University of Warwick s2

University of Warwick

BA Hons. Film and Literature

FR 1090 Aspects of Modern German Literature in Translation

Stephen Lamb, Coming to terms with Germany’s past: placing Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader in its historical context.

In 2003 leading analyst of German memory culture Aleida Assmann published an article in which he sought to define the major ways in which Germans’ attitudes to their twentieth- century past, and in particular the legacy of National Socialism (1933-45) have changed since the end of the Second World War 1.

His conclusion is that sixty years after the holocaust, after a long and at times tortuous process, Germany has finally managed to develop a positive and constructive approach to its understanding of the past, and that this approach is now firmly embedded in all areas of German society, from its political establishment through its education system to its culture, both high and popular.

Assmann’s critical but positive assessment of contemporary German memory culture is one that I share, based as it is on my own involvement as an observer of, and participant in, the student generation born soon after the Second World War.

So I want to document that complex development of Vergangenheitsbewältigung2, so that we can place the significance and impact of the final text in our half of the

1 Aleida Assmann, “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Amery, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture”, New German Critique, No. 90, 2003, pp. 123-133’s. Assmann’s choice of Jürgen Habermas’ phrase ‘Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit’ (a change in the nature of public opinion) is a clear indication of how substantial and significant he believes the change to be.

2 This is a complex term, usually translated as ‘coming-to-terms with the past. Its etymology suggests an active grappling with the past, as if this is no easy challenge. module into its appropriate historical context. Schlink’s The Reader has had a major, if not the most significant impact nationally and internationally, of any German-language novel published in the last two decades. The novel’s worldwide impact derives primarily from its unconventional reading of Germany’s past, as exemplified by its portrayal of a fictitious relationship between a young boy and a former guard at Auschwitz. As we will see, the novel can be read as humanising a holocaust perpetrator, an effect, if not an intention, that for many is unacceptable, given the immensity of the holocaust. The release in 2008 of a Hollywood film version featuring major stars Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes merely served to extend and intensify the range of the debate occasioned by the novel’s publication a decade earlier. In sum, Schlink’s novel has both reflected and shaped attitudes to Germany’s past and its present culture, as well as the science of memory culture.

My hope is that this lecture will enhance your understanding of German memory culture and indeed encourage you to want to know more about the country’s past and present. Reading and discussing Schlink’s The Reader is one important first step in addressing the memory culture issues outlined here; another, arguably more enjoyable, as well as intellectually stimulating way, is to visit Berlin, in many ways the prime site of German memory culture, and a living memorial to Germany’s positive engagement with its problematical past.

The following lecture is based in part on an article I published in 2006 on the significance of a range of cultural events staged in Berlin in 2005 3, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of world war two.

3 This lecture is based on the author’s article 'Re-presenting the German Past in 2005: Culture’s Contribution in the New German Republic.' in: Debatte, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Vol. 13, 3, December 2005 (see: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a727487456~db=all~order=page) The basic premise of the article and of this lecture is that we can’t appreciate where we are now unless we understand where we come from. This applies in my view to all cultural study of the kind you and I are involved in: literature, film, fine art, architecture etc.

A recent survey by a UK scholar of memory culture, Graham Jackmann, 4 has shown how Germany’s attitude to its Nazi past has progressed since the end of the second world war in 1945 from virtual silence for the first two decades, typified by the notion that 1933 - 45 was a time of “alien rule” when Germany was occupied by a criminal gang, (i.e. the Nazis, who were not ‘real’ Germans) 5 to, by the 1980s, gradual acknowledgment of the notion of Germany as a nation of guilty perpetrators of monstrous crimes against humanity.

This gradual acknowledgment of German so-called ‘collective guilt’ for its Nazi past was the result of a number of developments in the mid-to-late 1960s. These included:

1. Firstly in the mid 1960s the trials of the main architect of the holocaust Adolf Eichmann and of prison guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The fictional trial of Hanna in The Reader belongs in that context. 2. Secondly the student movement post 1968, in which the student generation born immediately after 1945 began to question their parents’ generation’s role in National Socialism. My schoolboy visits to Germany in the mid 1960s and my year as a student in Berlin 1968-69 when I

