers. This feeling is compounded later
in life by his discovery of her past: 'ich muB3teeigentlich auf Hanna zeigen.
Aber der Fingerzeig auf Hanna wies auf mich zuriick. Ich hatte sie geliebt' (V,
p. I62). Hanna's shame thus finds its correlative in Michael's shame, and yet it
had been shame which he and his fellow students were only too ready to load
onto their parents' generation: 'wir alle verurteilten unsere Eltern zu Scham'
(V, p. 88). It is a shame which leads him to seek to conceal his relationship with
her from the world at large. In not revealing Hanna's illiteracy to the judge, he
18 This 'Horigkeitsverhaltnis' and its implications are examined by Helmut Schmitz in 'Malen
nach Zahlen? Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser und die Unfihigkeit zu trauern', GLL, 55 (2002),
296-311.
390 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

acts against the interests of justice. In not visiting Hanna in prison until she is
due to be released, or even sending her a personal note, he deprives her of the
human touch which might have achieved more than the cassettes. In adopting an
unhealthy strategy of concealment, he denies his biography, as she denied hers.
In court, he is bound to be cynical of the way the case is conducted, because the
less guilty Hanna appears to him, the less ashamed he needs to feel. His theory
of 'Betaubung' (V, pp. 98-Ioo), whereby Holocaust victims, perpetrators, and
those involved in the post-war trials of the perpetrators are all struck down by
a kind of emotional anaesthesia, is another strategy of shame-containment. If
all are caught up in a web of numbness, then it is numbness that is to blame
for everything, not Hanna, nor he for loving her. In essence, Der Vorleser is a
biography of shame told from the perspective of an autobiography of shame.
Of course we are meant to believe that there might be some truth in Michael's
criticisms of the court, with its ex-Nazi lawyers and scapegoating of Hanna, or
in his criticisms of the self-righteous zeal of the student generation; in this, Der
Vorleser is very much a post-unification novel. But the novel suggests that this
criticism must be approached critically, in other words against the background
of scepticism towards Michael. The novel raises our awareness of problems
attached to coming to terms with the past in two related ways. Firstly, we
understand how faulty judicial mechanisms often are, and how questionable
the motives of all concerned-judges, defendants, lawyers, prosecutors, and
observers-can be. At the same time we understand how criticism of these
faults can itself be questionably motivated, instrumentalized even-to use the
word in vogue since Martin Walser's Paulskirche speech on receipt of the 'Preis
des deutschen Buchhandels' in I998-by people like Michael or indeed any
other members of society.'9 The only hope the novel leaves the reader with is
that the third generation might do better than the second: as with the course
of the history of law, the course of the process of coming to terms with the
past must begin anew.
Michael's frequent defence of Hanna's conduct thus sheds more light on
his bias than on any actual victim status applicable to Hanna. But surely, one
might counter, given that she becomes morally conscious after learning to read,
her previous illiteracy is to be understood as synonymous with lack of moral
sensibility, corroborating Hanna's status as victim and therefore not culpable?
It is true that Hanna sees herself as someone who, as camp guard, merely did
her job (V, p. I07), and she has little problem with accumulating even more
guilt for her role in the Nazi past than has actually accrued, so indifferent is she
to the moral issues of her role and any social opprobrium from this that might
result. However, it would be overstated to claim that Der Vorleser depicts an
entirely amoral Hanna prior to her literacy. There are hints that a sense of guilt
for her SS past might have filtered into her unconscious. The strongest of these
is her constant washing (though this motif may also be intended by Schlink as
another intertextual reference).20 After all, she may be illiterate, but she will
19 Martin Walser, 'Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede', in Die Walser-Bubis-
Debatte: Eine Dokumentation, ed. by Frank Schirrmacher (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999),
pp.
20
7-I7.
The commandant at Auschwitz, Rudolf H6ss, whose autobiographical report written while
 BILL NIVEN 39I

have seen the terrible pictures of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen disseminated by

