A PHOTOGRAPH accompanying reviews of Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader shows two people in a bathtub. One of them has his back to the camera and is reading a book. The other, English actor Kate Winslet, is submerged up to her shoulders. She is facing the camera but looking intently at the reader. The viewer is put in the position of a voyeur witnessesing an intimate encounter. The photo anticipates the moment when Winslet will step out of the bath to bare all.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” Bernhard Schlink’s first person narrator says of his second encounter with Winslet’s character, the tram conductor Hanna Schmitz, in The Reader. “Her neck and shoulders, her breasts, which the petticoat veiled rather than concealed, her hips which stretched the petticoat tight as she propped her foot on her knee and then set it on the chair, her leg, pale and naked, then shimmering in the silky stocking.”
The narrator – the reader – is aroused by what Hanna’s petticoat veils rather than conceals. He flees the scene, only to be drawn back to Hanna’s flat a week later. Bernhard Schlink’s novel, which has been adapted for the big screen by Daldry and playwright David Hare, chronicles how the reader’s attraction becomes a crush and then turns into a life-long obsession.
Prospective audiences are titillated not just by the prospect of gazing at Winslet’s breasts, but by the prospect of a beautiful thirty-something woman – who, as everybody knows even before watching the film, is a former concentration camp guard – seducing a fifteen-year-old. They are titillated by the prospect of being able to catch a glimpse of the evil that lurks beneath the apparent vulnerability of the woman in the bathtub.
But the titillation does not stop there. After all, this is a film about Germany and the Holocaust: about a culture that reputedly produced some of the most creative minds of European modernity and some of its most infamous mass murderers; about an ordinary German woman who became a monster; about a German boy who grew up in the shadow of a monstrous past.
The Reader – or Der Vorleser – has been a bestseller in Germany, as the film’s non-German reviewers keep telling their readers. The film promises to offer viewers a window into the German psyche – not only because Schlink supposedly explores his nation’s collective unconscious, but also because the film might explain Germans’ enthusiastic response to the book and thereby reveal something about their response to the crimes that implicated their entire nation.
Der Vorleser was first published in 1995. It sold well in Germany. As a German reviewer noted a couple of years ago: “In the nineties, you couldn’t avoid the Vorleser. It was the present of choice. Whenever you had to go to a birthday party – be it that of your grandma, that of your best mate, or that of your favourite sexual partner – and could not think of anything else, the Vorleser was always appropriate.” At the time, neither reviewers nor readers thought that they had come across a great German novel (rather than a good yarn). In fact, some review editors chose to ignore a book that is arguably rather average as a work of literature.
It didn’t help that Schlink had an established reputation as a constitutional lawyer – he was involved in the drafting of the German Democratic Republic’s last constitution – and as an accomplished writer of crime fiction. Why would somebody like him, past his fiftieth birthday, suddenly create a literary masterpiece? And once grandmothers, friends and lovers all had their own copy of Der Vorleser – and some had even read it – its time on the bestseller lists ought to have been up. It had to make way for the next Grisham or Steele or Follett.
But two years after its publication in Germany, Schlink’s novel was translated into English, and its sales figures outside Germany soon dwarfed those of the German edition. I remember being surprised by the attention Schlink received when he came to Australia in 1998 as guest of the Melbourne Writers Festival, just as my Australian friends were when I told them that Schlink was not considered one of postwar Germany’s most important novelists. The following year, Oprah Winfrey anointed The Reader as her “book of the month” and it subsequently reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
It is not uncommon for books that have first been published in the United States to do well on German bestseller lists. But The Reader was the first German novel in memory to top the American charts. Those who had bought multiple copies of Der Vorleser to give to their relatives, friends and lovers could feel that they had been onto something: if Oprah and the American book-buying public thought highly of it, then it must have attributes other than those associated with a convenient, inexpensive and inoffensive birthday present. German critics who had shunned Der Vorleser as they would any other bestselling thriller or romantic novel suddenly took note. A book that has become an international bestseller – to date Der Vorleser has been translated into forty-one languages – not only demanded attention but also needed to be claimed as a national icon.
Several years after its initial publication, and not least as a result of its reception abroad, Der Vorleser became prescribed reading. In several German states it was placed on the secondary school curriculum for German literature. Schlink received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Germany’s highest civil honour – not for his work as a lawyer, but for writing Der Vorleser. I expect its author eventually to win one of Germany’s major literary prizes.
Reviewers in the English-speaking world, who marvel at the resounding success Der Vorleser has had in Germany, ought to recognise that non-German readers’ fascination with The Reader – or rather, with its subject matter – has been partly responsible for that success. The “Germany” that supposedly obsesses about the questions asked in The Reader is also an American, British and French Germany. (Maybe Stephen Daldry wanted to admit as much when he let the camera zoom in on the books the young Michael Berg, who is played by the German actor David Kross, reads from: surprisingly, they are the English rather than German editions of works by Lessing, Homer and Chekhov; I wonder what cinema audiences in Germany make of that.)
The Germany I know is different from an exoticised “Germany” whose monstrousness is veiled rather than concealed and whose unseen yet imagined presence seems to account for non-Germans’ fascination with The Reader. The “Germany” that is the foil for the reception of The Reader is one whose people must somehow live up to expectations stemming from a collective Erbsünde – a sin that can’t be washed away and is inherited without fail by subsequent generations. In that Germany, appropriate reading material includes books such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners; a book that engages with the dilemmas faced by the descendants of the perpetrators is decidedly inappropriate. In that Germany, Der Vorleser must have been controversial because of its content rather than because of its literary merits. In that Germany, Schlink’s book must have been transgressive and risqué, much like the love affair between the former concentration camp guard Hanna Schmitz and an innocent fifteen-year-old Michael Berg.
