Review of Bernhard Schlink’s book “The Reader”

Pretenders

This review will not analyze the stylistic assets of the book, of which there are none. We are going to concentrate on the message and the method of its delivery.

Under the guise of a young German coming to terms with the Nazi past of his country through an affair with a former SS guard, this book attempts (and judging by its critical acclaim, succeeds) to desensitize us to the Nazi crimes, to deface the victims, and to put a human face on the very people who exterminated millions just a few decades back. A human face, or better, a mask looking like a human face. But we will see that this book contains many masks in place of human faces, in fact both main characters are nothing but pretenders, and the author is but a magician who pulls a bunny out of a hat and wants to convince us that this is the usual place where one can from now on expect to find a bunny.

The narrator starts with recounting how as a 15-year old boy he came down with hepatitis shortly after the war. And the first time he meets the protagonist, Hanna, she saves him from a disgrace: a complete stranger, she takes him into her home after he throws up on a street , cleans him up, washes his vomit off the street and takes him home helping him carry his book bag. Many months after, when the adolescent recovers, he goes to thank her for that act of kindness, and subsequently starts an affair with Hanna, a woman twice his age. One of her quirks is that she asks him to read aloud to her. Literature she is interested in is not some cheap trashy novels, but great works of literary art, like “War and Peace.”

Several months later she disappears from his life, she spontaneously moves away leaving him to cherish forever some indelible visual images of herself putting on stockings, riding a bike with a long dress swaying in the wind, and the like. The narrator finishes high school, and enters a university where he studies to become a lawyer. When he goes to observe a trial as a part of one of his law classes, he happens to be in the courtroom where several female SS guards are being tried for allowing hundreds of prisoners burn down in a church during an aviation strike in World War II. The guards decided against unlocking the church and letting the prisoners out because they were not sure they could prevent their escape. Hanna is the main guard accused of that crime. She betrays lack of understanding of the proceedings of the trial, she seems to be making statements which are detrimental for the outcome of the trial for her. Sensing her weakness, other defendants and their lawyers make her the scapegoat. They report that she had some unsavory relationship with the weakest of the female prisoners by taking them into her quarters privately for an unknown purpose. (It turns out that Hanna was asking them to read aloud to her.) Hanna is further alleged to have written the report about the incident which betrays full understanding of the situation and the consequences. By that time in the trial the narrator realizes that Hanna’s shameful secret which she is carefully guarding from the world is that she is illiterate. The narrator feels sorry for her, but also admires her pride. Rather than reveal her secret and get a reduced sentence, like the others, Hanna accepts the charge that she was the author of the report, and is sent to prison for life.

During the trial a dramatic moment happens when the judge accuses Hanna of cruelty by not unlocking the doors of the burning church, and she asks him point blank: “What would you have done?” This question remains unanswered as everyone in the court draws a collective breath, and in fact it is implied that many people who are now judging Hanna were former Nazis, just like she was. Their lack of a good answer to her question proves that if they had found themselves in the same situation, they would have done the same thing. Basically, it leaves us with the only logical conclusion: who are we to judge her? And if nobody is in the position to judge, then nobody is actually guilty – it is all the fault of the circumstances.

The narrator then goes on a quest to “understand” Hanna’s crime and her past – he visits a concentration camp in the vicinity of his town and “really tries” to imagine the suffering which went on in the camps, the concrete details of a camp, but all his attempts are “vain”. He claims to be ashamed and embarrassed by his inability to imagine this gruesome past, but he is also clearly relieved. Besides, he does not give us any proof of his hard work of trying to imagine – with all the details he gave us about Hannah and seeing her clearly with his inner eye, we do not get a picture of a single victim whose image the narrator is trying to conjure up mentally. Surely, all of us can come up with visions of emaciated bodies in striped camp uniforms, with huge desperate eyes on a bony face, their gait unsteady from exhaustion. But this particular narrator somehow fails to come up with anything like that. And for a reason, as we will see later.

So the conclusion put in black and white for all to see reads as follows: “I wanted to simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. […] I wanted to pose myself both tasks – understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.” And here lies the clue for the whole purpose of writing the book and the feat the author so masterfully achieves in it. If only we start looking at Nazis as individuals, if we see them first as kind human beings, as passionate lovers, people with some shameful defect to hide (he makes a comparison of Hanna’s situation with someone trying to conceal that he or she is a drug user or gay – possibly to make it ring closer home to the contemporary reader who the author is trying to brain wash with his peace of psychological propaganda), all of a sudden we won’t be able to condemn them. The author clearly invites us to do just that.

