Category: German Literature

Realism at Work: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann was born in 1875. Buddenbrooks, his seven-hundred-page-plus multigenerational epic depicting the decline of a merchant family in his native Lubeck, was published in 1900. Even to write such a book at that age would be a titanic achievement, but to make it good – that is something truly special. Indeed, when Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 it was Buddenbrooks, not his Magic Mountain of 1924, that was singled out by the committee as the main driving force behind their decision. I was not expecting to enjoy Buddenbrooks as much as I did, even though it had received some extremely enthusiastic praise from one of my old teachers at Cambridge. But, thanks to John E. Woods’ fantastic translation (Mann has long suffered in the English-speaking world thanks to H. T. Lowe-Porter’s somewhat dreadful efforts), I was truly able to get into Mann’s world.

Buddenbrooks is the work of a young man. There is a certain comparative lack of wisdom in it and a certain lack of sympathy, both of which mean that in the end I still find myself preferring Fontane to Mann. But Mann makes up for this by the sheer force of his intelligence. You can tell how hard he studied to write this book. When I was in Lubeck some years ago I visited the Mann Museum there, located in what we now think of as the Buddenbrooks’ house, and there was an entire room devoted to Mann’s planning for the work – pages and pages of notes, piles and piles of books. What Mann had not the experience to know, he used his mind to acquire. It’s amazing that he did as well as he did.

This piece is broken up into two halves – the first deals with the way the novel is built. What I found interesting is just the way that Mann writes with such a deliberate realism. Just as Mann studied hard to write this work, so too can any perspective writer study Buddenbrooks and discover somewhat exposed in it the wheels and cogs that any successful realist novel must have. The second part then details a few things of the plot. Buddenbrooks is a huge novel, and there is too much to say for any self-respecting blogger not to become boring. I will focus on my favourite bits, things and people that are worth thinking about.

Structure – How To Write A Realist Novel

The point of the realist novel is to be realistic, defined as containing as much of outward reality as possible. The contortions of modernist writing may better reflect our perception of the world and our own minds, but we turn to realism when we want what we think the world is actually like. But how do we build this world? It’s quite easy really – one can basically work from a recipe as if the completed novel is a dish we are trying to prepare. What is the world made up of? We have what people wear (such as Madame Buddenbrook’s gold bracelet), we have food, we have buildings (the various Buddenbrook houses), we have people. People, of course, have personalities, but they have appearances too, which are just as important, and indeed can compensate for a personality if we write them sufficiently well.

All of these things together create a picture of the world. Mann’s story, which runs from 1835ish to about 1880, uses these things – clothes, cultural markers (what’s on in the theatre) – to tell us where we are in time. In addition, Mann uses various historical markers, dropped in here and there. Buddenbrooks is definitely a book that is improved by knowing a bit about Germany’s 19th-century history – whether it is the debates over Lubeck joining the German customs union, or the Revolutions of 1848, or the Wars of Unification – it’s useful to know how to place the story within German history. Especially because one thing that it might be trying to say is that Germany’s ascendency as a great power is matched by the decline of one of its great families.

Realism is a fundamentally conservative mode of writing. That is because it is constantly setting the bounds of its own topics. All of the things I’ve mentioned – what people wear, what they eat, what they talk about, where they go – establish a sense of society. And any good realist novel is engaged in a critique of society while demonstrating its pervasive influence. Characters talk about what they are supposed to, and anyone who goes against this ends up being excluded, or mocked. In Buddenbrooks Christian Buddenbrook, who has spent much of his youth in South America, is such a figure. Another is Hugo Weinschenk, a husband of one of the Buddenbrooks, who comes from a lower class. Society in the realist novel is fundamentally class-based, and these novels tend to show the difficulties that any cross-class communication comes up against. (In Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, the lovely but lower-class Lene cannot spell correctly). In Buddenbrooks, silence or censure is the fate met by characters who speak out of line:

“It’s best not to say such things out loud,” she thought, fixing her eyes firmly in the distance in order not to meet his gaze.

Unable to articulate their problems without being cast out, people discover they have nowhere to turn. Wherever they go, society demands conformity – religion, education, business, even a beach holiday (all described in Buddenbrooks) all act to crush resistance on the part of would-be freethinkers. Revolts are rare, despair more common. It’s no surprise that many of the greatest realist novels of the 19th century which attack society end with suicide or resignation on the part of the rebels.

