Instead, he creates a possible analogy between her character and her generation in both critical and compassionate fashions. Schlink (through Michael’s reflections) does not ignore Hanna’s fault. The latter is a major source of shame for her, even more than the first secret in fact, her inability to admit it underpinned her tragic decisions through her lifetime – avoiding promotion to office duties, joining the SS and refusing to reveal her illiteracy even in the face of life sentence. Her personal traits are derived from two secrets: her past and actions in the SS and her illiteracy. The character of Hanna is used as a representative of the older generation, which took part in the Nazi horrors. She commits suicide just before her rerelease from prison, ordering him to give her modest savings to one of the victims. Hanna admits responsibly for the group’s false account for the massive death in the church, confessing that she wrote the report in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.ĭuring the third part, Michael, now a law historian, re-establish a connection with Hanna in the form of taping books for her and receiving her childish-written letters. In the second part, Michael has grown and he is now a law student and monitors a trial, which held for a group of middle-aged women who served as SS guards. The first part describes their meeting in a West German university town in the winter of 1958, a random meeting that evolved into a series of passionate encounters during the following summer. His 1995 novel The Reader, Bernhard Schlink provides a unique insight into the complexity of the German equivalent for ‘baby boomers,’ namely the generation that was born in the second half of the 1940s, which are often called “the lucky late-born.” Broadly speaking, the novel deals with an ambivalent love affair between Michael Berg, a teenager in the 1950s and the narrator of the story, and Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate streetcar conductor, who served as a guard in a concentration camp in Poland and later being accused for being responsible for the death of 300 female inmates in a burning church.
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