The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 June 2009
by Bernhard Schlink
How is it that the United States of America, this idealistic pinnacle of human rights, came to engage in acts of torture against its prisoners of war? How is it that this compassionate nation could countenance violations of its most basic beliefs (not to mention international conventions)? At one point, of course, there was someone who decided that this was what we wanted to do to these dehumanized enemies of the state. But after that, when it was becoming common knowledge that torture was going on, why did we let it happen? There are many reasons for this, blind patriotism in the wake of an unprecedented attack being among the most obvious. But, as the years of war dragged on, our detention of prisoners dragged on. And as details of their treatment continued to trickle through the normally compliant press, what happened to our capacity for outrage? In a sense, we became numb to reports of what was being done on our behalf. Surely, we thought, the people in power knew what they were doing. Surely, we had to be protected at any cost. And, with the complicity of an emasculated media, the men in power were able to continue unabated, almost boldly in the face of their violation of our ideals. People just grew numb with reports from the war and from Guantanamo Bay. Legal issues were just too complicated. The problem, thankfully, was kept from our eyes, even despite grim photographic evidence from prisons overseas. Is this how evil people get away with their crimes? Is this how disembodied inhumane evil perpetuates itself in our world? Is this the kind of slow growing complacency that led to even grander crimes against humanity and human rights, like maybe even the Holocaust? This is one of the powerful themes of Schlink's spare but intense novel, The Reader. Our narrator is a detached student of fifteen when he meets Hanna Schmitz sometime in the late 1950s. She is in her mid thirties when she takes him under her wing. She befriends him and finds his adolescent sexuality appealing. She has a complex history that she does not share with her young lover, and, in any case, he is too wrapped in love for her. She has him read his books to her. It is a kind of foreplay for them, and they settle into a routine that has its minor breaks and dramas, until, one day, Hanna vanishes. Young Michael is forever changed, and her memory endures throughout his life. Later, when he is a law student, he observes the trial of a group of women accused of allowing a large group of concentration camp prisoners to perish in the flames of a burning church late in World War 2. Hanna is one of the accused. Her defense, or lack thereof, seems to mask a tremendous pride and another secret she seems to find more shameful than the crime for which she is accused. In this is the moral core of the novel. Schlink's depiction of Hanna, her life, her trial, the youn man's numbed response to its horrors, and all of the echoes we can find in the behavior of an entire nation in the face of a horror it perpetrated upon an entire race of people, all of this is so movingly depicted, so deeply considered, that the book becomes a compelling document of its own. Schlink, a German author and a member of the legal profession, himself, is facing some big demons, moral, criminal and even romantic. Great issues of history and crime move against a private romantic tragedy in a seamlessly interlaced story. The narrator's own numbed response to the history of the Holocaust reflects the numbed nation, quietly complicit in its crimes. We travel from the private lonely sadness of a prison cell to the dramatic ghostly images of a concentration camp preserved as a witness to its crimes. And yet, in the end, it is a small story set against big events. A short, spare and dramatic book.
(This book, first published in 1995, was made into a movie of the same name in 2008.)
Also by Schlink: [Flights of Love]