But though these novels are conservative, in that they never advocate for revolution, they are rarely reactionary. Instead, they work upon their readers, making them ask questions, see society’s victims as society’s victims, and in doing so they cause people to reflect upon the structures around them. Progress comes slowly, but it comes.

In Buddenbrooks Mann shows the way that society exerts a crushing influence upon its members. Thomas Buddenbrook, once he has become head of the family, is so obsessed with trying to conform that he makes the life of his son Hanno a misery, even once he starts to question the foundations of the society that he is trying to fit into. Thomas’s sister Toni is ostracized after her two marriages – both undertaken not for love, but to help the family business, because she has internalised a sense of duty – end in divorce. Thomas prevents his brother from marrying his lover because it would bring shame to the family name. Altogether, the novel shows that even the victims of society end up being its willing executioners. Nobody is safe, and nobody is entirely guiltless.

Describing the world is not enough. We must also make use of symbolic objects, and here Mann’s youth is obvious. He has studied well. From Vronsky in Anna Karenina he takes the excellent symbol of teeth to show inner decay. From Fontane he understands the importance of houses as reflections of the soul. I particularly liked the way that the original Buddenbrooks house ends up decaying, so that although the façade is alright, the inner garden and courtyard is an overgrown mess. The family itself has undergone a similar decline, sustained by Thomas’s youthful vigour, while all around him everyone else begins to fail and falter.

In addition to symbols, Mann understands that the best way of creating memorable characters in a book with a great many characters – and in Buddenbrooks there are a lot – is the use of repeated phrases and ideas. Toothache is one, as is Toni’s upper lip. There is Klothilde, who is always eating but never seems to stop being scrawny, and Bendix Grünlich, with his “golden muttonchop” facial hair.

All this is good. All this makes his characters seem real, seem placed within a meaningful (because we can find symbolic significance within it) world, and seem to have genuine conflicts (individual versus society). One can study the book and go away and write a realist novel, easy as that.

Thomas Buddenbrook

I have written before about my own family, in round about terms. Novels of decline are dear to my heart – Roth’s Radetzky March, the Patrick Melrose novels, and so on. I exist at the tail end of a saga of decline, and I am sure that, were it not for the evils of modern medicine, I would quietly have gone to an early grave at the age of twenty-two, dying of consumption. Instead, I am alive, and straining under various pressures to be a certain kind of person, the one who will “restore the family fortunes” and its social standing. These pressures may be in my mind, but just as with realist novels, real life tends to convey society’s influence in ways that are not entirely obvious – through what is said and what is worn, through who is welcome to break bread at our table and who not, and so on.

Thomas Buddenbrook comes to head the family at a young age after the unexpected death of his father. He achieves early success. He quotes Heine and has a feel for culture that was lacking in his ancestors, who looked upon the arts with amusement or contempt. But this feel for culture sows the seeds for his downfall. For what Tom has, that his ancestors did not, is a certain interiority. He feels. And what does he feel? At first he feels ambition, he consciously chooses the role of the upper-middle-class business, which fits him like a glove. He succeeds in local politics, in business: “Didn’t you know that one can be a great man in a small town? … That takes a little imagination, I’ll grant, a little idealism – and that’s what you lacked, whatever you may have believed about yourself.”

Convinced of his own potential greatness, he lives to “keep up appearances”. He abandons his true love, as does Tony, and makes a marriage that brings the family a lot of money in her dowry (and Mann never shies away from showing figures, because they prove the thoroughness of his research). He goes about his business, he grows older, and at some point he realises that something is going wrong: “all the while he was wrestling in vain to find comfort in order and routine, because, to his despair, he found himself forever falling behind his own active imagination”. A true bourgeois, he tries to order his life to avoid any introspection. But it fails.

“A man who stands firmly in his profession, unshaken by doubts, knows only one thing, understands only one thing, values only one thing – his profession.”

Yes, this is the problem. A profession is not a life. It may be “pleasant to remember your forefathers when you know that you are of one mind with them and are sure that you have always acted as they would have had you act”, but when that is not the case…  Tom displaces his own anxieties onto his son, Hanno, demanding that he be “a genuine Buddenbrook”, whatever that means. He does what he can. But ultimately everything falls apart.