4 For a concise and informative survey of the present state of research see Graham Jackmann “The End of a Taboo? The Experience of Bombing and Expulsion in Contemporary German ‘Gedächtniskultur’”, German Life and Letters, Special Number, Vol. LVII No 4, October 2004. pp. 343 - 353 5 Soon after the war Hans Rothfels described Nazi rule as “ein Zeitalter innerer Fremdherrschaft”. In: Deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler, 1948 (p.?) Similarly Friedrich Meinecke claimed that a “Verbrecherklub” had managed “das deutsche Volk zwölf Jahre hindurch in seine Gefolgschaft zu zwingen”. In: Die deutsche Katastrophe, (1946). Quoted in Jackmann, p. 344 met both contemporaries of the Nazis and their offspring, who were my German peers, first aroused my interest in the personal ramifications of 20th century German history, which was clearly far more complex, both politically and emotionally, than British history. 3. Thirdly the nationwide debate in 1960s and 70s about the so-called Statute of Limitations, which was concerned about whether it was legally, and, more importantly, morally right for there to be a time limit on culpability for the holocaust, i.e. whether the state should drop charges against former Nazis and SS members after a certain period of time. There is now no time limit on Nazi crimes. [A case in point is the trial of 89-year-old Ivan Demyanyuk from the Ukraine, which started Nov 30 2009 in Munich. Demyanyuk was accused of complicity in the murder of 28,000 prisoners in the Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek death camps, where he was a guard during world war two. In the 1970s, it became known that the concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible, was in fact John Demyanyuk. In 1986 the United States sent him to Israel where he was sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity. However eight years later the Israel Supreme Court had to withdraw the charge for lack of evidence. The Americans continued their investigation, which produced evidence, including Demyanyuk’s SS ID card, showing that he was a guard at Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek camps during WW2. The prosecution case was supported by a witness, 82-year-old Sobibor prisoner Toman Blatt. On 12 May 2011 Demyanyuk was convicted pending appeal and sentenced to 5 years in prison. He died in Germany before the appeal could be heard – which means he is technically legally innocent.] These developments in German ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ were followed in the 1980s and 90s by a further series of factors that brought about another shift of emphasis in the debate: These included:

1. Firstly the so-called ‘Historikerstreit’ or ‘historians’ dispute’, of the late 1980s. This was a debate about whether it was right to continue to believe that National Socialism and the holocaust were uniquely evil historical events without parallel in twentieth-century European history, and which therefore should never be compared or equated with any other similarly horrendous crimes. A consequence of Germany’s belated acknowledgement of its war guilt after the Second World War was the notion that the extermination of six million Jews and up to 30 million others, including 20 million Russians, was unparalleled, both in terms of its sheer scale and in terms of its moral severity. But the ‘Historikerstreit’ started to shift that view: National Socialism and fascism, the debate claimed, weren’t the only criminal political movements around in the first half of the twentieth century. Communism, claimed some German historians, was an ideology equally as evil as National Socialism, and in its Soviet Union version, under Joseph Stalin, had been responsible from the 1920s to the 1950s for some horrendous crimes, including mass murders, of both its own citizens and of those of others in Eastern Europe whose opposition Stalin could not tolerate. The consequence of this major historians’ debate was that some people interpreted the outcome of the debate as a desire on the part of some German historians to relativise or minimise Germany’s sole guilt by suggesting that other countries were evil too, that Germans weren’t the sole perpetrators, that Stalin and Hitler were equally evil dictators, that there is no substantial qualitative difference between the extreme right of the political spectrum and the extreme left. The ideologies of left and right might be different, but if judged by their inhumane outcomes and effects, the numbers who died as a result, they amount to the same thing.

2. The second significant chapter in the long story of Germany’s dealing with its recent Nazi past started in 1995 when a highly controversial exhibition toured major cities in Germany. It was controversial because it dealt with the role of the ‘Wehrmacht’, the name the Nazis gave the German army under their regime. This was a highly sensitive topic, because the prevailing orthodoxy amongst post-war German military historians was that the German army were a disciplined organisation that merely carried out its orders, and was not to blame for the atrocities carried out across Europe between 1939 and 1945 in the name of Germany. The blame lay, this orthodoxy claimed, firmly with the Nazi party and particularly with the SS, Hitler’s elite troops that ran the concentration camps and were primarily responsible for the implementation of the holocaust following the Wannsee conference of January 20 1942 The 1995 exhibition sought to challenge that orthodoxy and implicated what was for many Germans of that generation an honourable institution that had been abused by Hitler and dragged into a war it didn’t want. The film Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise as the German officer Graf Stauffenberg, executed for his role in the abortive July 20 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, is an example of this view of the German army under Hitler, as is, to a degree, Downfall. The German army, the exhibition proclaimed with a series of shocking photographic images, were just as responsible as the Nazi party and the SS for the holocaust. Two other films which engage with this question of complicity are The Wannsee Conference (1984 German TV movie) and Conspiracy (2001)

