The Reader

“Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing—then why not the satisfaction and the act itself.”

Michael acknowledges that his attraction to Hanna violates morals. He also asserts his agency. He desires Hanna and wants to satisfy his lust.

“The next night I fell in love with her. I could barely sleep, I was yearning for her, I dreamed of her, thought I could feel her until I realized that I was clutching the pillow or the blanket. My mouth hurt from kissing. I kept getting erections, but I didn’t want to masturbate. I wanted to be with her.”

Michael uses a blunt tone to convey his deep feelings for Hanna. He declares his love for her and uses imagery to illustrate his constant urges to have sex with her.

“Get out of my bed. And if you don’t want to do your work, don’t come back. Your work is idiotic? Idiotic? What do you think selling and punching tickets is.”

Hanna’s outburst is the first of many bewildering conflicts between her and Michael. Her upset serves as foreshadowing. She wants Michael to try hard in school. Getting an education is a privilege Hanna lacks—she can’t read or write.

“But to be seen with Hanna, who was ten years younger than my mother but could have been my mother, didn’t bother me. It made me proud.”

Michael juxtaposes Hanna with his mother to emphasize the fraught age difference between him and Hanna. His blunt tone indicates that he doesn’t feel like a victim. He wants to be with the older Hanna—it excites him.

“She was an attentive listener. Her laugh, her sniffs of contempt, and her angry or enthusiastic remarks left no doubt that she was following the action intently, and that she found both Emilia and Luise to be silly little girls.”

Hanna demonstrates her intelligence by engaging with the texts Michael reads aloud. She can’t read, but she can think critically about the stories. Here, the text is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti.

“As sham as our first fight and indeed all our fights were, everything that enlarged our ritual of reading, showering, making love, and lying beside each other did us good.”

Michael concedes that he and Hanna have issues. Their fights perplex him, yet they don’t break the intense relationship. Anger and violence blend with their passion, subtly highlighting their uneven power dynamics. Nonetheless, the quote reveals their multifaceted relationship: Sex is only one part of their lifelong bond.

“I was the one who picked out the inns where we spent the nights, registered us as mother and son while she just signed her name.”

Once again, Michael manipulates time. He ages himself by taking on the role of the assertive boyfriend. He’s in control of the trip, paying their way despite being a child. At the same time, he maintains their age difference by registering as a son and mother. Hanna’s signature is foreshadowing: She “just signed her name”—she can’t write.

“Then when I proceeded to get bad-tempered myself and we started a fight and Hanna treated me like a nonentity, the fear of losing her returned and I humbled myself and begged her pardon until she took me back. But I was filled with resentment.”

Michael doesn’t try to censor the bad parts of the relationship. He admits that Hanna mistreats him and that he does things that make him feel bad. Nonetheless, Michael’s diction doesn’t make it easy for the reader to call him a victim.

“She was standing twenty or thirty meters away, in shorts and an open blouse knotted at the waist, looking at me. I looked back at her. She was too far away for me to read her expression.”

The image of Hanna at the pool reinforces her mysterious character. Despite their intense relationship, Michael knows little about her. Here, Hanna is like a ghost or an apparition. By the next chapter, she’s gone.

“Never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose—I didn’t formulate any of this as I thought back then, but I know that’s how I felt.”

Michael concedes that Hanna has had a negative impact on his relationships. His strong diction—words like “humiliate” and “guilt”—provide evidence that the relationship could be abusive and traumatizing.

“We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could breathe and see. ”

Michael uses imagery and figurative language to express the zeal he and the other seminar students initially possess for shining the spotlight on the Nazi past. As Hanna’s trial unfolds, Michael revises his opinion and comes to a different understanding of history and guilt.

“She had no sense of context, of the rules of the game, of the formulas by which her statements and those of the others were toted up into guilt and innocence, conviction and acquittal.”

Michael juxtaposes Hanna with the court, and the court comes across as manipulative and boorish. It’s not justice but a game; it’s not truth but formulas. The court symbolizes injustice and the lack of critical thought. It thinks in binaries: guilty or innocent.

“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”

The judge reinforces the obtuse symbolism of the court with his nonanswer. Hanna asks him a direct question, but his diction is convoluted and evasive. He uses impersonal pronouns (“one”) to deflect Hanna’s question, answering with generalities rather than giving an honest answer. “Get drawn into” is passive voice, further separating himself from the question. The language here indicates a reluctance to confront reality.