What is extraordinary is the fragility of the (19th-century) bourgeois family. We rest our hopes upon one or two males, and if they fail – then all the rest collapses. The women are simply chattel for improving the family name. Buddenbrooks is not a story of continual decline. Instead, it is a decline that is punctuated by great moments of hope. But in a sense, from the moment Hanno Buddenbrook is born – a sickly, unhealthy child who likes music more than making money – we know that the family is doomed, however hard Thomas works. No amount of religious faith, no dominus providebit (God will provide) above the door, can compensate for the wrong child being born at the wrong time. And therein lies the tragedy.

All of us in Thomas’s position are faced with pressure to lead a certain life, and often with competing pressures. Is one to make money or to be oneself? Our parents may want one thing and our schooling demand something completely different. In such situations, the sensible thing may be to compromise, but I am too young to know. At the end of On Tangled Paths Baron Botho, having broken off his relationship to the poor Lene to marry the rich and silly Käthe, tells a friend in a similar situation that he must “beware of this middle course, beware of half-measures.” Either he must submit to his society in full, or take his love away – to America, perhaps. But to go for the middle course is only to destroy yourself: “Many things are permissible, but not what does violence to the soul or entangles the heart, even if it’s only your own.”

Conclusion

I am not in danger of being anything other than a disappointment for choosing the wrong girl (or boy) to marry. But disappointment need not come from others and nor is a marriage the only thing worth judging. I know how well I have internalised my own idea of society, and how it watches over me, whip in hand, every day of my life. I must make money, I must follow my heart, I must heed the calling of my soul – and yet how few hours there are in the day! We are doomed to despair, whichever route we take. Thomas’s Uncle Gotthold marries his childhood sweetheart and is disinherited. His three daughters have no money to marry, and end up growing to be old and lonely spinsters. Thomas himself makes the “right decision”, and his earthly reward is a terrible punishment.

The world is made up of so many tangled paths along which we stumble blindly. It is better to have no internality, to believe confidently in the world as it stands as any good Hanseatic merchant or office-bound lawyer does. But like Mann, I am cursed with a voice and a questioning gaze. He made something of his, even if he did not lead the family business to great glory. I can only hope that I will do the same. Though I am still young, and there is much stumbling for me left to do…

Anyway, Buddenbrooks is a complex, fascinating, at times touching portrayal of the declining fortunes of a family of Lubeck-based merchants. Although there is a certain coolness to it that means I ultimately prefer the Fontane of Effi Briest, there’s no denying Mann’s phenomenal talents. He provides a guidebook on how to write a great realist novel, and that’s incredibly inspiring. The fact that I did not even attempt to analyse it properly is more a reflection of its quality, than anything else. There is too much to say. The conflict between duty and the heart is already enough to show the depth of the book’s treatment of its various themes. For English readers, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Woods translation. It’s very readable. And that’s good, because this is a book that needs to be read.

A Few Thoughts on Kleist’s Style

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most extraordinary German writers of an age when German writing was already shaping world literature. However, it took a long time for the world to get used to him. Goethe famously snubbed him, and Kleist’s biography tends to be haunted by its ending – he died in a suicide pact at age 34. Before that death, however, he managed to produce a small body of work – his complete works, including letters, fits snuggle into a single two-thousand-page volume – which time has only elevated in stature.

For Kleist did not fit in within his world. Stefan Zweig, the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer, wrote a book entitled Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, which suggests something of his character and his kindred spirits. Kleist’s writing, which I have long struggled to get into, has at last opened itself up to me. I have conquered his dreadfully long and torturous German sentences for the first time, and now I am able to see for myself what the fuss is all about.

Heinrich von Kleist

Kleist wrote dramas, and he wrote short stories, and he wrote a couple of interesting philosophical essays and journalistic pieces too. This post will focus on the short stories. At Cambridge I read Penthesilea, his tragedy involving Achilles and the eponymous Amazonian queen, but I could not understand it. Last month I read The Broken Jug and The Schroffenstein Family, both of which are early dramas which had moments of cleverness but were nevertheless a little contrived. I will read his more mature dramas, including Penthesilea again, in due course. But it is his short stories – eight of them, all written near the end of his life, that have motivated me to write today. For they are really something special.