the Allies (especially as a cinema-goer). She avoids using the lounge in her
tiny post-war flat, which looks out onto a former station, perhaps intended by
Schlink as a metaphor for deportation and the Nazi past; the visibly emerging
proximity of a seat of justice may also prompt Hanna to shun the room (V,
p. 13). In her final conversation with Michael, she claims she could drive away
visions of the dead before the trial, not that these visions never threatened (V,
p. 187). But as long as Hanna remains illiterate, her self-obsessed shame blocks
her capacity for empathy, the prerequisite to moral sensitivity. In acquiring
literacy, she overcomes shame, releasing the blockage on this empathy.
In Hanna we can detect a shift from shame to a sense of guilt, in line with the
post-war cultural transition (albeit somewhat halting) identified by Assmann
(p. 93). Hanna talks of the dead having the right to 'call her to account' when
Michael visits her shortly before she commits suicide (V, p. I87). As such,
Schlink would indeed appear to portray in Hanna the possibility of 'Wand-
lung', a concept of some importance in post-war West Germany, not least to
Dolf Sternberger, editor of the short-lived journal Die Wandlung (I945-49).
According to Assmann, Sternberger 'hielt nichts von der "sauberen Trennung
des Inneren und AuBeren, des Geheimen und Offentlichen"', and he warned
against the dangers of 'Mimikry' (Assmann, p. i I i). Assmann's identification
of the concept of 'the mask' as a mechanism of the 'culture of shame' is useful
in understanding Hanna. Equally, her apparent development towards a sense
of guilt, made possible by her 'dropping of the mask', may show growth to-
wards a 'culture of guilt', which depends on the responsibility of the individual.
Hanna might also illustrate the realization of one of the four concepts of guilt
for Nazism that Karl Jaspers outlined in Die Schuldfrage. Jaspers distinguished
between criminal (and judicially reprehensible) guilt, political guilt, the moral
responsibility of the individual, and metaphysical guilt.2' Hanna's criminal guilt
is addressed and punished in court, but in a manner which does little justice
to her situation as an illiterate.22 In developing a sense of moral responsibility,
Hanna could be said to internalize guilt, producing a degree of correspondence
between outer and inner processes of coming to terms with the past.
Hanna's apparent moral evolution is perhaps confirmed by her physical de-
velopment. After her death, the prison superintendent tells Michael how Hanna
lived 'wie in einem Kloster', while still enjoying a certain reputation as a person
of authority among the prisoners. In time, she grew fat and smelly, surprising
given that she had always been scrupulous about her figure and personal hy-
giene, and withdrew even more from her surroundings (V, p. 196). Ceasing to
wash would appear to denote acceptance of guilt. It may also represent Hanna's
voluntary abandonment of that 'social persona' she had previously been so keen
awaiting execution by the Poles was read by Hanna in prison, had an obsession with washing
and bathing which began while he was a child. See Rudolf H6ss, Kommandant in Auschwitz:
Biographische Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958).
21 See Karl
Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Zur politischen HaftungDeutschlands (Heidelberg: Lambert
Schneider, 1946).
2 For a discussion of the incommensurate nature of the legal handling of the case and the Nazi
past in particular, see Silke Dreike, 'Zur Rechtsskepsis in Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser', GLL,
55 (2002), 118-29.
392 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

to preserve. This reason for this apparent paradox is that the newly developed
consciousness of guilt can be lived only within the confines of her own body,
whose neglected outer aspect is both symbol and means of her self-willed with-
drawal. Coming to terms with her guilt is not a process she feels she can enact
'publicly'. It must be done entirely within her own conscience. One is strongly
reminded of Martin Walser's dictum, 'Mit seinem Gewissen ist jeder allein'
(Walser, p. 14).
With respect to the more dubious aspects of Hanna's development in prison,
it is illuminating to consider these within the context of the philosopher Pe-
ter Sloterdijk's speech, Regeln fiir den Menschenpark (I999). The basic thrust
of Sloterdijk's essay is a critique of humanism, voiced through an analysis of
Martin Heidegger's essay 'Uber den Humanismus' (1949). Referring to an idea
of Jean Paul's, Sloterdijk describes philosophical works as 'letters' sent by one
generation to the next down through the centuries. Through such missives, a
literary society was formed. Erotologically speaking, according to Sloterdijk,
such letters provide an example of 'Fernstenliebe'.23 However, in time, this
development took a negative turn. Humanist educational principles did not ac-
cord human beings, as embodiments of 'humanitas', the respect they deserve,
treating them in essence as rational animals, 'animalitas', to be trained. Some-
what dismissively, Sloterdijk talks of a politicized trend in the nation-states of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries towards 'durchalphabetisierte Zwangs-
freundschaftsverbande' based on national literary canons (p. I I). Implicit in the
essay is the objection that literary humanism not only aimed to liberate, but also
to domesticate human beings. For Heidegger, according to Sloterdijk, modern
movements such as Fascism, Bolshevism, and 'Americanism' have to be under-
stood within the wider context of humanism's deep ambivalence (p. 31). In a
clear adoption of the concept of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, Sloterdijk
writes: 'Was zihmt den Menschen, wenn seine bisherigen Anstrengungen der
Selbstzahmung in der Hauptsache doch nur zu seiner Machtergreifung iiber
alles Seiende gefiihrt haben?' (p. 32).
In his introduction to a new edition of Der Vorleser, Stuart Taberner writes
that, in a sense, 'Hanna is destroyed by learning to read and write'.24 On
this highly original view, Hanna develops empathy not merely at the cost of
cleanliness, attractiveness, and sensuality. She can also be seen to have been
domesticated by the humanist canon, along the lines described by Sloterdijk,
into a kind of morbid self-rejection. However, I would apply to Hanna another,
differently weighted, criticism of humanism voiced by Sloterdijk in Regeln
fiir den Menschenpark. Sloterdijk is scathing of the post-war hope that the
literary canon might somehow 're-educate' the Germans. Such an attempt-
'als k6nnte eine Goethe-Jugend die Hitler-Jugend vergessen machen'-was
nothing more than 'ein Traum von der Rettung der europaischen Seele durch
eine radikalisierte Bibliophilie' (p. I5). Undoubtedly the adult Michael shares
this dream. At school, he is exposed to the traditional literary canon, and he
23
Peter Sloterdijk, Regelnfiir den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreibenzu Heideggers Brief iiber
den Humanismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, I999), p. 9.
24
Stuart Taberner, 'Introduction', in Bernhard Schlink: Der Vorleser, ed. by Stuart Taberner
(Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002), pp. 7-38 (p. 34).
 BILL NIVEN 393

