The Reader

As an adult, Michael reflects on the building on Bahnhofstrasse. In the 1970s or 80s, a new building replaced the old one. The new building has plaster on the outside. It contains tiny apartments and renters that don’t seem to stay long. Beneath the homes, there’s a computer store.

The old building featured bricks, arches, and balconies. The front door had pillars and two decorative lions. The building captivated Michael as a child. He thought only magnificent people could live in the lavish place. As an adult, the building continues to preoccupy Michael. He dreams about it constantly. He sees the building not in Germany but in other countries and places, like Rome. Sometimes, the urban building is in the country. Michael goes to the front door, but he doesn’t open it.

The narrative returns to his teen years. Michael, following his mother’s wishes, brings flowers to the woman who helped him. As he doesn’t know her name, he describes her to a man leaving the building. The man realizes Michael is looking for Frau Schmitz, who lives on the third floor.

For the first time, Michael enters the building on Bahnhofstrasse, and it’s not as splendid as the outside. The red paint on the stairs is fading, the green linoleum wall covering is rubbing off, there’s string holding the banisters together, and it smells like cleaning fluid and food.

Frau Schmitz leads Michael into her kitchen—the biggest room in her apartment. There’s a sink, stove, couch, and bathtub. The apartment also has a living room with a window that looks out onto a train station. Years later, a courthouse and administration building will replace the train station.

Later, Michael can’t remember what they spoke about, but he remembers she was ironing her underwear, and he couldn’t look away. He also looked at Frau Schmitz’s face and thought she was beautiful.

Michael has to go, and so does Frau Schmitz. Michael waits in the hall as Frau Schmitz changes. The door is open a crack, and Michael sees her take off her smock and put on a stocking. He gazes at her feet, legs, breasts, neck, and shoulder. As she puts on the other stocking, she catches Michael staring at her. Ashamed, Michael runs out of the building and through the same streets he ran along as a child.

Michael feels like a child and wonders why he couldn’t stop looking at Frau Schmitz. Her body is fuller than those of the girls he typically watches, and she’s much older—probably in her 30s. Years later, Michael realizes his gaze had less to do with her specific body and more with how she moved and held herself. He asks future girlfriends to put on stockings, but he doesn’t explain why.

The doctor doesn’t think Michael is ready to return to school, and Michael thinks about the enchantment that comes with being sick as a child. The outside world can’t compare to a sickroom, where the fever heightens the imagination and produces intriguing monsters, distortions, and feelings.

Michael has dreams that leave his pajama pants stained or wet. The dreams counter what adults taught him about right and wrong, but he can’t stop fantasizing. His thoughts compel him to return to Frau Schmitz. Years later, Michael notices a pattern: He does things without intending to do them, like seeing a woman he doesn’t want to see, telling off a boss, or continuing to smoke.

Frau Schmitz isn’t home, but the building’s front door is open, so Michael waits on the stairs on the third floor. He hears heavy footsteps and presumes they belong to a man, but it’s Frau Schmitz. She’s carrying scuttles (metal containers for coal) and asks Michael to help her. In the cellar, Michael has trouble with the tall coal piles, and black dust covers him.

Back in the apartment, Frau Schmitz and Michael laugh at his dirtiness, and she insists that he take a bath. Afterward, she wraps him in a big towel and touches his chest and erection. Michael’s afraid he won’t know what to do, but once he starts smelling and feeling her, everything unfolds effortlessly. When he ejaculates, he screams so loud that Frau Schmitz covers his mouth.

Michael is in love with Frau Schmitz. He can’t sleep. He thinks about her constantly and is continuously erect, but he doesn’t want to masturbate. He wants to have sex with her.

He thinks about being a four-year-old during the winter. The mornings were cold, but the kitchen was warm, and his mother washed him with hot water. He wonders why his mother spoiled him with warmth.

Michael wants to return to school and exhibit his new grown-up masculinity. When he comes home from Frau Schmitz’s apartment for the first time, his parents ask why he is late. Michael lies and says he went to a memorial garden in the cemetery in Molkenkur and wandered into Nussloch. His older brother makes fun of him: Molkenkur and Nussloch are in different directions. Michael's mother isn’t sure he should return to school, but his father, a philosophy professor, thinks it’s fine. Michael believes his father thinks of his family members as pets. He also feels like the dinner is a goodbye—as if it’s the last time they’ll be together.

Frau Schmitz is a streetcar conductor, and she has the early shift, so Michael cuts his final class at school to be with her and then runs home for lunch. Frau Schmitz is very clean, and Michael graphically describes their sex.

Their sixth or seventh time together, Michael asks what her first name is. After she gives him a suspicious look, she laughs and says her name is Hanna. Michael tells her his name, and Hanna says she has a son named Michael—he’s 17 and wants to be famous.

Hanna and Michael talk about school, and Michael complains that he might have to repeat a grade. His negativity provokes Hanna, and she says if he thinks school is stupid, he should try selling and punching streetcar tickets. She reenacts her duties, and Michael apologizes, but he doesn’t understand why she’s upset. He wonders if she doesn’t want to have an unsuccessful lover.

As an adult, Michael wonders why thinking about his time with Hanna as a teen makes him sad. He remembers that neither students nor teachers noticed him much, but he had lots of energy, and he would grow up to be smart and handsome.

Back in Michael’s teenage timeline, Hanna doesn't care about the future and talks remotely about her past. She grew up in a German community in Romania, moved to Berlin at 16, and worked at a Siemens factory (Siemens is the biggest industrial corporation in Europe). At 21, she joined the army. Since World War II, she has worked various jobs to survive. She’s 36 and doesn’t mind being a streetcar conductor. She likes the uniform and the motion.

Adult Michael thinks about their relationship in the context of literature. In Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black, the protagonist, Julien Sorel, has an affair with an older married mother, Madame de Rênal. In Thomas Mann’s unfinished novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the eponymous character has an affair with an older mother. Michael also defends the supposed relationship between the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the married and older Madame von Stein.

The narration skips back to the past. Michael doesn’t want people to spot him with his mother, but he wouldn’t mind if people saw him with Hanna—who could also be his mother. As an adult, he thinks of a 36-year-old woman as young and a 15-year-old boy as a child. Due to Hanna, teen Michael doesn’t feel like a child. She gives him confidence. He excels at school and isn’t awkward around girls.

The couple discusses school again. Michael reads about the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and Hanna asks him to read to her. Michael reads her The Odyssey, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti (1772), and Friedrich Schiller’s play Intrigues and Love (1784). One day, Hanna makes Michael read to her before they have sex. Hanna listens carefully and comments on the plots and characters of the various texts. Reading to Hanna and being with her makes Michael thoroughly happy.