But painting a very human and humane portrait of the killer is not the only prerequisite for “understanding” them. One must also, like the narrator, completely abstract from the sufferings of the victims. Like I mentioned before, there are no real portraits of the victims painted. They are never even called victims – only “prisoners” and “creatures” (as if we are dealing with some house elves in “Harry Potter”). I believe, in psychology this effect is called “detachment” when one deliberately disassociates from the other person in order to not feel any pain. Curiously, the narrator even manages to completely avoid describing the appearance of the main witness against Hanna at the trial, the daughter who survived the church inferno. After Hanna’s death, he comes to visit her in New York, he spends some time describing the appearance of her house, but here is the only thing he tells us about the “daughter” (always nameless, and as we see, generically faceless): “Everything about her was matter-of-fact: her manner, her gesture, her dress. Her face was oddly ageless, the way faces look after being lifted.” He creates a visual image on a non-entity, of a totally commonplace unremarkable human being, at the same time managing to obliquely accuse her of falseness with the implication of a face-lift (a surrogate of a mask which he and Hanna have been wearing all along). Even the prison warden who makes but a cameo appearance at the end of the book has more personality. Compare how she is described: “a small, thin woman with dark blond hair and glasses. She seemed insignificant until she began to speak, with force and warmth and a severe gaze and energetic use of both hands and arms.” Well, but this individual is a Hanna’s sympathizer, so no detachment is necessary.

We practice similar detachment when we enjoy a good steak. The aroma of the meat, the succulent taste - all comes at the expense of a cow with large moist eyes being rather brutally killed and cut open while still warm, and axed into pieces, etc. If we make ourselves think about that before dinner, we may lose all appetite for a steak after all. So we are naturally very good at blocking certain images from our minds. The author suggests we do the same with the Nazi crimes. He demonstrates the technique of easily turning us into moral omnivores, and making us even feel good in the process. All you have to do is to see each individual Nazi as a human, and completely ignore the individuality of their victims. Essentially, this is how Hitler was zombying his troops sending them to kill the inferior peoples (one of them being the Jews). Bernhard Schlink makes a not entirely talentless attempt to follow in the footsteps of his great teacher. In this book he makes us all have an affair with the Nazism and not be afraid of finding the experience fairly pleasurable.

I am looking forward to his future books of making us empathize with a pedophile killer who was abused as a child and who resorts to murders only because he is too ashamed and proud to ask for treatment for his early life scars. This author may be particularly well endowed to write a biography of gay serial killer Jeffery Dahmer – too bad Kate Winslet won’t be able to play the title role for the obvious reason, or else she might have claimed another Oscar for it.

The book “The Reader” is fake from beginning to end. First, it never explains why and how it happened that a German woman who was not known to have been raised in a jungle and is not severely demented grew up completely illiterate in highly cultured Germany. Secondly, it is not explained how an illiterate person could be enlisted as a member of the SS force which was regarded as an elite unit by the Nazis. (The suggestion by some critics that Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for her ignorance of the Holocaust does not hold water – anybody who had at least the hearing intact in the Nazi Germany was fully aware of Hitler’s speeches played on the public radio. Such a suggestion of critics tries to give credit to the writer’s style by finding at least one metaphor in his primitive writing, but it is even less persuasive and plausible than Hanna’s “literal” illiteracy.) Proof of racial purity was required as a prerequisite for joining the SS. One would imagine that any perspective candidate was asked to fill out questionnaires. But the author clearly trivializes the process and makes it sound like it was easier to join the SS than to become a street car driver. What he is describing is historically inaccurate and impossible. The supposed “readers” – those “creatures” who read to Hanna at the camp – a “feeder” camp from which prisoners were sent to Auschwitz for the extermination – had to be native speakers of German because Hanna is not known to have been a polyglot. Well, the only problem with that is that the absolute majority of prisoners at Auschwitz did not come from Germany and therefore were unlikely to speak and read German as their native tongue. A small detail which the author bulldozes over, but which leaves an attentive READER disgusted with what trash is being fed to him or her under the guise of a fresh dish. Further, the narrator claims to have become a law historian rather than a prosecutor or a defender. But just like Hanna is wearing a mask of an illiterate person, this harmless book worm is actually an insidious and very skillful advocate of the Nazis. The Western readership, the critics of the book – the jury before which the narrator was making his speech – found it convincing. This makes me seriously concerned for the Western culture which either recognizes its own nationalistic tendencies and is eager to embrace them under the high-brow guise of hailing the book, or is too dumb to see what the book is really about. Regrets,

Svetlana Krylova