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The Third Victim in Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser

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Jane Alison
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Queens University
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Jane Alison (2006) The Third Victim in Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser, The Germanic Review: Literature,
Culture, Theory, 81:2, 163-178, DOI: 10.3200/GERR.81.2.163-178

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 THE GERMANIC REVIEW
Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications

The Third Victim in Bernhard

Schlink’s Der Vorleser
JANE ALISON

W hen it first appeared in English translation in 1997, Bernhard

Schlink’s The Reader—a novel dramatizing relations between
Germany’s present and past allegorically, through a love affair
between a boy and an older woman who was once an SS guard—was
lavishly praised on both sides of the Atlantic as a realistically am-
bivalent Holocaust novel: Schlink had replaced the black-and-white
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Nazi monster with a fatale monstrum, the more shaded and human-
ized Hanna Schmitz. A 36-year-old tram conductor, Hanna sexually
initiates the novel’s narrator, Michael; the two have an intense affair;
she then disappears, emerging years later as a defendant in a war-
crimes trial that Michael, now a law student, observes. There, Michael
realizes that Hanna is illiterate and that this disability has determined
each decision in her life, including the one to join the SS. Given that
the book’s centerpiece is Hanna’s trial, the reader is invited to under-
stand the novel as both crime story and parable: Michael represents
Germany’s postwar generation that judges the Nazi past, in turn rep-
resented by Hanna. How guilty, he asks, was she—and, by extension,
other mid-level perpetrators—if her actions were determined by “ig-
norance”? How should his generation comprehend and live with the
guilty elders they love? To what degree is this second generation im-
plicated as well?
Although most critics and readers welcomed the seemingly candid
moral uncertainties of the novel, others decried the book as bankrupt
for its apparent intention, in Cynthia Ozick’s words, “to divert from the
culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for
Kultur” (22).1 In confronting The Reader’s moral position, though, crit-
ics on both sides have focused on the issues adhering to Michael (the
present/interrogator) and Hanna (the past/defendant). Receiving no
attention is the third figure in the book’s allegorical, legalistic equa-
tion: the Jewish accuser and victim.
Yet, issues of innocence and victimization are central to the novel.
Dealing with questions of identity, taboo, and guilt in crime-story form,

163
 164 ALISON

Schlink—a jurist and writer of detective novels—may have taken as a

conceptual model the aboriginal crime story of Western literature,
Oedipus Tyrannus. Frequent mentions of the Odyssey, one of the texts
Michael reads to Hanna, suggest classical underpinnings, particularly
when the narrator envisions Hanna as Nausicaa, Odysseus’s virginal
savior (Schlink, Vorleser 66). Yet, the nature of Hanna and Michael’s re-
lationship makes Sophocles’s tragedy an obvious reference point:
Hanna often bathes her young lover, whom she calls Jungchen, and
when the two travel it is as mother and son (41). Both Sophocles’s play
and Schlink’s novel open with a sickness symptomatic of a past crime:
in Thebes, it is pestilence; in Germany, hepatitis or Gelbsucht ulnone
(5), which, as Ruth Franklin points out, literally means “‘yellow mania,’
as reminiscent of the yellow star of the doomed Jews as of the jaun-
dice associated with the disease” (par. 7). Both works, furthermore,
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develop dramatically through an interrogation that is conducted by the

protagonist but turns on him, and both conclude with the female lead—
Hanna or Jocasta, the pitiful monster—hanging herself offstage. The
central figure (Michael, Oedipus) is punished psychologically, guilty for
having loved what is taboo, yet still innocent—because how can one be
guilty if ignorant? As Sophocles’s characters are both guilty and vic-
tims, so are Schlink’s: Hanna is guilty of joining the SS yet is a victim
of circumstances and disability; Michael is a victim of Hanna herself
and, like Oedipus, of a fate decided at birth, in that he was born Ger-
man in 1944.
That postwar Germany suffers from a generational and identity con-
flict stemming from the Nazi past would seem an understatement. Yet,
when Michael ponders whether “die Auseinandersetzung mit der na-
tionalsozialistischen Vergangenheit nicht der Grund, sondern nur der
Ausdruck des Generationskonflikts war, der als treibende Kraft der Stu-
dentenbewegung zu spüren war” (Schlink, Vorleser 161), he reduces it,
in J. J. Long’s words, to a mere “Oedipal conflict between fathers and
sons” (54). As Long notes, this assertion is problematic for various rea-
sons, principally because it levels the Holocaust’s historical specificity
to the “timeless” and personal. Yet it supports the idea that Freud’s de-
finition, recast as a compound of love for motherland and struggle
against patrimony, together with the tragedy from which the term was
derived, forms a schematic base for Schlink’s novel.2
The question I wish to address is this: if Schlink’s legal drama pre-
sents both the Nazi perpetrator and postwar interrogator as victims,
what becomes of the actual victim of the crime? This character is a
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 165