passes this on to Hanna. In later life, he sends Hanna recordings of literary

works as 'letters' (albeit largely those of others, and across space, rather than
time) in the hope that he can educate her morally. He strives for the same kind
of actio in distans to which Sloterdijk refers (p. io). But in Schlink's novel,
this canon has lost the power to provide proper orientation. It leaves Michael
quite unprepared for the atrocities of the concentration-camp system which are
described during Hanna's trial (see V, pp. 96-98). Nor, contrary to what critics
suggest, is there clear evidence that it has a salutary effect on Hanna.
Johnson and Finlay point out that Hanna's irritated reaction to the tragic
fate of the heroines of Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Schiller's Kabale und Liebe
indicates her inability to understand the moral imperative behind their be-
haviour (pp. 208-09). By the time she is exposed to Tolstoy's War and Peace,
she is at least able to enter the world of the figures without prejudgement (V,
p. 68). By and large, however, being read to from the world of fine literature
has little measurable impact, so that Michael's faith in such works (he refers to
his 'grof3es bildungsbiirgerliches Urvertrauen' (V, p. 176)) seems premature.
Even when Hanna has become literate, her aesthetic judgement remains banal.
Michael may describe her comments on the texts he has recorded for her as
'erstaunlich genau' (V, p. I79), but he is deceiving himself: 'Keller braucht
eine Frau', or 'Schnitzler bellt', are not aesthetic judgements of particular
quality. Hanna's step out into literacy is a rather timid one. When Michael
visits her cell, he finds quotations from nature poems as well as photographs
of trees and meadows pinned up over her bed (V, p. I94). This suggests that
Hanna's appropriation of literature has been guided at least to a degree by se-
lective sentimentality. Michael also finds cooking recipes: being able to read is
a source of mouth-watering imaginings. Schlink's novel may well bear out the
sceptical opinion of literary historian Harold Bloom. In reference to writers
among whom are at least two to whom Hanna is exposed by Michael, Bloom
writes: 'Reading the very best writers-let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,
Tolstoy-is not going to make us better citizens.'25
This scepticism is not contradicted by the development in Hanna's moral
conscience; as already pointed out, the initial cause of this development is
not literacy itself, but Hanna's overcoming of the solipsism of shame. From
the moment she can read, Hanna starts to order and read books about the
concentration camps (V, p. I94). Such accounts were not among the material
Michael had read to her or recorded for her, and indeed will have played
little, if any, part in the post-I945 school curriculum (which might at the most
have included the diary of Anne Frank). In other words, where Hanna's moral
development is supported by literature, then it is not by the traditional humanist
literary canon, but by a new kind of literature. The works of Elie Wiesel,
Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi were quite new as a genre, treading a fine
line between gruesome fact, imagination, reflection, and biography. They were
new also in their deep scepticism. This was a literature about the collapse of
humanism, the spirit on which the traditional canon is based. As such, reading
it throws a critical and questioning light on the function and value of this canon.
25
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan,
1995), p. i6.
394 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

