The Reader is the last book I chose for the War Through the Generations - WWII challenge.That means that I have completed this challenge, and just in time too seeing how there are only two weeks left! This is another one where I heard about the movie first, and then discovered that it was based on a book, so quite naturally I had to read it.

This book is set in post WWII Germany and told by Michael Berg. It starts when he was 15 years old and Hanna Schmitz came into his life. Although Hanna was twice his age, Michael was seduced and immediately fell in love with her. For a period of time they were lovers, and one of the things that Hanna liked was when Michael read to her, until one day Hanna disappeared and left no way for Michael to contact her. Years later when he is a law student, Michael is assigned to a trial and there he unexpectedly sees Hanna again. This time things have changed, she is being trialled as a guard in one of the concentration camps and there is so much about Hanna that Michael doesn't know. As he sits through the trial he tries to understand her motive, until he discovers the secret which is keeping Hanna from defending herself.

I found this to be a very easy and a quick read, and although it is a short novel, the topics it deals with give you a lot to think about. I liked the two main characters in this book, yet I thought that Hanna was much stronger and at first I was a little disappointed when Michael discovered her secret. My initial reaction was that it was impossible for someone to behave that way, but thinking about it made me realize how much it must have meant for Hanna if she was willing to get a harsher sentence to conceal her secret. In the end I was eager to see what happened to Michael and Hanna, but again was disappointed by what she did. I may have been hoping for a happy ending though, and the fact that it did not happen could have something to do with why I was unhappy with Hanna.

I think I expected more from this book, probably because of all the hype surrounding the movie that was released in 2008, which I haven't seen yet because as always I like to read the book first. All in all however it was still worth reading and I think it would make a great book for discussion, it is surely good food for thought. ( )

When Michael Berg, a fifteen-year-old German boy, falls ill outside a building on the Bahnhofstrasse, he is cared for by one of the residents, a single woman living on her own, Hanna Schmitz. The encounter sets off an erotic relationship between the boy and the woman that abruptly comes to an end one day when Michael arrives at her apartment and she is gone. Years later, as a law student, Michael again sees Hanna as one of five women defendants on trial for their work as camp guards in a concentration camp. The other defendants accuse Hanna of being in charge while Jewish inmates were trapped in a burning church, but their accusations hinge on whether or not it can be proved she wrote the consequent military report on the fire. By this time Michael recognizes that Hanna is illiterate, and so fails to understand why she admits to authoring the report:

"I was no stranger to shame as the cause of behavior that was deviant or defensive, secretive or misleading or hurtful. But could Hanna’s shame at being illiterate be sufficient reason for her behavior at the trial or in the camp? To accept exposure as a criminal for fear of being exposed as an illiterate? To commit crimes to avoid the same thing?" (p.132)

Schlink’s novel is a meditation on truth, guilt, and forgiveness. As one generation of Germans uncovers another’s past—the past of their fathers and mothers—they must also come to terms with complicity, what it means to love in the face of guilt, and what it means to deny that love. For those who have already read the novel, ‘the reader’ will be seen as either the young Jewish girls who were forced to read to Hanna at the concentration camp, or as Michael who reads to her as a boy and later sends tapes of books he has read to Hanna in prison, or as Hanna herself, who eventually, through Michael’s tapes, learns to read and write. Yet in a way there appears to be a fourth reader: you and I, who read the words of Bernhard Schlink and involve ourselves in the tale of Michael, Hanna, and a post-war generation contending with condemnation of and forgiveness for their elders.