woman who does not appear until part 2, which recounts Hanna’s
trial. As a child, this character (nameless in the novel), her mother,
and several hundred other Jewish women had been forced on a march
led by Hanna and other guards. The march ended when the Jewish
women were closed for a night in a church, which Allied bombs then
struck; Hanna and the other guards did not open the doors of the
burning church, and only “the daughter” and her mother survived. A
book the daughter later wrote documented the event and forms the
chief evidence in Hanna’s hearing, at which the daughter testifies. This
character then disappears until the end of the novel, by which time
Hanna has served her sentence, taught herself to read and write—yet
suddenly committed suicide before her release. Michael fulfills
Hanna’s last wish by going to New York to offer the daughter Hanna’s
remaining money.
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This character, the Jewish victim, occupies just a few pages of the
novel and, perhaps for this reason, has received little attention. Yet,
the role she plays dramatically (as Hanna’s accuser) and the role her
principal scene plays structurally (Michael’s visit to her balances his
initial visit to Hanna) suggest that it is not the case, as William Don-
ahue (63) and Ann Parry (253) have said, that the Jewish victim has
no significant part in The Reader. She does indeed, but one so subtle
as to have gone unnoticed—and one that forms a subtext with dis-
turbing consequences for how the book’s celebrated moral ambigui-
ties should be read.

***

To gauge the novel’s characterization of the daughter, I propose to

examine each textual moment in which she appears and to measure
her against her counterpart, Hanna. Before doing so, however, I
should note some difficulties in locating moral ambiguity in this first-
person narrative.
The consciousness of the narrator, Michael, filters the information
given to the reader and is accordingly the locus for most of the
novel’s moral uncertainty. But although Michael has been construct-
ed as a seemingly candid, analytical character who invites the read-
er’s identification and sympathy, Donahue has revealed the array of
rhetorical strategies with which Michael in fact disarms the reader
and obfuscates what is purported to be a rigorous exploration of the
moral issues surrounding Hanna’s crime and the past. Discussing his
 166 ALISON

preoccupation with the Betäubung of the concentration camps, for

instance, Michael says, “als ich dabei Täter, Opfer, Tote, Lebende,
überlebende und Nachlebende miteinander verglich, war mir nicht
wohl, und wohl ist mir auch jetzt nicht” (Schlink, Vorleser 99). The
rhetorical gesture at the end of this sentence is tantamount to a le-
galistic move in which Michael “‘retracts’ his questionable equation,”
but only once it has been made (Donahue 69); it is worth remem-
bering that this book is narrated by a fictional jurist and written by a
real one. Elsewhere, Michael avoids recounting graphic details of the
death camps by pleading this same “numbness,” a trait he ascribes
as well to the Jewish daughter’s account of the camps—thus in one
move endorsing his own avoidance, shielding Hanna from an incrim-
inating context that would lessen the reader’s sympathy for her, and
withholding information that would prompt the reader’s sympathy for
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the victim (Schlink, Vorleser 98, 114).

These dubious tactics belong to the fictional narrator and, as such,
could perhaps have been constructed by the author to urge the reader
to regard the narrator critically. But this would be the case only if the text
offered authorial clues encouraging such a reading. As Donahue con-
vincingly argues, however, Schlink’s text promotes no such critical dis-
tance from Michael; his narration is presented as objective, his exten-
sive self-criticism indeed preempting the reader’s ability to critique him.
Yet, when a close reading reveals the narrator’s obfuscating strategies,
and when there is no authorial counterweight to these strategies, the au-
thorial text is implicated in these narratorial tactics as well.3
There are further problems within the fictional donnée itself. That
Hanna is illiterate, that her war crime is only her failure to open the
door of a burning church, that this church was bombed by the Allies,
that the survivor has written a book documenting the incident, that the
daughter now lives in New York: these are all details invented by the
author. And it is in the details of the surviving Jewish victim—in par-
ticular, as she is constructed in opposition to Hanna—that I believe
some of the text’s greatest moral difficulties lie.

