(Translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

In brief: At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg begins a passionate affair with Hanna, a woman twice his age. At first the affair is purely physical but when Michael starts to read to his lover, it becomes an essential part of their lovemaking ritual. One day Hanna disappears and when Michael next sees her, he is a law student and she is on trial as an SS camp guard. He becomes obsessed with the trial and when she is convicted, remains haunted by the unanswered questions posed by it.

In detail: Set in post-war Germany, The Reader begins as an erotic love story but later becomes a philosophical enquiry into the effects of the Holocaust on a generation whose parents are perceived as at best complicit, at worst perpetrators. Central to the novel is the question: what is to be done with the knowledge and the guilt of the Holocaust?

When Michael Berg is taken ill on his way home from school a stranger helps him out. After a winter spent sick with hepatitis, Michael's mother sends him to thank the stranger. Finding his way into Hanna's house, he surprises her when she arrives home. While she changes out of her work clothes, Michael watches through the crack of the door, running away when she catches his eye. He returns and their affair begins. When Hanna asks Michael to read to her it soon becomes an essential part of their routine. One day Hanna disappears.

When Michael next sees her, he is a law student and she is on trial for her part in a war crime. During a bombing raid, while guarding a group of women in transit between camps, Hanna and her fellow SS guards locked the women inside a church. All but two were burnt to death. The author of the report describing this terrible event is considered the most culpable defendant. Hanna refuses to deny that she wrote it despite the fact that, as Michael has finally realised, she is illiterate.

Michael is faced with a dilemma: if he convinces the judge of Hanna's illiteracy she will be given a lighter sentence, but given that she is too proud to confess it herself, would she want it exposed? He seeks advice but eventually lets it go and when Hanna is sentenced to life he is haunted by guilt. His marriage fails after five years and he struggles to find some sort of meaning in his work. Eventually, he begins to record his favourite books for Hanna. When the prison governor writes to tell him that Hanna will soon be leaving prison, he visits her for the first, and last, time.

About the author

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944 to a German father and a Swiss mother. He grew up in Heidelberg, studying law in both Heidelberg and Berlin where he is a professor of constitutional and administrative law at Humboldt University and also practises as a judge. In addition to The Reader he is the author of several prize-winning crime novels, one of which, Self’s Punishment, has been translated into English. He divides his time between Bonn and Berlin.

For discussion

• Who do you think 'the reader' of the title is, or can it be applied to more than one character? At what point was it apparent to you that Hanna was illiterate? What is the importance of literacy in the book?
• How would you describe the tone and style of Bernhard Schlink's writing in part one of the book? How does it differ from the second and third parts? What effect does this difference achieve?
• The relationship between Hanna and Michael begins with an act of kindness on her part but we later learn of her involvement in the concentration camps. Does Hanna engage your sympathy at any point after you found out that she was a camp guard? On pages 131-132, Michael suggests reasons why Hanna became a guard and for her selection of girls to read to her. How convincing are his arguments? How can we explain why ordinary people commit atrocities without resorting to calling them monsters?
• Why does Michael find it so difficult to make his relationship with women work? How does the affair with Hanna affect him as an adolescent?
• On page 133, Michael says 'And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of loving one'. Michael did not know of Hanna's crime during their affair so why does he feel guilty? How do other characters of his generation appear to feel about the Holocaust? What about his father's generation?
• On page 146-147, Michael refers to the many images that have been produced of the camps, particularly in films. Is there a danger that the continued exposure of Holocaust images lessens their impact until they become frozen into clichés as Michael suggests? How do you feel about the images of war which are recorded in the newspapers and on television?
• Is Hanna a scapegoat just for her co-defendants or in a more general way? When she turns to the judge and asks him what he would have done in her position (page 110), what does his answer imply? Could the judge be considered as guilty as Hanna if he knew about the camps but did nothing?
• Why do you think Hanna does what she does at the end of the novel? How do you think learning to read might have changed her view of what she had done in the camps?
• Does the novel answer the question posed on page 102: 'What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews?' What do you think the answer might be or is it an unanswerable question?
• Does the novel give any grounds for hopes of forgiveness, and if so what are they?
  

Suggested further reading

Novels
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
War Story by Gwen Edelman
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
The Twins by Tessa de Loo
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Non-fiction
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (History)
If This is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi (Autobiography)
The Holocaust and Collective Memory by Peter Novick (History)
Night by Elie Weisel (Autobiography)