"But I also read [Hanna] books I already knew and love…Taken together, the titles in the notebooks testify to a great and fundamental confidence in bourgeois culture. I do not ever remember asking myself whether I should go beyond Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann, and Lenz, and read experimental literature, literature in which I did not recognize the story or like any of the characters. To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting with the reader, and Hanna didn’t need that and neither did I" (p.183)

Schlink, through his novel, seems to be asking his readers to respond to history. Will we condemn figures like Hanna—who is both a woman who cares for a sick stranger and a woman who selected inmates for execution—or grant them absolution? And whether we condemn or absolve are we not, either way, responsible for the consequences? ( )

an easy read - story covering the interactions of two individuals originally as a 15 year old boy and an older woman, then again during a court trial, and again during her imprisionment. Was not totally satisfying to me, I wanted addtional character definition (of both characters). Hanna's secret was pretty obvious early on. ( )

Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung auf einem neuen Niveau.: „Was hätten Sie dann gemacht?", fragte die angeklagte KZ-Aufseherin den Richter. Eine Frage, die von jedem Leser von Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser eine Antwort fordert. Jedoch, ist es Schlink gelungen, diese Frage nicht nur auf das immer wieder bearbeitete Thema der Vergangenheitsbewältigung, sondern auch auf die psychologische Charakterisierung der Figuren zu beziehen. Der zu Beginn fünfzehnjährige Ich-Erzähler, Michael Berg, beschreibt im ersten Teil des Buches sein leidenschaftliches Verhältnis mit der viel älteren Hanna, von deren Vergangenheit er fast nichts kennt und über die er auch nichts fragen darf. Nach dem ungeklärten Verschwinden Hannas überspringt der Text einige Jahre und Michael, der jetzt Jurastudent ist, wird durch einen, von seiner Studiumsgruppe beobachteten Naziprozess, gezwungen, zurück auf die Ereignisse seiner Kindheit und auf deren Bedeutung für sein zukünftiges Leben, zurückzuschauen.Der Erfolg dieser Geschichte liegt an der Fähigkeit des Autors, mehrere, verschiedene Themen zusammen zu bearbeiten und den beiden Teilen des Buches durch das thematische Leitmotiv und die Struktur eine Einheit zu geben. Der erste Abschnitt bereitet den Leser auf das vor, was später geschehen wird, in dem er einige Elemente der späteren Handlung einleitet, zum Beispiel Themen wie Gewissenskonflikte und Verantwortung, die die zwei Teile verbinden und dem Text eine runde Struktur geben. Obwohl die Trennung des Textes in zwei Teile einen ungewollten Bruch für das Vergnügen des Lesers darstellen könnte, lenkt er, in der Tat, unsere Neugier auf die vielen unbeantworteten Fragen im Zusammenhang mit Hannas ungeklärtem Verschwinden und der Zeitraum, der einige Jahre umspannt, unterstützt die Darstellung des Hauptthemas der Vergangenheit und der Frage ob man ihr entfliehen kann oder sollte. Obwohl der präzise Stil des Autors einige Aspekte der Hauptfiguren weniger berücksichtigt, zum Beispiel das Familienleben Michaels, erlaubt er dem Autor, eine moralisierende Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema zu vermeiden. Durch Michaels Selbstanalyse, wenn sie auch teilweise überlang ist und das Tempo manchmal verlangsamt, gelingt es Schlink, den Leser zum Nachdenken zu bringen und ihm die Antworten auf die vom Buch aufgeworfenen Fragen zu überzulassen.Die Originalität dieses Buchs liegt in der neuen Methode Schlinks, das Vergangenheitsbewältigungsthema zu bearbeiten. Der Naziprozess stellt die traditionellen Schuld- und Verantwortungsfragen, aber die Entwicklung Michaels nach dem Prozess und die Art und Weise, auf die er sich mit der Vergangenheit beschäftigt, führt die Vergangheitsbewältigung auf ein neues persönlicheres Niveau. Die Frage „Was hätten Sie dann gemacht?" gilt Somit nicht nur allgemein der Nazivergangenheit Deutschlands, sondern auch den persönlichen Ereignisse und Entscheidungen eines Individuums.

Found this to be really heavy reading ... the fundamental story - the affair, impact on Michael's (the narrator) personal life, Hanna's history, it's underlying cause, the court case and her life following this event, was relatively interesting, however really saw 'The Reader' as an allegory about the impact of the holocaust on future generations of Germans, and how they responded to the crimes, perpetrators and the passive co-opters. ( )