***

We first encounter Hanna at the novel’s opening, when Michael, sick

with Gelbsucht, vomits on the street, and a woman he does not know
helps him; once he is well, he goes to her apartment with flowers to
thank her. Using the fictional device of portraying character through
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 167

abode—a device with a lineage as old as Homer’s Kalypso—Schlink

precedes the account of Michael’s first visit to Hanna with a lyrical
portrayal of her building.
This is the sole subject of the book’s second chapter and functions
almost as an ekphrasis: the building’s physical form, invested with
personal or symbolic content, is detached not only from the narrative
but, within the fiction, from its location on the street. As a boy, Michael
has long been curious about the place: it is an old building that dom-
inates the block and is heavy, darkened, and wide, made of sandstone
and brickwork, with elaborate balconies, pillars flanking the front door,
and a pair of lions keeping guard. He imagines its inhabitants as “wun-
derlich [. . .] vielleicht taub oder stumm, bucklig oder hinkend”
(Schlink, Vorleser 9). Later, the middle-aged narrator tells us, this
building haunts his dreams, reappearing where it does not belong, in
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fields of lavender or in Berlin or Rome. Although uncanny, its appear-

ance comforts him, like an old friend. Yet it seems forlorn; it has lost
its place and looks “abgeschnitten, unzulänglich. [. . .] [D]ie Fenster
sind ganz staubig und lassen in den Räumen nichts erkennen, nicht
einmal Vorhänge. Das Haus ist blind” (10). It is a tragic house in a life-
less setting: “Die Welt ist tot” (10). In the dream, Michael climbs the
steps and turns the doorknob, but does not open the door. He wakes
knowing that he did not enter.
That haunting vision comes, chronologically, later, when Michael is
in middle age. Yet, it is important to note this passage’s prominent ap-
pearance early in the book, when the reader is not yet in a position to
perceive the dream-house as other than an emblem, perhaps, of
Michael’s youth, a time-place to which he cannot return. Only later, as
I will show, can the house and the dream be translated.
Returning now to the narrative and to chronology: as the younger
Michael first visits Hanna to thank her for helping him, he enters the
building and finds that, despite its imposing façade, inside it is shabby
and worn, yet clean, the smell of cleaning fluid permeating the air.
Cleanliness dominates our first impressions of Hanna. She earlier
washed away Michael’s vomit; now, he comes upon her methodically
ironing fresh laundry; when he visits her next, she will beat the dust
from his clothes and bathe him, and the bath itself launches their affair.
She was always, Michael says, “von peinlicher Sauberkeit, hatte mor-
gens geduscht, und [er] mochte den Geruch nach Parfum, frischem
Schweiß und Straßenbahn, den sie von der Arbeit mitbrachte”
(Schlink, Vorleser 33). Although Stuart Parkes (118) and Long (56)
 168 ALISON

regard Hanna’s cleanliness as “obsessive” and “in keeping with the

clichéd view of the fascist personality,” it seems here sensual and
wholesome rather than compulsive. Her face has a “[h]ohe Stirn, hohe
Backenknochen, blaßblaue Augen, volle, ohne Einbuchtung gleich-
mäßig geschwungene Lippen, kräftiges Kinn. Ein großflächiges,
herbes, frauliches Gesicht” (Schlink, Vorleser 14). Despite stern
façades, both Hanna and building are wholesome, industrious, clean.
When, on this first visit, she finishes ironing and steps into another
room to dress, a glimpse of her putting on her stockings, absorbed in
the activity and with no intention to seduce, enthralls Michael.
Once Michael begins his affair with Hanna, his vision of her
changes: she can be unpredictable and violent. But only after her
abrupt disappearance and reemergence years later as a defendant in
a war-crimes trial do we discover that this volatility arises from her il-
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literacy and the struggle to conceal it. Her crimes, however, are dis-
closed only a few pages before her illiteracy (although readers may
have guessed), and the effect of these revelations being paired is to
render Hanna a brute, but in the sense of a “poor dumb brute,” an an-
imal who knows no better.
Indeed, this pairing of criminality and illiteracy, of brutality and
brutishness, may have been prefigured in the lyrical second chapter
about Hanna’s building. If we take her abode as metonymic, it also rep-
resents Germany’s past, a reading supported by Michael’s description
of his law seminar’s approach to the war-crimes trial: “Wir rissen die
Fenster auf, ließen die Luft herein, den Wind, der endlich den Staub
aufwirbelte, den die Gesellschaft über die Furchtbarkeiten der Vergan-
genheit hatte sinken lassen” (Schlink, Vorleser 87). Thus, the three—
Hanna, building, the Nazi past—form a logical compound. The building,
Michael told us, was dominating, fascinating, grave; those who dwelled
behind that historic façade must be both grand yet “deaf or dumb.” Now,
as he discovers Hanna’s illiteracy in tandem with her criminality, his
childish speculation about the inhabitants of “Hanna’s building” is con-
firmed: like those imagined cripples, Hanna too is “dumb.” Those who
lived in that building, who belonged to that past and did those things,
were indeed deaf or dumb—thus not wholly to blame.
The house of Michael’s dream can now be reconsidered: “Das Haus
ist blind,” he told us, both further binding the cluster of Hanna, house,
and history, and offering further exculpation. The house’s abandon-
ment and isolation also prefigure Hanna at her end, alone in a cell,
about to hang herself offstage like Jocasta. The disconnected house
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 169