In addition to his suicide pact, everyone likes to mention that poor Kleist had a rather significant mental breakdown in 1801. This is what scholars like to term the “Kant Crisis”. Kleist had been reading the aforementioned German philosopher and had accidentally broken down the foundations of his own world. It happens. Kleist learned from Kant that we are unable to penetrate through our sensory perception of the world to things as they really are. As he explained it to a friend, it’s as though everyone is wearing tinted glasses – our world is distorted, but we cannot know how, and we cannot know what the real world is actually like. Objective truth becomes impossible; at least Kleist saw it that way. Connections to others are fleeting, trust is impossible. Our world is only misunderstanding heaped upon misunderstanding. All this broke Kleist the man but it made Kleist the writer.

Style

Deceitful Reportage in Michael Kohlhaas

So what is this writer? Awful, is one way of describing him. His stories are made up of long, winding sentences, that occasionally bring German grammar up to its limits. These long sentences fit into paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. This does not make for easy reading. The two previous times I read Kleist’s prose, at school and then at my first year at university, I was crushed by it. The language was too complex, the syntax and lexis arcane. I had a feeling that I’d like Kleist, but I couldn’t reach him. Perhaps if he’d been born fifty years later, I thought, he’d have learned how to use speech marks and add a new paragraph here and there, as so often do his translators.

And yet these sentences and these paragraphs serve a purpose. “Michael Kohlhaas”, the longest novella, has the subtitle “from an old chronicle”. It tries, consciously, to be a kind of reportage. Kohlhaas, a real figure from the age of Luther, is blown up by Kleist into a titanic figure. A horse dealer who is wronged by an aristocrat, Kohlhaas burns the man’s castle to the ground and goes around pillaging half of Germany, just to get a kind of justice. Kleist pretends that the work is history, referring to “the chronicles whose comparison allows us to write this tale”. But the tale has little to do with the historical Kohlhaas, and Kleist’s approach seems designed more to derail our idea of history as something clear-cut and definite. The narrator informs us at one point that the sources disagree, and decides that he cannot really say what happened. At another point he mentions an emotion in Kohlhaas’s heart but refuses to say what it is. We are left with an allegedly objective document that falls apart.

Then there is the narrator himself. A man who refers to “the poor Kohlhaas” and only a moment later heaps insults upon him, the narrator provides no ballast. Though occasionally he appears to see into Kohlhaas’s heart, just as often he makes us see only a gesture, or a facial expression. As with some of my favourite books – Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Conrad’s Nostromo – Kleist presents us with a mysterious central character who we look upon, but rarely into.

The story further displays a defiance of objective truth by being filled with rumours – where is Kohlhaas and his band of rebels? – and mistakes. The justice system, supposedly on Kohlhaas’s side, and supposedly designed to help us reach Truth, proves hopelessly corrupt due to the influence of the aristocrats (mockery is made of the justice system in The Broken Jug as well). We repeatedly get the impression that around Kohlhaas are forces that he cannot understand and cannot predict, whether they are the scheming aristocrats or bandits using his name to further their own ends. In this, Kohlhaas becomes a kind of microcosm of humankind’s place in a not-fully-knowable universe, and a surprisingly modern work.

God and Perspective in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, “The Foundling”, and “The Earthquake in Chile”

“Michael Kohlhaas” uses a documentary style that ultimately undermines itself. Elsewhere, Kleist explores the importance of perspective in questions of truth. “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, is a shorter story that is quite enigmatic. Four brothers arrive in Aachen with the intention of destroying some religious images – the time is at the height of Protestant fervour. They gather together a band of men and head to their target church, but during the mass, instead of giving the signal to attack, the brothers are overcome by the power of music. They begin to pray, and pray, and pray. They are brought to a madhouse, and there they stay, living out a long and somewhat strange life. The music that they heard was played by a nun that was apparently sick, but had miraculously recovered in time to perform. However, it later transpires that she was sick after all, and that her replacement’s identity is unknown.

What exactly has happened? We encounter much of the story through the eyes of the brothers’ mother, who travels six years later to Aachen in search of them. From one of the band of rabble-rousers she learns one version of the story, from the abbess another – and from other inhabitants of the town, still more versions. Nothing is clear, from who played the music to what happened to the brothers. We encounter a truth that has been shattered beyond repair, something Kleist makes clear by using numbers. We cannot reach the truth of a story where there were both definitely three hundred and one hundred rebels at the ready – we can only select a version that makes most sense to us.