3. A third chapter started in 1996 the American-Jewish historian Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners whose basic premise was what it said on the tin, namely that when it came to allocating responsibility and guilt the German people themselves were far from innocent parties. Goldhagen’s book reinforced the notion of collective German responsibility. 6

4. Chapter 4 in the evolution of Germany’s changing attitude to its Nazi past came in 1998 and featured the distinguished novelist Martin Walser, a man with a long- standing reputation as champion of progressive liberal and left-wing causes and a critic of Germany’s consumerist society, and who for 40 years had repeatedly proclaimed that Germany had a moral responsibility to acknowledge its war guilt, surprisingly did a volte-face and proclaimed that the time had come for the German people to draw a line under the past, stop beating itself up about past guilt and move on. 7

5. Chapter 5 featured two controversial publications in 1999 and 2002 by the writers Jörg Friedrich and W.G. (Max) Sebald, the latter the author of the international best- sellers The Emigrants, Austerlitz and Ring of Saturn. Sebald published a work on the effects of British and American bombing raids on German cities during the second world war 8. These publications were significant because they signalled a willingness, a desire, on the part

6 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Random House, 1997 7 Martin Walser, “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntags-Rede” (11.10.1998). In Frank Schirrmacher, ed., Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eine Dokumentation, Frankfurt/Main, 1999 8 Willi Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur , Munich, Hanser, 1999, Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Berlin, Propyläen, 2002 of Germans to proclaim that it wasn’t just the Jews and other nationalities who suffered during the second world war, the Germans did too, at the hands of the British and the Americans, for example in the fire bombing of cities such as Dresden.’ (Anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five will know what happened in Dresden in April 1945, when hundreds of thousands of refugees were killed in raids that had no military significance, given that he war was already won and lost). The Germans, these publications implied, were victims as well as perpetrators. This might not sound much of an issue to us now, but in the context of Germany’s engagement with its guilty past, this was a bold step, which some particularly outside Germany, interpreted as a desire to minimise, if not deny, German guilt as perpetrators. 6. Chapter six of the Germans’ continuing, indeed never- ending determination to analyse their twentieth-century past was provided by an exhibition which ran from April to October 2005 at Germany’s equivalent of the British Museum, its Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin, entitled “The end of the war and memory politics in Germany” (‘Kriegsende und Erinnerungspolitik in Deutschland’). Its aim, according to their website, was to “investigate the treatment of Nazi crimes in both German states [i.e. the Federal Republic of West Germany and the Communist so- called ‘German Democratic Republic’ of East Germany] and to confront the relationship of Germans to war and the military in general.”

The effect of all of the developments detailed above has been to broaden and intensify the debate n understanding Germany’s past, a debate that has had an overwhelmingly positive outcome in the last 20 years. Summing up the development of memory literature we can establish the following broad outlines:

In the 1950s and early 1960s the attitude and approach slowly developed from initial wilful ignorance or (worse still) denial of the Nazi past to a grudging acceptance in the late 60s of the reality of guilt and shame. This produced a ‘perpetrators and victims scenario’ with a black-and-white view of a whole generation of Germans as either perpetrators or passively complicit onlookers.

By the 1980s attempts to portray some Germans as victims of Nazism as well as innocent bystanders or perpetrators, previously total taboo, had started to become acceptable, although this was still highly contentious, with some equating such a position as tantamount to holocaust denial.

This means that the publication of a novel such The Reader, which asks us to consider the perpetrator with a degree of understanding, if not sympathy (see for example chapter 6), would not have been possible before the mid 1990s.

Difference in attitudes to the past between different generations is a key issue in The Reader. This novel asks awkward questions that throw into doubt the absolute moral certainty that the first generation (of Germans during the war) were guilty and the second generation (my generation, born after the war) were morally pure, whiter-than-white in their condemnation of the first generation. Which awkward questions do we mean? A key one is that asked by Hanna Schmitz of the judge in her trial “what would you have done?”; (p. 110 also again on p. 127). Another is: “Should I not have signed up at Siemens?” (the electronics firm that was implicated in supplying the Nazis with the hardware necessary to implement the holocaust) The consequences of this process of gradual change in attitudes towards the past can be summed up as follows:

The outcome was NEITHER a neglect of the lessons to be learnt from history, NOR a denial of its past. However for some the result was a far more differentiated evaluation of the Nazi past. This was NOT a more ‘balanced’ attitude, because how can you balance perpetrators and victims?