has the air of an abandoned set, a place in which dramatic stuff was
once staged. “Das Haus ist blind”; “Die Welt ist tot”: these two sim-
ple sentences, placed dramatically at the end of descriptive se-
quences, conjure tragedy—the fall of a house like the house of
Atreus, the death of a queen, the end of an era; working zeugmati-
cally, they may even suggest both the dead Jocasta and the blinded
Oedipus. The narrator’s predisposition toward exculpating and grant-
ing tragic status to Hanna and those in her “house,” then, is revealed
even in the opening pages.

***

The same sections that disclose Hanna’s twinned criminality and

illiteracy also introduce “the daughter.” Her textual appearance as a
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character, however, is prefigured by that of the book she wrote docu-

menting the camps and the church fire. Thus, before we know any-
thing further about her, the most crucial difference between her and
Hanna is enunciated by strategic textual placement: while Hanna is il-
literate, the daughter is both literate and published.
As a character per se, she appears abruptly: during the trial, she
suddenly cries out from her seat. When the judge asks if she would
like to add to her testimony, she “wartete nicht, bis sie nach vorne
gerufen wurde. Sie stand auf und redete von ihrem Platz unter den
Zuschauern aus” (Schlink, Vorleser 111). Hanna, on the other hand,
is often not given the chance to speak or is misunderstood or dis-
missed, and the judges are exasperated by her seeming obstinacy—
which, we understand, has been caused by her inability to read or
comprehend the charges against her. The contrast between the two
figures is again established succinctly by careful textual arrange-
ment: the final words of chapter 7, in which Hanna faces an unjust
charge and Michael silently begs her to speak, are “[a]ber der Anwalt
fragte Hanna nicht, und sie sprach nicht von sich aus” (113). This is
followed by the first words of chapter 8: “Die deutsche Fassung des
Buchs, das die Tochter über ihre Zeit im Lager geschrieben hatte”
(114). Hanna does not speak and is not asked; the daughter speaks
freely and not only writes but also writes in English and is translated,
her book then distributed abroad.
On reading this book, Michael finds it distancing and alien. He
presumes that this is because it is written in English, but years later
he decides
 170 ALISON

daß das Buch selbst Distanz schafft. Es lädt nicht zur Identifikation ein
und macht niemanden sympathisch, weder Mutter noch Tochter, noch
die, mit denen beide in verschiedenen Lagern [. . .] das Schicksal geteilt
haben. Die Barackenältesten, Aufseherinnen und Wachmannschaften
läßt es gar nicht erst so viel Gesicht und Gestalt gewinnen, daß man sich
zu ihnen verhalten, sie besser oder schlechter finden könnte. Es atmet die
Betäubung, die ich schon zu beschreiben versucht habe. Aber das Ver-
mögen, zu registrieren und zu analysieren, hat die Tochter unter der
Betäubung nicht verloren. [. . .] Sie schreibt über sich und ihr pubertäres,
altkluges und, wenn es sein muß, durchtriebenes Verhalten mit derselben
Nüchternheit, mit der sie alles andere beschreibt. (114–15)

As noted earlier, others have written about problems in the narrator’s

invocation of Betäubung, concerning both the fallacy of the phe-
nomenon and its appropriation in the daughter’s account (Donahue
68–72; Schlant 214–15). But important here, too, are terms em-
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ployed to qualify the book and the daughter: unsympathetic, distanc-

ing, cunning. Ostensibly, it is she who portrays herself as cunning in
her book, yet this is, of course, a book described by the narrator and
imagined by the author, and we must be alert to such subtle shiftings
of responsibility. Book and woman need not have been constructed
as distancing and cunning, but sympathetic; or, were this view of
them to be read as the narrator’s and not as “fact,” then the text could
communicate his unreliability to the reader by simultaneously offer-
ing another rendering of the daughter. Instead, the text allows the
daughter to incriminate herself.
We learn no more about her now, but we do see her mother in the
account of the church fire:

Mutter und Tochter überlebten, weil die Mutter aus den falschen Gründen
das Richtige tat. Als die Frauen in Panik gerieten, konnte sie es nicht
mehr unter ihnen aushalten. Sie floh auf die Empore. Daß sie dort den
Flammen näher war, war ihr egal, sie wollte nur allein sein, weg von den
schreienden, hin und her drängenden, brennenden Frauen. [. . .] Als sie
im Morgengrauen des übernächsten Tags aus der Kirche kamen, begeg-
neten sie einigen Bewohnern des Dorfs, die sie fassungs- und wortlos
anstarrten, ihnen aber Kleider und Essen gaben und sie ziehen ließen.
(Schlink, Vorleser 118)

This information is scant and naturally focuses more on the horror of

the incident than on characterization. Yet, while Hanna’s own actions
that night fall into a lacuna and so remain potentially defensible, the
mother’s are presented, and the data—she wants to be alone, she can-
not bear being among the others, she does the right thing for the
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 171

wrong reasons—portray her, if not unfavorably, then with no palpable

sympathy and even less benignly than the villagers, who help the
mother and daughter and are, like Hanna, wortlos.
Consider now, too, a key element in the textual presentation of
the trial. The ostensible subject is the night the church burned: why
the women were not let out, which of the guards had the key, who
is responsible for the women’s death. This material is surely dra-
matic and full of pathos, yet is suppressed in favor of the courtroom
drama in which it is set: that is, how (as Hanna complains) “man
wolle ihr etwas anhängen” (105). The narrator’s account, in no way
disavowed by authorial clues, channels our sympathy not to the
many women trapped in a fire, but to one woman—who could have
saved them—being trapped by prosecutors. Of the many moral
quandaries and ambivalences to which this narrator candidly con-
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fesses, such selectivity in narration is not one.

Finally, consider two simple elements in the donnée itself: Hanna’s
crime ultimately was one of omission; the fire itself was caused by the
Allies. Presumably, there were many fictional choices in creating both
a crime for Hanna and a scene in which women are trapped by fire;
the building need not even be a church. Both narrator and donnée thus
urge sympathy and exculpation for Hanna while subtly countermand-
ing sympathy for the victim, and even holding the Allies responsible
for the crime.

***

After the courtroom scenes, the daughter disappears from the nar-
rative, which follows Michael’s stunted life, his resumed contact with
Hanna, her eventual literacy gained in prison, and her suicide. The
daughter reappears at the end of the book, when Michael, executing
Hanna’s will, visits her to offer Hanna’s money.
Here, we have the daughter’s principal scene, which, in balancing
Michael’s initial visit to Hanna, is crucial to the book’s structure and
must be read together with that earlier scene. Both visits are formal,
the first to offer flowers and thanks, the second to offer money and
atonement; both a dream and a description of the building precede the
scenes themselves.
Michael’s dream on his way to visiting the daughter in New York
echoes his earlier dream of Hanna’s building. Whereas earlier, the
building materialized out of place, now it is Hanna and Michael who do,
 172 ALISON

appearing in an idealized, autumnal American countryside, with car,

house, and shopping bags. His longing for her is painful, and he wakes
riven with the knowledge of the dream’s impossibility: Hanna is dead,
and how, anyway, could she be in this scene in America, she who could
neither speak English nor drive? He acknowledges “daß die Sehnsucht
sich an ihr festmachte, ohne ihr zu gelten. Es war die Sehnsucht
danach, nach Hause zu kommen” (200). But this “home” for which he
longs is extremely problematic if we associate it with Hanna’s building
and the past, as the parallel placement of the two dreams suggests.
Michael’s dream and his conscious acknowledgment of what it sig-
nifies are followed by a description of the daughter’s home:

Die Tochter lebte in New York in einer kleinen Straße in der Nähe des
Central Park. Die Straße war beidseitig von alten Reihenhäusern aus dun-
klem Sandstein gesäumt, bei denen Treppen aus demselben dunklen
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Sandstein in den ersten Stock führten. Das gab ein strenges Bild, Haus
hinter Haus, die Fassaden nahezu gleich, Treppe hinter Treppe, Straßen-
bäume, erst unlängst in regelmäßigen Abständen gepflanzt, mit wenigen
gelben Blättern an dünnen Ästen. (200)

The place itself is not unlike Hanna’s: both are old, sandstone, dark.
But Hanna’s house is singular and extraordinary, whereas this one, de-
spite its age, has an anonymity that makes it more like the new build-
ing that replaced Hanna’s after hers was torn down: a structure that is
“glatt und hell verputzt. Viele Klingeln zeigen viele kleine Apartments
an. Apartments, in die man einzieht und aus denen man auszieht, wie
man Mietwagen nimmt und abstellt” (8). The daughter’s block of
buildings, then, both aligning with the structure that replaced Hanna’s
and appearing directly after a textual clue pointing back to Hanna’s
lost building, sets the featureless and anonymous against the unique—
and problematic—“home.”
Now to the visit proper:

Die Tochter servierte den Tee vor großen Fenstern mit Blick in die kleinen
Gärten des Häusergevierts, mal grün und bunt und mal nur eine
Ansammlung von Gerümpel. Sobald wir saßen [. . ,] wechselte sie vom
Englischen, worin sie mich begrüßt hatte, ins Deutsche. “Was führt Sie zu
mir?” Sie fragte nicht freundlich und nicht unfreundlich; der Ton war von
äußerster Sachlichkeit. Alles an ihr wirkte sachlich, Haltung, Gestik, Klei-
dung. Das Gesicht war eigentümlich alterslos. So sehen Gesichter aus,
die geliftet worden sind. Aber vielleicht war es auch unter dem frühen Leid
erstarrt – ich versuchte vergebens, mich an ihr Gesicht während des
Prozesses zu erinnern. (200–01)
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 173

Michael explains why he has come and offers Hanna’s money, but the
daughter refuses this on the grounds that it would be an absolution. He
then proposes that the money go to a foundation to help the illiterate,
to which she consents. In their brief discussion, the daughter notes
Michael’s attachment to Hanna, questions him, learns his secret, and
remarks on Hanna’s brutality, a charge from which Michael tries help-
lessly to defend her.
This brief but crucial scene in New York has received little atten-
tion, as if, given the pyrotechnics elsewhere in the book, the one ex-
tended moment in which we see the Holocaust victim dwells in a
blind spot—a blind spot all the more striking among American crit-
ics. Writing in the New York Review of Books, for instance, D. J. En-
right refers to the daughter, who by this time is surely near sixty, as
“a young woman” (5). Schlant, who looks more closely, sees in this
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characterization of the daughter something positive: she is cool, inci-

sive, assertive; and her final gesture, taking Hanna’s tea caddy, sug-
gests an openness to dialogue (215–16). Yet, I think there is about
the daughter a tone distinctly less sound than Hanna: the rubbish in
the gardens versus the industrious sawing in Hanna’s Hof; her seem-
ingly lifted face and extreme impartiality, both like the blank wall of
the new building; further, the blankness of her face in contrast to
Hanna’s, with its pale blue eyes and strong, womanly features; her
namelessness; and the gelben Blättern outside her house, which echo
disturbingly Michael’s Gelbsucht, as if the daughter’s neighborhood is
marked or identified. Even the tea caddy, in which Hanna had saved
her money and which she wanted given to the daughter, points to a
comparison: in her own caddy, the daughter as a child had kept tufts
of her poodle’s hair and opera tickets, both casual indications of a
childhood far more privileged than Hanna’s. And, too, that the daugh-
ter saved precious objects in a tea caddy as a child reminds the read-
er that it is a childlike thing Hanna has done in prison, suggesting
again her innocence. Finally, the daughter switches easily between
languages, whereas Hanna, as Michael’s dream only a page earlier
reminded us, has only a stunted grasp of one.
In this scene, in fact, each woman’s control of language—the ability to
speak, listen, read, and write—comes pointedly into question. Although
the daughter quickly perceives Michael’s attachment to Hanna and
questions him, she fails—despite the “ability to observe and analyze”
(Schlink, Reader 118) that had been evident in her book—to hear and
draw logical conclusions from what he tells her: that Hanna had been
 174 ALISON

unable to read her book and thus unable to understand the chief charges
against her, so her testimony had been compromised. We already know,
on the other hand, that for all her illiteracy, Hanna had an open, ingenu-
ous relation to language, a desire to use it plainly and honestly. Her ob-
servations about the literature Michael read to her, for instance, “trafen
oft erstaunlich genau” (Schlink, Vorleser 179); and her brief notes to
Michael, once she could write, described the natural world around her in
such a way that, for the first time, he really looked. Just as her physical
being is a compound of cleanliness and industry, her use of language is
honest and direct. Michael has been obliged to make this visit, after all,
by Hanna’s last words.
In der lila Teedose ist noch Geld. Geben Sie es Michael Berg; er soll es mit
den 7000 Mark, die auf der Sparkasse liegen, der Tochter geben, die mit
ihrer Mutter den Brand der Kirche überlebt hat. Sie soll entscheiden, was
damit geschieht. Und sagen Sie ihm, ich grüße ihn. (196)
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But when Michael proposes that the daughter donate Hanna’s