And what does it mean that the brothers were converted? Is it an act of God? Perhaps, but we cannot be sure. They are catatonic, capable only of repetitious prayer. Although they appear to be happy, this is not the sign of a benevolent God – certainly not the kind of God that most of us look for. The boys’ mother is converted to Catholicism at the story’s end, but it’s a conversion that seems slightly absurd to us – we cannot understand her. We know what she experienced, of course, because we read about it – but we do not know how she interpreted it or how it touched her core.

God lies at the heart of Kleist’s most exciting works. Does he exist, and what is he like if he does exist? Kleist’s style reflects a refusal, a brutal refusal, to answer these questions. In “Saint Cecilia” we see an apparent act of God, but one that only makes God seem stranger than what we’ve been led to expect – it disorientates us. In “The Foundling”, another extraordinary story, a merchant takes in an orphan after his son dies and raises him as his own. And in return for all this unconditional, Christian kindness, he is treated with an almost satanic cruelty. It does not make sense. It challenges that Christian-moral firmament upon which our worldview rested in Kleist’s day, and still mostly rests in our own day. The tragic conclusion of “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place in and outside a church, but it is brutally violent and fit only for an old-testament God in one of His worst moods.

Conclusion

Any good story has an element of ambiguity, but Kleist’s ambiguity seeps through to his very formal approach to problems. We see events and characters from multiple angles, in a style that appears to be factual, but all this does not take us any closer to resolving our issues. On the contrary, it makes them even more acute. We have a God who seems to exist, but rather than providing a bedrock upon which to build a certain surety, Kleist uses his God to make us even more confused about what we think of as truth.

I admit that the style is frustratingly dense at times, and the sentences need attacking with a hacksaw, but if one can get over these hurdles, they will find in Kleist a writer who is very much worth reading. He is a figure who is disquieting in the extreme and strikingly contemporary. More posts on him to follow.

A Book Without a Soul – Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader

I read The Reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink, because – surprise, surprise – it was on my reading list. However, I’d been meaning to read it for a while. I actually bought myself a copy of the German while still at school – the book is short, and at the time I thought that I’d have plenty of time, energy, and desire to read German literature in the original language. I read the first few pages and gave up. But now my German’s better and I do, sometimes, read things in that language now, and even occasionally enjoy doing so. Still, I was in Russia, and my German copy is at home, so I read Der Vorleser in English on my Kindle to save myself time.

The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, a young man who falls in love with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. One day she suddenly disappears, and when he meets her again it is in a courtroom, where she is being tried for working in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This forces Michael to re-evaluate their relationship and confront a kind of complicity for having loved her. As you do. Anyway, the novel forms part of the German postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) that I’ve written about elsewhere. In particular, The Reader raises questions about guilt and responsibility. How far can we blame Hanna for her actions, and all of that.

Well, let’s find out.

The Relationship – First Love

Young Michael Berg, aged just 15, gets hepatitis. He collapses vomiting on the way home from school. Luckily, however, a woman is there to help him. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault”. This woman is Hanna Schmitz, an ideal German beauty and in her thirties. When Michael recovers, after a long time in bed at home, he finds Hanna to thank her for her trouble. Except instead of just thanking her, he falls in love with her. When he sees her changing her stockings he goes red and runs away. But he comes back, and this time helps her move some coal. He gets covered in black dust and she suggests he has a bath. After the bath she puts her hands on his erection and initiates their physical relationship.

Being a modern reader who tends to value consent, this struck me as an inauspicious start to a relationship. Of course, for Michael, it’s great. The two create a ritual of showering and making love, and when he goes back to school it is with newfound confidence, because he now feels comfortable around girls. He starts skipping lessons at school to go and see Hanna, and even plans a biking holiday for them both at Easter, which they both actually end up doing. Everything seems wonderful. Michael even has the cute habit of reading her stories, mostly significant Enlightenment works by stodgy German authors. Anyway, she laps it up.

