Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: cottonbro studio
By the end of the novel, Michael approaches acceptance, if not understanding and peace, by following Hanna's wishes and donating her money—after the Jewish woman refuses to condone Hanna's actions by accepting her money—to a German charity that helps people learn to read and write.
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Read More »The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink, explores themes of love and guilt, shame and loss on both a personal and national level, through the complex and moving relationship between Michael Berg and Hanna. The novel begins, in 1958, as 15-year-old German schoolboy, Michael Berg, falls ill outside 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz’s apartment house. She helps him and returns him to his home.When he returns a few months later to thank her for her help, Hanna seduces him, and they begin a sexual affair. Each day at lunchtime, Michael skips school to meet Hanna. She insists that he read to her, and then they make love. Michael quickly falls in love with Hanna. However, her feelings remain much more oblique.The affair ends several months later when Hanna abruptly disappears from town. Blaming himself for her disappearance, Michael is confused and upset. Michael goes on with life, however, making friends and focusing on his education.In 1966, Michael is a law student, and he is sent to observe a Nazi war crimes trial. When he arrives at the courtroom, he is appalled to see that one of the women on trial for war crimes is Hanna. She stands accused, among other crimes she committed as an Auschwitz camp guard, of the deaths, in 1945, of 300 Jewish women who were locked inside a church that was firebombed by the allies, following a winter death-march in evacuating Auschwitz. He is bewildered when she puts up no defense, refusing to give a handwriting sample that might acquit her, and takes full responsibility for the deaths. She is sentenced to life in prison.However, Michael discovers that she is hiding a secret that she considers more shameful than being sentenced for war crimes: Hanna is illiterate. Here, Michael faces his own moral dilemma. Should he reveal her secret, which might mitigate some of the blame for the crimes of which she stands accused? In the end, like so many people facing a difficult moral choice—as Schlink indicts both the reader and his characters—Michael, conflicted and helpless, does nothing, says nothing. Michael’s failure to stand up for Hanna mirrors the guilt of all ordinary Germans for failure to stand up against the Nazi war machine.Michael finds himself unable to reconcile the taciturn, but honest and hardworking, woman he loved with the undoubtedly cruel, unremorseful woman appearing at her trial. Additionally, he tries to understand his own complex feelings of guilt, revulsion, and love, as a German one generation removed from the Nazi’s rule of Germany, and to reconcile those feelings with his compassion for Hanna. He visits concentration camps, in an attempt to understand what happened. He cannot make peace with himself, as a German, or with his feelings for Hanna in the aftermath of her trial.Michael again moves on with his life, practicing as an attorney, marrying and having a daughter, then divorcing. Moved by his knowledge of Hanna’s secret, however, he tapes himself reading literature and sends the tapes to Hanna in prison throughout this period of his life. One day, he receives a “thank you” note from Hanna; she has learned to read and write in prison. Other letters follow, but he never answers them.In 1984, the prison warden contacts him. After 18 years in prison, Hanna’s sentence has been commuted. The warden asks for Michael’s assistance in helping Hanna return to the world. Though he does not directly correspond with her, Michael finds her a job and an apartment. The evening before her release, Hanna hangs herself in her cell. When Michael arrives at the prison to pick her up, the warden allows Michael to visit Hanna’s tiny cell, in which he finds all of the tapes that he sent her, and some money that she wishes Michael to give to the lone Jewish survivor of the church fire.Michael muses on his relationship with Hanna as a symbol for the relationships between post-war Germans and their parents, the WWII generation. There are no easy answers, and Schlink directly confronts the reader in the form of Hanna’s question to the court during her trial: “what would you have done?”No one escapes the moral legacy of the concentration camps; no one can be allowed to forget. By the end of the novel, Michael approaches acceptance, if not understanding and peace, by following Hanna’s wishes and donating her money—after the Jewish woman refuses to condone Hanna’s actions by accepting her money—to a German charity that helps people learn to read and write. Symbolically, Hanna’s illiteracy represents the colossal cultural and moral illiteracy, or ignorance, that allowed the Holocaust to occur. Accordingly, Schlink indicates that only through eradication of ignorance can the past be redeemed.Quotation from The Reader available from: http://www.aadl.org/files/bctg/bctg_guide-reader.pdf.
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