Der Vorleser shows a Michael floundering in the wake of what he has heard,
seen, and experienced of the German Nazi past, ill-prepared as he was for
it by immersion in Tolstoy, Schiller, and Lessing. Equally, if Hanna's moral
consciousness is sharpened, then it is not by Grillparzer, Lessing, and other
traditional authors, but by Wiesel and Levi. The post-Holocaust confrontation
with Auschwitz is at least an acknowledgement of the traumatic caesura the
Holocaust represents; immersion in pre-Holocaust classical humanism is a
form of blindness, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
But here too we must be cautious. In her conversation with Michael before
her suicide, Hanna opines that no one can call her to account who does not
understand her, and only the dead understand her (V, p. I87). This rules out
the right of the German judicial system, indeed of German society as a whole,
to pass judgement: 'wo blieben da die Lebenden?', as Michael asks himself
in some indignation (V, p. I90). Moreover, in casting off all sense of answer-
ability to present-day social and judicial co-ordinates and replacing these with
the authority of an imagined community of dead concentration-camp prisoners
whose 'opinion' she can manipulate at will, Hanna effectively reinstrumental-
izes the victims. It is an instrumentalization based on a tendentious reading of
Primo Levi. In May I960 Levi wrote in a letter to the German translator of
his book Se questo e un uomo (1958): 'Today I, prisoner No. 174517, by your
help, can speak to the German people, remind them of what they have done,
and say to them: "I am alive, and I would like to understand you in order to
judge you".' The letter continues:
But I cannot say I understandthe Germans:now, something one cannot understand
constitutesa painful void, a puncture,a permanentstimulusthat insists on being satis-
fied. I hope that this book will have some echo in Germany,not only out of ambition,
but also because the natureof this echo will perhapsmake it possible for me to better
understandthe Germans,placate this stimulus.26
This letter subsequently formed the foreword to the first German edition of Ist
das ein Mensch? (196I). Hanna, in her final conversation with Michael, appears
to be 'responding' to Levi's appeal for understanding. She might feel she has
satisfied any such appeal from her victims, and be conferring upon them, in line
with Levi's preface, the right to judge. But this is to assume the role reserved
for the victims: it is hardly her place to play their part, even if they are dead
and therefore unable to play their own. It also seems that Hanna has not read
Jean Amery properly, or that she has selectively absorbed what she read there.
One of Amery's themes was the idea that his torturers might understand him,
and what they did to him. In a speech of 7 March 1976 for South German
Radio, Amery said: 'Meine Ressentiments aber sind da, damit das Verbrechen
moralische Realitat werde fur den Verbrecher, damit er hineingerissen sei in
die Wahrheit seiner Untat.'27 Amery seems to suggest that redemption from
the experience of persecution, which he defines as one of the most extreme
26
This letter, together with an account of how it came to be used as the foreword to Ist das
ein Mensch?, is provided in Primo Levi, 'Letters from Germans', in The Drowned and the Saved
(London: Abacus, 1989), pp. 137-65 (p. I43).
27 Jean
Amery, 'Ressentiments', in Jenseits von Schuld und Siihne: Bewdltigungsversuche eines
Uberwdltigten (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1997), pp. 102-29 (p. I 3).
 BILL NIVEN 395