Rather it resulted in a reaffirmation of German guilt and responsibility for the holocaust, as reflected for instance in German school curricula, which includes obligatory trips to concentration camp memorial sites, and in history syllabuses, But alongside that reaffirmation there developed a desire to investigate conventional wisdoms about victims and perpetrators, and how we can distinguish precisely between the two, indeed should we be keeping the two concepts totally separate? Are perpetrators not sometimes potential victims too?

The outcome in terms of everyday educational practice and government policy is that Germans now have a more positive, balanced, open, honest and critical engagement with the lessons of history, not only of their own, but of others’ too.

This means for instance that Germans on the whole have a sceptical attitude to military engagement as a solution to local and global problems, so that for instance the German government did not assent to US & UK military engagement in Iraq and does not send front-line troops to Afghanistan, merely logistical back-up forces. In this context it is worth remembering that German military uniforms were not seen in action anywhere outside German borders until the Balkans war in the 1990s, and even then it was highly controversial, internally as well as externally.

German extremism’s ruthless implementation of ideologies in the pursuit of simple solutions, in whatever form (and Germany has a long history of extremism, from Prussian militarism in the 18th and 19th centuries, through the excesses of imperialism and colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th century, the destruction of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first pluralist society, by totalitarian National Socialism, to the ‘real existing socialism’ of the GDR, i.e. the German version of Stalinism, and finally the urban terrorism of the early 1970s West Germany) is now firmly a thing of the past. Even where right-wing, potentially extremist groups protest about immigration and islamisation of the West, the German Government promptly identifies these as an unrepresentative minority.

Germany, in terms of both its cultural output and its success as a modern pluralist democracy, is clearly now benefiting, not suffering, from its active engagement with its own history. Germany’s culture today displays a confidence to confront broader aspects of the past, not only its own (colonialism, the Weimar Republic, the GDR, as well as National Socialism) but also that of other nations, as in the ‘Myths of the Nations’ exhibition staged at the German Historical Museum in 2005, where for the first time a systematic presentation of Germany’s pre-1918 colonial past was presented.

The attitude exemplified by the title of the leading article in Germany’s leading broadsheet weekly Die Zeit on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in February 2005: “Never again. Again and again”,9 appears typical of Germany’s intellectuals and cultural producers today. The holocaust, proclaimed Die Zeit, must continue to be ever-present in

9 “Nie wieder. Immer wieder”, Die Zeit 5, 27.01.2005 the German collective memory, if we are to prevent it happening again. Germans are extremely, some say excessively cautious n their treatment of the past. That’s why it’s a crime in Germany, punishable by gaol sentence, to deny the holocaust.

In reflecting on the broader context of the issues raised in The Reader we need to remember a key distinction between differing forms of remembering the past. On the one hand there is Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ which is essentially in practice a reactive process of coming-to-terms with the past, entailing at worst mere acknowledgment of past crimes and at best living with its legacy. ‘Aufarbeitung der Geschichte’ 10 (exploring/evaluating history) on the other hand is a more proactive process. Aufarbeitung is translated in the English translation of The Reader as: “exploration [of history]” (Part II, chapter 2, p. 89f) so that the concept means ‘working on, at, with the past’, suggesting looking at the past without preconceived notions, and a desire to learn from the past and to apply the insights gained to understanding the present..

In the newly unified German Berlin Republic, still only two decades old, culture, and that includes an international best- selling novel such as The Reader, continues to play a vital role in this process of constant reassessment and regeneration, one from which other nations, not least the UK, could learn a good deal. In the UK in the last five years we have experienced a political culture under great pressure, marked by a lack of trust and deep scepticism amongst voters about the previous Labour government’s apparently authoritarian response to terrorism, particularly the war in Iraq and the threat to civil rights following the London suicide bombings of July 2005 and subsequent terrorist threats, such as the plot to blow up transatlantic flights in 2006.

