Abstract
The past 50 years have witnessed the inexorable growth of literature seeking to illuminate the greatest genocidal tragedy of all time, the Holocaust. So much has been written, that an elder Israeli statesman, Abba Ebban, wrote, ‘there's no business like Sho'ar (Hebrew for Holocaust) business’.
Historical psychological studies continue to gather momentum, notable examples being Lifton's The Nazi doctors and Cocks' Psychotherapy in the Third Reich. These authors concur that individual moral choice is between good and evil and can never be mitigated by group membership. Following Eichman's trial, Hannah Arendt wrote that evil is meaningless and as such, banal. Can evil ever be mitigated when we seek to understand it? Can the moral dimension of behaviour ever be reduced to a set of psychological concepts?
The primary Holocaust literature, successfully surveyed in Roethke's Literature of destruction, often seeks no more than to portray personal and collective suffering, rather than explain it. Only recently have the children of the perpetrators begun to question and comment on their past. Schlink hails from this generation alienated from their forebears seeking to understand their personal suffering and relieve their collective guilt.
Set in the wake of the Holocaust, The reader links an apparently lyrical love affair with a doleful dénouement, a story that, as Ruth Rendell writes, seeks the redemptive power of understanding. The author tells a story, mirrored also in dreams, of a schoolboy encounter leading to an infatuation with a tram conductress. A dramatic and unexpected court encounter heralds a double dénouement. The author, by then a legal student, meets the eye of Hannah in Court, where she and her co-conspirators are on trial. He subsequently discovers that her life choices including camp guard have been shaped by a secret: her need to hide her illiteracy.
At each step, the Hannah portrayed by the narrator rationalises her choices: ‘Hannah had not decided in favour of crime. She had decided against a promotion at Siemens, and had fallen into a job as a guard’. Her subsequent choices included: the attentions to her ‘readers’, the girls awaiting their extermination in the death camps, as making their last moments bearable; the neglect to release the women from the ‘the burning church’, as an impossible choice based on fear of reprisal. She fawns off the narrator, her subsequent ‘reader’, who never rises above the appellation ‘kid’. Throughout, ‘she always had to dissimulate somewhat’. In prison, she tries to familiarise herself with books on women in the camps and the Holocaust literature, but to no avail. Many years later, on the verge of release from prison, she hangs herself. This is not because of an awakening of conscience but rather when she feels betrayed by her ‘reader’. At each turn, pride and her own survival come before that of others. The shame of illiteracy takes precedence over the shame of genocide.
What of the ‘reader’? The author's compassion mingles with his complicity. By reading to Hannah on tape and visiting her in prison (‘I sat next to Hannah and smelled an old woman’), by rationalising her as a victim and yielding to the subversion, he risks betraying himself, his peer group, his family, his wife and child, and ultimately himself. He is only partly able to question her choices, the choices of the German people and his own choices. His father, remote from his son and detached from the horror of the Holocaust, is unable to address his son's moral dilemmas: ‘When we children wanted to speak to our father, he gave us appointments just like his students’. This detachment is paralleled by the ‘self righteousness’ of the narrator's co-students, and the clear inability of the presiding judge at Hannah's trial to either confront her ‘choices’, or to be accountable to the ‘reader’ or the public at large. Although collective guilt is ‘a lived reality’, there is thus only an equivocal awakening of conscience, and ultimately a failure to come to terms with the Nazi past.
Dissociation of thought and deed, and denial both on a personal and collective level paralleled nazification of Germany and its postwar aftermath. Germans were not only able to hate Jews: they were able to deny Jews their humanity and systematically seek to eradicate them. This quasi-dissociative process not only affected the perpetrators, Hannah included. The author several times alludes to his own dissociation. At times, this appears to be closer to the psychological dissociation following traumatic stress. That of his forebears, and of Hannah, is a moral dissociation, which ultimately fails to yield to psychologism. The ‘reader’ and his generation had virtually no experiential contact (did not seek to make contact?) with direct evidence of the Holocaust. They were familiar with allied photographs of the dead, but ‘the imagination was static’ and these images ‘froze into cliches’. The narrator's visit to a concentration camp, Struthof-Natzweiler, and experience of the denial of a perpetrator, who killed neither under orders nor out of hatred but indifferently just doing his job, merely left him ‘outraged and helpless’. Unable to transcend his own emotional responses, and reflecting on how ‘one is supposed to feel’, he further wrote: ‘But it was all in vain, and I had a feeling of the most dreadful, shameful failure’.
The author shows some skill in psychological portrayal of his protagonists. Sex and aggression intermingle in their relationship reflecting a primitive Reichian fusion and expression of these drives in Nazi Germany. They emerge in the narrator's dreams ‘in which a hard, imperious, cruel Hannah aroused me sexually’. Hannah enters the moral vacuum obtaining within the narrator's family and within German society.
The moral perversion of the protagonist, Hannah, is a metaphor for the moral perversion of the German people. The subversion of the author is a metaphor for the subversion of his paramour (in Janetian psychological terms, his ‘director’) ultimately subverting the integrity of the overall text. As writer, the ‘reader’ sets himself an impossible task, to both understand and condemn Hannah. It is Derrida who outlines the true asymptotes of understanding. His hyperbolic ethics masterly relates the impossibility of reconciling the irreconcilable, of forgiving the unforgivable. Written with a sparse almost disembodied beauty The reader is nonetheless compulsive reading.