money to an organization helping illiterates—a Jewish organization, if
there is one—the daughter replies, “‘Sie können sich darauf verlassen,
daß, wenn es Vereinigungen für etwas gibt, es auch jüdische Vereini-
gungen dafür gibt. Analphabetismus ist allerdings nicht gerade ein
jüdisches Problem’” (203).
The contrast is strong: Hanna’s simple offering, put in a written
form that has been hard won; versus the daughter’s deflection, deliv-
ered with a linguistic sting. One must note, too, that all the daughter
accepts from Hanna is the tea caddy, her own having been stolen at
the camp. Although Long assumes that the caddy had been confis-
cated by guards (57), the daughter’s explanation suggests that it was
instead taken by fellow inmates: “‘gestohlen wurde mir die Dose nicht
wegen des Inhalts. Die Dose selbst und was man mit ihr machen konn-
te, war im Lager viel wert’” (Schlink, Vorleser 203). Just as Hanna’s
actions on the night of the fire remain a lacuna, rendering her poten-
tially innocent, the text’s use here of the passive allows the inmates
to be implicated. This means, perversely, that Hanna’s gift potential-
ly redresses not the crime of a Nazi perpetrator, but that of a fellow
Jewish victim.
Altogether, and astonishingly, the portrait of Hanna is the more
sympathetic. Much has been written about the problems of creating
a humanized Nazi war criminal;4 what I wish to stress is the way this
portrayal comes at the expense of the actual victim. Against
Hanna’s simplicity and ignorance stand the daughter’s “cunning”
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 175

and extreme literacy; against her broad-planed womanliness is the

daughter’s lifted face. Above all, Hanna has struggled to become lit-
erate and has left a simple testament attempting to atone and to
give, whereas the daughter takes for granted her literacy, even
wielding it to achieve not intimacy but distance.
Consider now the final scene of the novel, which seems designed
to achieve a neat balance both thematically and structurally. After
leaving the daughter, Michael returns to Germany and donates
Hanna’s money to the Jewish League against Illiteracy. In response,
he receives “einen kurzen computer-geschriebenen Brief, in dem die
Jewish League Ms. Hanna Schmitz für ihre Spende dankt” (207). In
this book so concerned with the written word, this note forms the
clear counterpart to Hanna’s own most significant piece of writing,
her will. Yet it shows no knowledge that she is dead and no knowl-
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edge that she was not “Ms.” but “Frau,” and, above all, it is not per-
sonally written. Just as the daughter’s book does not give the camp
guards faces or shapes, so too does this letter obscure Hanna’s iden-
tity. She is not properly recognized. Further, this thank-you letter bal-
ances Michael’s thank-you gift of flowers to Hanna, yet compare the
two representations of gratitude: as Hanna’s grand old shabby build-
ing has been torn down and replaced with one that is featureless, the
old house dwelling now only in dreams, gone too is a world where
thanks are offered personally, with flowers. The past, even the Nazi
past, is romanticized; the present, debased.

***

So, if Schlink has portrayed his perpetrator as a tragic, romantic

Jocasta, how has he drawn the actual victim? Not as a victim at all,
although perhaps we could read what she is in more than one way.
Consider the elements with which she is associated: the United
States—specifically, New York City; the many “Jewish organiza-
tions” to which she refers (and note again that the text places these
words in her mouth, just as she portrays herself as “cunning”); the
book she has written, which presumably joins the many books and
films about the camps that Michael complains have so proliferated
since the war. Thus, in addition to her specific attributes—she is well
off, literary, educated—associated with her is a loose set of agencies
that include New York, Jewish organizations, Hollywood, and the
media: an ensemble of some power.
 176 ALISON