loneliness, may be possible if the perpetrator can appreciate the moral truth
of his or her misdeeds and bridge the gap to the victim: 'SS-Mann Wajs, als
er vor dem Exekutionspeleton stand, erfuhr die moralische Wahrheit seiner
Untaten. Er war in diesem Augenblick mit mir-und ich war nicht mehr mit
dem Schaufelstiel allein' (Amery, p. 114). Certainly Hanna is together with
her victims in her suicide, suggesting perhaps the moment where her guilt is
assessed in metaphysical terms. But she is together with them very much on
her own terms, effecting a decidedly biased union of victim and perpetrator.
Hanna may commit suicide for many reasons: fear of release from the security
of prison, a sense that her relationship with Michael can never be as it was, and,
perhaps more pertinently, a general dread of the outside world. Her suicide is
also intended in part as a gesture of penance. But we are not meant to identify
with Hanna's act of self-forgiveness. The discussion of her understanding of
Levi and Amery offered above demonstrates this. Moreover, the text strongly
indicates that her new-found moral awareness is brittle indeed, and certainly
not tied to any sense that, as an autonomous moral being, she must bear it
rather than flee from it. When Michael visits her prior to the planned release
from prison, he sees her sitting on a bench. In her lap she is holding a book, but
she is not reading it. In fact, she is gazing over her reading glasses at a woman
throwing breadcrumb after breadcrumb to some sparrows (V, p. I84). There
could hardly be a stronger metaphor for Hanna's hunger to return to the days of
spoon-feeding, and her wish to abandon the arduous task of reading for herself.
When Michael asks her if she reads a lot, her answer is less than enthusiastic: 'Es
geht so.' Significantly, she adds: 'Vorgelesen bekommen ist schoner'-and, after
a telling glance at Michael, she says: 'Damit ist jetzt SchluB, nicht wahr?' (V,
p. I86). These are hardly the words of a woman who has stepped convincingly
out of Kantian 'Unmiindigkeit'. It is as if she had hoped to slip back into the
role of passive recipient. Realizing that this will not be possible, she escapes,
in carefully stage-managed style, into suicide. The daughter who survived the
church fire, however, has clearly not read Hanna's script. Or rather: she has, but
chooses her own. She refuses to accept Hanna's gift of money, an acceptance
with which, undoubtedly, Hanna sought posthumously to validate her suicide
as an act of penance. Instead, the daughter takes the tea caddy in which some of
the money was kept: she makes her own choice, on her own terms, symbolizing
the autonomy of the victims (V, pp. 202-04). The novel comes to an end in
a manner which echoes its beginning. Hanna came to Michael's rescue when,
as a child, he threw up, deeply ashamed, in public (V, p. 6). Now, he comes
belatedly to her rescue, trying to 'clean away her shame' just as she washed away
his all those years ago. But the symmetry is only apparent, the 'roundedness'
flawed. For the daughter will not provide the hoped-for absolution. Hanna goes
to her grave imagining a forgiveness which posthumous reality denies her.
In conclusion, it should be reiterated that Schlink's novel is critical in its
portrayal of Hanna. By her example, it shows that shame can cause an indi-
vidual to lose sight of moral issues in seeking to place outward appearances
over all other concerns. It also shows that, in what might appear to be a cul-
ture of guilt or a culture of 'penance'-a word used by Mary Fulbrook with
396 Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'

reference to West Germany28--the emotional conflation of first and second

generations of which Hanna's and Michael's relationship is (albeit hyperboli-
cally) paradigmatic can still block true Vergangenheitsbewiltigung, while Nazi
continuities in courts block true justice (witness the scapegoating of Hanna).
Equally, the novel shows us that the literary canon with its underlying human-
ism is not an appropriate form of addressing the Nazi past. However, none
of these reflections on Vergangenheitsbewdltigungis intended as an argument
against it. While Schlink's novel is, of course, a work of literary fiction, it can
nevertheless be compared with those works of post-unification historiography
in Germany which seek to reassess the process of coming to terms with the
past, examining the degree to which it was inscribed with political, judicial,
and psychological mechanisms which did as much to hinder as to advance it.29
In a sense, coming to terms with the Nazi past can progress only by addressing
the flaws which have hitherto typified it. Schlink's novel reflects contemporary
developments in another aspect. It was in the I98os, when Hanna commits
suicide, that West Germany began to move towards a greater public and poli-
tical acknowledgement of German guilt for Nazism. This process was halted,
if not held up, by the 'Historikerstreit' of I986. Since unification, moreover,
there have been increasing conservative calls for an end to the supposedly
obsessive preoccupation with German guilt in the public realm. Yet Martin
Walser's apparent rejection of public forms of memory in favour of personal
conscience in his Paulskirche speech of 1998 need not be read as a strategy of
evasion: situating memory within the conscience can be a form of anchoring
it, not disposing of it. At the same time, over-reliance on individual conscience
could mean that memory becomes prey to subjective distortions and interests.
A hallmark of post-unification discourse on the Nazi past is this ongoing search
for a balance between public and private memory work. Schlink's novel is a
part of this discourse. It addresses the need to combine a personal working
through of the past and, where relevant, acknowledgement of responsibility,
with some form of collective 'memory guidance' in which certain regulatory
standards are upheld. Der Vorleseris a warning against the effects of imbalance.
If Hanna's development is flawed, that is because her autodidacticism, however
laudable, degenerates into an over-subjective process in which arbitrariness and
self-indulgent imagination corrupt initially positive intentions. While she must
take responsibility for these failings, it cannot be denied that the direct medi-
ation of Michael or the prison authorities might have made possible a slightly
different development.
THE NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY BILL NIVEN
28
Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, I999), e.g.
P. 59.
29 See
e.g. Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfdnge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-
Vergangenheit(Munich: DTV, 1999), and Peter Reichel, VergangenheitsbewaltigunginDeutschland:
Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von b945bis heute (Munich: Beck, 2001).