“‘Death march?’ asks the daughter in the book, and answers, ‘No, death trot, death gallop.’”

The chapter on the survivor’s book emphasizes The Reader’s postmodern traits. Postmodernists tend to make readers aware that they’re reading books, and Michael makes the reader aware that he’s writing a book and reading another book by the surviving daughter. The death marches took place in the final days of the war when the Nazis mercilessly marched the camp prisoners around Europe trying to avoid the Allies. The daughter’s play on the term “march” reveals her wit and humor.

“At the trial Hanna did not weigh exposure as an illiterate against exposure as a criminal. She did not calculate and she did not maneuver. She accepted that she would be called to account, and simply did not wish to endure further exposure. She was not pursuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice.”

Michael advances the opposing symbolism between Hanna and the trial. Hanna isn’t trying to distort the record. She’s after the truth and wants justice. Michael uses repetition—he repeats “she” as if he’s trying to convince himself or the reader that she is acting honorably.

“He’s doing his work, he doesn’t hate the people he executes, he’s not taking revenge on them, he’s not killing them because they’re in his way or threatening him or attacking him. They’re a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.”

The conversation with the driver on the way to the concentration camp alludes, however crudely, to substantive theories about why people became Nazis and participated in genocide. Scholars like Raul Hilberg, Thomas Childers, and Hannah Arendt talk about how Nazis saw their murderous duties as a job. They didn’t kill out of hate; they killed because it’s what their job description entailed. Notably, the Nuremberg Trials established that following orders does not absolve one of guilt; Article 8 of the International Military Tribunal states that “the fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility” (“Charter of the International Military Tribunal.” United Nations, 8 Aug 1945).

“I wasn’t really concerned with justice. I couldn’t leave Hanna the way she was, or wanted to be. I had to meddle with her, have some kind of influence and effect on her, if not directly then indirectly.”

Michael displays his exhaustive, elusive voice. The court doesn’t care about justice, and neither does Michael. He realizes he’s not chasing a higher, selfless ideal but trying to maintain a bond with Hanna by potentially telling the judge about her illiteracy.

“So I stopped talking about it. There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”

Michael uses tricky diction to make a point about action versus words. He tries to talk to other romantic partners but gives up. He talks to them about Hanna because he wants to be with her—that’s the truth in what he says and does. He finds a way to stay engaged with her when she’s in jail, demonstrating his love and care by sending her tapes of him reading aloud. While he doesn’t write her letters, he replicates how they connected when they were together.

“I didn’t see myself in any of the roles I had seen lawyers play at Hanna’s trial. Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defense, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.”

Michael uses diction, repetition, and hyperbole to reinforce the thoughtlessness on display in Hanna’s trial. He repeats “grotesque simplification” twice and uses the exaggerated phrase “most […] of all.” He views the trial as a way of assigning blame rather than the pursuit of truth, and it permanently alters his career path.

“‘You’ve grown up, kid.’ I sat down beside her and she took my hand.”

Hanna manipulates time here; Michael is an adult, yet she still calls him kid. The nickname reinforces their closeness, as does the image of them holding hands. Clinging to their past also signifies Hanna’s reluctance to move forward.

“I had granted Hanna a small niche, certainly an important niche, one from which I gained something and for which I did something, but not a place in my life.”

As Hanna did with him as a teen, Michael restricts Hanna to a specific area of his life. Such statements make Michael an unreliable or questionable narrator. If Hanna only occupied a small niche, why does he send her tapes for years? Why does she continue to preoccupy him?

“I went over to the bookshelf. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry—the literature of the victims, next to the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, Hannah Arendt’s report on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and scholarly literature on the camps.”

The books on Hanna’s bookshelf act like a reading list. If the reader, like Hanna, wants to find out more about the Holocaust and Nazism, then they can pick up these titles. This intertextuality also illuminates the book’s ideas about guilt, memory, and justice.

“That’s true of thousands of people, it doesn’t take a Frau Schmitz.”

Michael responds to the daughter’s quip that Hanna is the reason his marriage failed and he has a distant relationship with his daughter. The daughter’s question gives Michael the chance to directly address the idea that Hanna traumatized him, and he dismisses the charge: Lots of people have divorces and distant relationships with their kids. Michael doesn’t blame Hanna.