Yet recall that, earlier in the novel, when Michael struggled to envi-
sion Hanna as an SS guard, he found himself hampered by prefabri-
cated images. “Die Phantasie kennt sich in [der Welt der Lager] aus,”
he says, “und seit der Fernsehserie ‘Holocaust’ und Spielfilmen wie
‘Sophies Wahl’ und besonders ‘Schindlers Liste’ bewegt sie sich auch
in ihr, nimmt nicht nur wahr, sondern ergänzt und schmückt aus”
(142–43). He might have cited other films instead—Alain Resnais’
Night and Fog, Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa, Claude Lanz-
mann’s Shoah, Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity. Yet, as Don-
ahue has noted, just as the text tacitly holds the Allies responsible for
bombing the church that night, so too does it tacitly blame “the Allies”
for creating this “impoverished Holocaust iconography” (77). But,
given what we know of the daughter and the various agencies associ-
ated with her, are we to take this a step further? With respect to those
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who have produced the many books and films about the Holocaust, is
it not just America that is being held responsible, but also, more dis-
turbingly, those particular Americans, Jewish Americans, who are time
and again alleged to “control” Hollywood and the media?5
If one follows this idea through, the role played by the daughter
and what she represents in this legalistic parable of a novel—the
Americanized, politicized, and empowered Holocaust survivors or
heirs—is heavily but subtly charged. Schlink has said in an interview
that “it’s much easier for an intellectual to come up with a legend to
delude others” (Smith), and one can only wonder about the logical
extension of this statement: that “intellectuals” are indeed deluding
others now with their production of images. The minute detail of the
daughter’s lifted face becomes, in this light, more troubling. For
what does a lifted face represent other than the alteration of traces
of the past, together with the financial means to achieve this? Are we
to think that the daughter, with her education, worldliness, and
media enfranchisement, has fabricated a past, created a legend? Is
this novel pure revisionism?
But perhaps a less suspicious reading is possible, likewise taking its
cue from that curious detail of the face. In providing her with neither a
name nor a proper face, and in associating her with a building that is one
of countless others, the text does not individuate her, just as Michael, vis-
iting Struthof, was unable to visualize the camp inmates. The mother, the
daughter, the women, the inmates: so many, they resist specificity. Per-
haps the daughter here is meant to be emblematic of this lack of speci-
ficity to express the extent of the horror. But given that this lack of indi-
 SCHLINK’S DER VORLESER 177

viduation is accompanied by an absence of sympathy, the text seems

rather to withhold tragic status—in the literary sense—from this unindi-
viduated victim. Tragedy requires singularity. Schlink has chosen a per-
petrator to play the tragic role; his text will sing of her so that she will not
be buried beneath all the Holocaust iconography. The daughter’s book
“never gives the barracks leaders, the female guards, or the uniformed
security force clear enough faces or shapes for the reader to be able to
relate to them” (Schlink, Reader 118); Schlink’s book seems intent on
redressing this wrong. To do this, he sacrifices the victim.
***
For Schlink to have drawn his perpetrator as a Jocasta, inviting not
just horror but sympathy, was a disturbing artistic decision that has
rightly preoccupied critics. But just as disturbing, especially because
it has been so little noticed, is the text’s treatment of the surviving
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Jewish victim. Donahue has noted that “the mother and daughter
whose lives are spared by pure chance [. . .] do not once enter into
Berg’s ethical calculations” (79). Yet, the daughter figures in the
novel’s ethical calculations in a way that makes the whole enterprise,
already disturbing, even more so.
“The tragedy of the Jewish people,” Hegel infamously wrote, “is not
a Greek tragedy, it is incapable of provoking pity and fear, because
these attach only to the fate of a beautiful creature who had [. . .] an
inevitable flaw” (204–05). Schlink’s novel, denying tragic status to its
Holocaust victim and instead, astonishingly, gracing the Nazi perpe-
trator with this mantle, would seem to affirm this.

Queens University

NOTES

1. An excellent discussion of the book’s reception can be found in William

Donahue’s “Illusions of Subtlety.”
2. Although Ruth Franklin points out Hanna’s motherliness (par. 9), the
role possibly played by Sophocles’s tragedy as structural and thematic model
for this “generational conflict” has not, to my knowledge, been noted.
For a recent manifestation of this “generational and identity conflict,”
witness the European Parliament’s debate in January 2005 about the word
“German” in a draft resolution concerning the sixtieth anniversary of the lib-
eration of Auschwitz: an early draft termed it a “Hitler Nazi death camp,” and
only after the insistence of a Polish parliamentarian, further debate, and the
coming forward of German Socialist parliamentarian Martin Schulz was the
phrase “Nazi Germany’s death camp” adopted. “I think that explains the guilt
 178 ALISON

and special responsibility of Germany,” Schulz said (“The Word ‘German’ Pro-
vokes Sharp Debate”).
3. Indeed, disturbingly little psychic distance is even established between
narrator and author: Schlink himself has said, “It’s a book about my genera-
tion, so it’s also a book about me” (Oprah Winfrey Show 12). One can only
speculate how the novel’s ethical issues would have been handled were the
book instead written from an omniscient viewpoint.
4. A subsequent attempt to humanize the Nazi that has been just as con-
tentious as Der Vorleser is Bruno Ganz’s portrayal of Hitler in the film Der Un-
tergang (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004).
5. Just a year before Der Vorleser appeared, the issue of “Jewish control of
the media” erupted anew in an article written by William Cash for the Specta-
tor, in which he discussed, in a way inflammatory to many, the extent to which
Jews had become powerful in Hollywood.

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