Review of The Reader

The Writer (now a movie starring winsome Kate Wimset) is Bernhard Schlink's novel about the love between an older woman and fifteen-year-old boy set in Germany in the 1950s. Then, a decade or so later, the woman stands trial for war crimes. However, she does almost nothing to aid in her defence, thinking that she has a secret even more shameful than having participated in the deaths of innocent people at Auschwitz during World War II.

Born Oct. 22, 1922, Hanna Schmitz, the female lead in The Writer, was 10 years old going on 11 when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. She was of the generation that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to reach most, because they were young and impressionable when the Nazis ruled Germany. Indoctrinated with Nazi hate by the Hitler Youth, Hanna gave up a promotion to supervisor at a Siemens plant at the age of eighteen to join the SS. During World War II, she was a concentration camp guard at Auschwitz, where she undoubtedly committed unspeakable crimes. Then, 20 years after the war, she is tried and convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to life in prison.

Naturally, one would think that Hanna Schmitz was a repulsive person, regardless of how beautiful the narrator, Michael Berg, might have thought she was. She and six other female concentration camps were involved in an incident where several Jewish female concentration camp inmates were locked in a church in Poland that caught fire during a bombing raid and burned to death. Since Hanna and the other guards had the keys to unlock the church doors, it stands to reason that she and the other guards could have prevented the inmates' deaths. But at her trial, Hanna pleads indecision: she and the other female guards were abandoned by their unit during the air raid and left to fend for themselves. Like girly-girls, they panicked and didn't know what to do.

Since the incident took place in the winter of 1943-44, Hanna was not yet 22 years old. The oldest of the guards involved was probably no more than 25 years old while the youngest might have been only 16 or 17 years old. Therefore, you could say that the women involved were at a young and impressionable age, though they were still all adults, and therefore responsible for their actions. But hey, we have all dones things in our youth that we are not proud of, right?

About 15 years after the war, Michael Berg, a boy of 15, finds himself involved in a passionate affair with this woman after she walks him home after he starts to show symptoms of the hepatitis that will cause him to miss much of the school year. It's sort of like Robbie Benson and Jennifer O'Neill in The Summer of '42, except that Michael's beloved is a Nazi war criminal. But hey, that's the risk a teenage boy in Germany took back then, if he fell in love with a thirty-ish German hausfrau.

Back in the 1960s, there was a huge scandal when it was discovered that the President of West Germany, Heinz Karsten, was a member of the Hitler Youth during the war. Then it was revealed in the 1980s that Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary General of the United Nations and President-elect of Austria was an officer in the Waffen SS. Both Karsten and Waldheim pleaded that they had to join the Hitler Youth and the Nazi movement; according to Waldheim, he became a Nazi officer to "advance his career." He wanted to "be all he could be," I guess. Could be, both men were getting spanked at home by wives who were former concentration camp guards.

Let's look at the nature of the relationship between Michael and Hanna. Hanna is a cleanliness freak who insists that Michael take a bath before they make love. Then she insists that he read to her love poetry and plays by writers like Schiller. It's obvious that Michael has a brain, whereas Hanna has had very little schooling, but it's obvious who's putting who through the paces. You could say that Hanna is domineering and manipulative: it's either her way or highway, and whenever they have a disagreement, she withholds her love until he gives in (and he always does).

On at least one occasion, she resorts to physical violence, when she hits him across the face with a leather strap because he left her alone in a tent on a camping trip without telling her where he was going. Michael had left her a note, but his red-hot Nazi mama can't read a word, either because she's dyslexic, or because she has never been to school. Obviously, it's bad boys get spanked with Hanna.

So you might ask yourself what Michael sees in Hanna, and the answer is, most likely: sex, sex, and über-sex. Hanna was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan fräulein from a farming family in Bavaria with no education and plenty of Bäyern Kürves, like the ride at Cedar Point. When she suddenly leaves him, he's naturally in a funk because he's no longer getting any sex, and his Willi is really sad.

When the trolley company where Hanna works offers her a promotion to trolley driver, she not only turns it down flat, but she quits and joins the world of missing persons. She's obviously management material, if she has the wherewithal to herd Jews into a burning church to keep them from running away, but she gets cold feet whenever anybody wants to make her a manager because she can't read.

Around the time that she was born, the 1920s, a lot of Germans were still illiterate, particularly the children of agriculturalists in places like the Black Forest. Apparently, you didn't have to know how to read to be a member of the SS.

Hanna doesn't resurface again until she faces charges for war crimes. Predictably, Michael goes through a period of self-loathing (and loathing for Hanna) because of his country's Nazi past. His whole generation was mad at their parents because they didn't resist Hitler and his Nazi horde sufficiently enough.

When Michael figures out during the trial that Hanna can't read, he starts sending her tapes of himself reading to her while she's in prison, but he can't bring himself to visit her or write to her and ask how she's doing because she has become, more or less, like a leper to him, or like someone who gave him a social disease during one of their rendezvous. Visiting her in prison would be like visiting a leper colony, more or less. Many foreigners visiting Germany had the seem impression for a long time after the war, I'm sure.

After spending 18 years in prison, Hanna is released. Many years after a divorce, Michael finds it in him to set Hanna up with a job and an apartment, but Hanna commits suicide the day before her release. Go figure!

Probably few readers will mourn Hanna's passing. Very likely, many of them will think that her suicide was many years too late, that it should have come before she and the five other female concentration camp guards allowed those Jewish women to burn to death in that church in Poland. But like most criminals, Hanna Schmitz feels "misunderstood" and feels herself to be a victim. Her main goal at her trial is to "be understood."

In her will, to make amends, Hanna bequeaths a small amount to some Jewish society to fight illiteracy among Jews in Germany, but few holocaust survivors and their families will want to join in a love fest with repentant Nazis even after reading this book.

Bernhard Schlink's Michael Berg is like Günther Grass's Oskar Mazerath in The Tin Drum, because both characters are crippled by experiences that have everything to do with World War II and Nazism. After his relationship with Hanna, Michael refuses to grow emotionally and ends up married and divorced, whereas Oskar refuses to grow physically and ends up a midget who nevertheless becomes a millionaire in the postwar economic miracle in Germany. But while Grass's novel is satirical, Schlink's novel is elegiac and mournful when there is nothing to be elegiac and plenty to be mournful about. Okay, Germans maybe had reasons to mourn their loved ones killed in the war, but should they really mourn the passing of the Third Reich?

Maybe Hanna was a good roll in the hay, but why should Michael want to spend the rest of his life with a farmer's daughter with sadistic tendencies who joined the SS because she couldn't read? Hanna Schmitz is proof that Germany was full of stupid people during the Third Reich. The SS provided employment for people like her at a time when even intelligent people couldn't get jobs.

I can just hear the voiceover of Saturday Night Live's Dan Ackroyd saying, "Hanna, you ignorant slut!"