It’s not that such a Germany does not exist: Anne Frank’s diary has been required reading since the late 1950s and is still on the bestseller lists. (It’s currently ranked twentieth in the paperback non-fiction category on the Spiegel’s bestseller list, while Der Vorleser is ranked second in the paperback fiction category.) Goldhagen’s book received a rapturous response in Germany – even before it came out in translation. But the “Germany” that seems to fascinate many non-Germans because it has the forbidden allure of Nazi Germany is but one – not particularly dominant – side of contemporary Germany.
Those who were most critical of the film also seem to be wedded to images of a nation that has more in common with the Germany of 1945 than with that of the early twenty-first century. It is a Germany that is marked by an overwhelming collective desire to deny responsibility for the Holocaust. Bernhard Schlink and David Hare have been accused of providing “ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the Archbishop Williamsons of the world.” In a contribution for the online magazine Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, journalist and author of the acclaimed Explaining Hitler, suggested that the film’s “essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.”
Rosenbaum’s response is akin to that of the student in the film who leaves the class taught by Bruno Ganz’s character because he can’t see the point: Hanna Schmitz and the other women charged with murder are guilty – so why bother? Neither the book nor the film denies that Schmitz is guilty. There is no doubt about her crime: to have failed to unlock the doors of a church and allow 300 concentration camp prisoners to save their lives after the church was hit by bombs and caught fire. Neither the film nor the book suggests that there are adequate means of atoning for such a crime. Schmitz ended up as an SS guard not because she was committed to killing Jews but because she couldn’t read and considered the SS a convenient career opportunity. But Schlink does not suggest that she could have used that as an excuse. There could not have been any excuse for what she did.
That’s not to say that her story shouldn’t be told – particularly by somebody who loved her, as Michael did. Many of Schlink’s generation empathised with Nazi Germany’s victims to the extent that they identified with them. They came to believe that they could have been Anne Frank (or her brother). Many of Schlink’s generation distanced themselves from their parents and grandparents: they were Nazis and would always be Nazis. In The Reader, Schlink lets Michael Berg say: “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. … The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we… condemned it to shame.” The so-called Achtundsechziger, the generation of the 1968 student revolt, assumed that they didn’t have anything to do with the Holocaust. It was an accident of history, something to do with sperm and genes, that they had been born as the children of perpetrators and accomplices and bystanders.
It is about time that the ties between the perpetrators and bystanders, on the one hand, and their children and grandchildren, on the other, are acknowledged. It is about time that second and third generation perpetrators and bystanders critically and substantially engage with the lives of those to whom they instinctively feel attached – however contorted their emotional ties may be. Germans’ empathy with Anne Frank always smacked of an escape. Why not explore the limits of empathy by trying to learn about the life of somebody like Hanna Schmitz?
FORTUNATELY, Bernhard Schlink’s novel is but one among many attempts by the children of the perpetrators to understand their parents and to acknowledge how they are implicated in what happened, even if they weren’t yet born. Unfortunately, Der Vorleser is not a particularly successful attempt at arriving at such an understanding. We simply don’t learn enough about Hanna Schmitz. The filmic version compounds that weakness by trying hard to make us understand, and empathise with the sorrows of, Michael Berg, as if he were Hanna Schmitz’s ultimate victim.
There is now a host of books like Der Vorleser: fiction and non-fiction in which Germans in their fifties or sixties or early seventies explore the lives of their parents (or of people of their parents’ generation). Many of these books are unsatisfactory: because the authors end up distancing themselves without trying to understand, because they are apologetic, or because they confuse victims and perpetrators. Most of these books have little literary merit. But they are worth reading nevertheless because they suggest a complicated alternative to identifying with Anne Frank, denying any connection with Nazi Germany, or reimagining Germans as victims (of the Allied bombing campaign, systematic rape by soldiers of the Red Army, expulsion from former German territories in Poland and the Soviet Union, etc – or, as in Der Vorleser, of the generation of their Nazi parents).
One such Vaterbuch – book about one’s father – was recently published in translation. There is nothing to titillate the reader in Wibke Bruhns’s My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family. Bruhns was one of Germany’s most prominent television presenters. Born in 1938 (six years before Schlink), she wrote a book about her father: a Wehrmacht officer who was executed in 1944 for plotting the assassination of Hitler but who was also implicated in the crimes committed or condoned by the German army.
Like Der Vorleser, My Father’s Country is flawed. Maybe that’s also because it is impossible to understand and at the same time retain a critical distance. “Who am I to judge today, when I want to understand the past?,” Bruhns writes. “I have no scores to settle, and I must reign in my arrogance. … Sixty years on I cannot sit here ruthlessly ‘being right.’”
Despite its flaws, I recommend My Father’s Country. It complicates commonly held ideas about Nazi Germany and its contemporary heir. It can do so more easily than The Reader because it does not offer the kind of histrionic distractions that make Schlink’s book and Daldry’s film so uncomfortably beguiling. My Father’s Country is less likely to allow readers to adopt a voyeuristic position.
Both as a book and as a film, The Reader poses crucial questions about individual and collective guilt, about shame and about redemption, albeit often in a somewhat heavy-handed manner: Schlink taught constitutional law at universities in Bonn, Frankfurt and Berlin, and his book suggests we could imagine him not so much as a depressed and twisted Ralph Fiennes (who plays the adult Michael Berg) but as a seemingly disengaged Bruno Ganz (who plays Michael’s professor at the University of Heidelberg).
The important questions raised by The Reader are not specific to Germany. In saying this I do not mean to deny the singularity of the Holocaust but rather to discourage non-German audiences from treating the setting of The Reader as an exotic location off-limits to decent folk, which allows them to distance themselves from issues that may be closer to home than they wish to admit. •