10 Jackmann, op. cit., p.343 Germany offers a rather different reality: a political intellectual and popular culture of extreme moderation, willing and able to learn the right lessons from its complex past. Memorial culture is highly developed in Germany, more so both quantitatively and qualitatively. The new Berlin is replete with memorials to its past, from the heydays of Prussia and Wilhelmine Germany in the Victory Column commemorating first unification back in 1871 (remember Effi Briest’s Prussia) to memorials celebrating the Weimar Republic, and commemorating the Nazi past in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in nearby Kreuzberg, to the most grand memorial of them all: the so-called the Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe (‘Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden’)

As you can see from the images on the German department website, this is a massive space covering some 19,073 square metres, with a symbolic location chosen for its proximity to the Brandenburg gate, government offices and foreign embassies. Into it have been inserted, at varying angles and depths, a collection of some 2,711 hollow concrete rectangular pillars, all 2.38 m long and 0,95 m wide and between one and four metres high. In marked contrast to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum this monument encourages its visitors to empathise with those it commemorates. Walking on this ‘Wellenboden’ (undulating floor) with its varying angles the visitor is meant to feel the uncertainty and disorientation experienced by inmates of concentration camps. There could be no clearer sign of the German nation’s desire to atone for its past than its government’s contribution of 27.6 million Euros to the cost of this astonishing memorial.

One wonders whether the British too might not have something to learn from the Germans as far as coming-to-terms with the past is concerned, and whether they too might aspire to a more open form of confrontation. This was certainly the view of Matthias Matussek, Head of the London Bureau of Der Spiegel, writing in the Guardian in April 2005:

"I couldn't agree less with the idea that Germany was trying to whiten the war. I wish in Britain there was an equal effort to deal with their past. [The UK] is obsessed with the German past in relation to the war, in a triumphalist way." 11

So turning to our novel The Reader, how does it fit in to our timeline of remembrance of things past?

My answer is that it fits into the final stage of that timeline, and indeed could not have been written, or at least published, at any earlier stage in that process. To construct a novel about the holocaust and a perpetrator that is narrated from the perspective of a man who has had sexual relations with the perpetrator and who during the trial has clear, if silent sympathy with her, and whose perspective on the holocaust is in part at least conditioned by empathy with the perpetrator is ground-breaking, and for some unforgivable:

What do I mean when I say that the central figure Michael shows apparent empathy for Hanna Schmitz, potentially as victim as well as perpetrator? Here are some examples from the text:  He sympathises with Hanna’s inability to grasp the subtleties of the legal process see p. 108f.  He gets frustrated by her ingenuousness and naïveté when she’s faced with duplicitous fellow defendants who are determined to focus on her guilt in order to exculpate themselves in the eyes of the jury: “Hanna wanted to do the right thing […] she had no sense of the rules of the game ……”

11 Guardian 05.04.2005  At the end of chapter 7 part 2 p. 116 when he’s watching the trial he even tries to come up with an excuse that Hanna could or should have given as to why she held back the younger inmates from the gas chambers. He imagines himself pleading to the judge: “Ask her why she chose the weak and delicate girls, because they could never have stood up to the work on the building site anyway, because they would have been sent on the next transport to Auschwitz anyway”

Indeed it would have been unthinkable before the mid 1990s in Germany for a novelist to cast an former Auschwitz prison guard as anything other than the embodiment of evil, unthinkable to cast her as a light-and-shade complex character with hints of victimhood and vulnerability, unthinkable to have used her as one part of a complex love, indeed erotic, relationship, unthinkable to have made a sexual relationship between an older woman and an under-aged boy the centrepiece of the novel, unthinkable to have coupled that with an analysis of literacy, or its absence, and to imply that she deserves sympathy because of that illiteracy.

It would have been extremely difficult to find a publisher for such a challenging project and would have been open to all manner of charges: of insensitivity to the suffering of victims of the holocaust; of seeking to diminish German guilt; of exculpating a brutal prison warder who sent thousands to their deaths; of abusing a seminal chapter in German history by using it as a mere backdrop for a love story; or as a backdrop for a legal treatise about guilt and responsibility;

Above all the novel seeks to get away from simplistic right and wrong, good and evil scenarios, by asking complex questions with no easy answers: So let’s look at a few examples of how The Reader deals with this most contentious of all chapters in Germany’s recent history. What contribution does this novel make to the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung or ‘exploring the past’, as the translation chooses to call it?

1. It addresses the concerns of the so-called second generation, those born after the war who started asking questions as students in the early to mid sixties. The narrator, one of that generation talks of the process of ‘exploration’. “Exploring the past […] Radical explorers, tore open the windows […] Breathing and seeing […]. We condemned our parents to shame, even if only charge was tolerating the perpetrators […] our responsibility to enlighten and accuse” (p. 89) Re that passage (pp 88-90)  The English translation says: “we considered ourselves radical explorers”. A more accurate translation of the German would be “the avantgarde/or pioneers of exploration” because the narrator is here introducing a hint of self-criticism i.e. we thought we were the pioneers of a critical analysis of the past, but in fact (e.g. p. 90) we were quick to judge (swift to chide and slow to bless)

 “We condemned our parents to blame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst.” (90)  see also: “what should we have done with our knowledge of the extermination of the Jews?” (102)  wanting at the same time to understand and condemn : “but it was impossible to do both” (156)

2. How does the novel deal with issues of guilt, blame and responsibility, personal and political: how to define them, esp. their interconnection? One of the novel’s focal points is personal relationships, and one way of reading the text would be to say that it uses the holocaust as a backdrop against which it can pursue a narrative about more universal issues, such as:

 What defines love, what are its strengths and its limitations; does it make people blind to questions of morality?  What defines sexual attraction? Are we meant to read Hanna as a woman desperate to compensate for an unhappy early life by engaging in sexual encounters, but only with a much younger male who is sexually totally inexperienced and therefore unlikely to challenge her at all? What does such a scenario tell us about the relationship between sexual attraction, the exercising of physical and authoritarian power and a fascist regime whose power is based on violence terror and unquestioning acceptance of authority?  Is a relationship between an older woman and younger man morally acceptable?  Are we meant to conclude that such a relationship wrecks an individual’s sensitivity and capacity for love (with Sophie, with his wife Gertrud, divorced when Julia was 5):  What does the novel say to us about the possibility or impossibility of personal pleasure and/or happiness free of public/political pressures?

 Do we see Hanna as guilty also of wrecking the possibility of any meaningful relationships with others, both her own and Michael’s (e.g. Sophie) cf. p. 86f., also p.172  Does being in love with someone mean that you forfeit the right or the obligation to judge them (see p. 168)

This novel also provides insights into notions of the purpose and function of literature and literacy. Note in this context that the term in the title DER VORLESER cannot be translated precisely and with total accuracy into English, as it means literally ‘someone who reads out loud’. This, given Hanna Schmitz’s ‘unseen disability’, to use the correct modern term, is clearly crucial. Related examples:

 “It all happened because of reading out loud.” (p. 39)

In which specific ways is the novel addressing connections between literature and sex? Is listening to literature being out loud as much of a turn-on to Hanna as sex?

 “Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her ……. The ritual of our meetings.” (40f.)

5. What insights does the novel offer on the writing of history; on the relationship between past, present and future?

What does it suggest is the purpose and effect of historiography? Remember that the narrator’s area of research is law in the Third Reich: “[here] the past and the present come together in a single reality. Here escape is not a preoccupation with the past, but a determined focus on the present and the future that binds us to the legacy of the past that brands us and with which we must live.” (178f.)

What does it suggest is the purpose and effect of literature about the holocaust? Look at the section when the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor talks about the book of the survivor: “the book that creates distance. It does not invite one to identify with it and makes no one sympathetic […] It exudes the numbness I have tried to describe before”: (p.117f.): Is Schlink here implicitly critiquing survivor literature a la Primo Levi, which because it is first-person narrative potentially overloads the reader with the direct experience of survivors and therefore by implication desensitises us, contrary to its intention? Does The Reader fall into this trap of desensitisation or has it found another way of engaging us in understanding the reality and horror of the holocaust?

6. What does the novel say about memory: personal and public/political?

 cf. p.37 (beginning of chapter 9)  c.f. p.86: “is my memory of happiness even true?”  c.f. p.98 watching her from behind at the trial: “the memory was like a retrieved file. I felt nothing. […] Anaesthesia: who had given me the injection?”  survivor literature: 100f.  Second generation 102

7. What insights does the novel offer on the Law and the legal profession (remember Kafka and Before the Law!)

 Part II chapter 16 p.157ff: you can do all the right things in terms of academic study, but does this guarantee truth or a balanced accurate reading of the complexity of human behaviour in adversity?

Of course this issue is a challenge for us all in our academic work!