The Relationship – Dating a (literal) Nazi

Of course, things aren’t as wonderful as they seem. Michael narrates The Reader from far in the future. He already knows what will happen to their relationship, and he struggles to fully enjoy even these recollections, knowing what he eventually does about her. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily”. But even beyond hindsight, there’s a lot going wrong. She “took possession of [him] as a matter of course” during sex (I’m not critiquing anybody’s sexual preferences, but it’s an important point), and seems to view everything as a “power game”. The relationship quickly becomes abusive. Michael starts apologising for things he never did, taking on blame, surrendering. During their bicycle holiday, one morning she even hits him with her belt.

In some way, their relationship plays out in miniature the experience of a nation under fascism. Hanna is controlling, violent, and demands devotion. Michael gives it to her, accepting horrible conditions in the name of love (for the state). She is “single-minded” – there’s a lack of internality to her, something Adorno describes as common to the authoritarian personality type. When Michael thinks about his love for her there are lots of images of submerging, which also connects to fascism’s demands for a loss of self and identification with the state.

Moving On

One day Hanna disappears. Michael sees her while he’s out with his friends, but he doesn’t approach her. The next time he goes to her flat, he finds it empty. The aftermath of the relationship is just as nasty as the thing itself. Michael ends up sleeping with people he doesn’t love; he refuses his dying grandfather’s blessing out of an obnoxious nihilism. Hanna has left him a mess. But he does get into university, and there he studies law. One day he takes part in a seminar which involves going to a local court to watch the trial of some concentration camp guards. And it is here where we, in the second part of The Reader, meet Hanna again.

A Sham of a Court

Hanna, while they were together, never really spoke much about herself. Whenever Michael asked something she’d dismiss him – “the things you ask, kid!” – or else answer with difficulty – “it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers”. Now, at the courtroom, he learns the truth. Hanna had worked at the camps. What was more, while transferring prisoners from one camp to another as the war ended, she and her colleagues through negligence ended up killing almost all of them, for a fire broke out in the church where they were locked up for the night and the guards never opened the doors to free them.

Schlink, a professor of law in real life, introduces the reader to the challenges of retroactive justice. At first, for the students, the idea is an intellectual one. Hanna broke the law of the time, but the law was not applied to her then as a guard – does that mean she should go without punishment in the present? But this theoretical, intellectual problem becomes a personal one when Michael sees her among the defendants. However, even in the court it’s hard to feel we’re dealing with a real trial. Among the lawyers are ex-Nazis, and at one point Hanna rightly asks the judge “so what would you have done?” He can only bluster an answer. The idea that everyone in Germany is complicit in the Nazi atrocities, directly or indirectly, is a one challenging component of some postwar German thought.   

When Hanna is asked why she didn’t let the prisoners go free, she says that it would have been impossible to restore order. Faced with her duty as a guard and her duty as a caring human being, she chose the former. The Reader does engage a little bit with German philosophy, old as well as new. Michael’s father is a professor of the subject, and has written on Kant and Hegel. I’m no expert on Hegel, but I know enough about Kant to say that he placed a huge amount of emphasis on doing one’s duty.

While the categorical imperative probably has an answer to the question of whether we should let prisoners die or fail at our jobs, I think there is a subtext about the inadequacy of philosophy in The Reader. Early on in the novel Michael notes that “behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided”. In reality, neither Hegel nor Kant could create a philosophical system capable of coming to terms with the questions of collective guilt and responsibility that the Holocaust raised. When Michael eventually asks his father for advice about the case, he does not get the answer he wants from him either.

The Reader and the Listener

The twist of The Reader, which is relatively obvious, is that Hanna can’t read. She ended up in court because she ignored court summonses, and she hit Michael on their bike tour because he left her a note she couldn’t understand. In the courtroom the other guards blame her for writing a report on the atrocities, and she accepts responsibility for it. It turns out she’ll do anything to avoid the shame of others learning that she can’t read. In fact, she ended up in the camps because she was avoiding the possibility of promotion at her old job, a promotion that would have exposed her illiteracy.

For Michael, this raises the question of whether her illiteracy could “be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp”. He knows that he could tell the judge, saving her from getting a huge prison sentence. But he hesitates. His father tells him that it’s more important to protect her dignity, her sense of self, than to save her from prison. In the end, Michael watches her get sentenced to a far longer sentence than she perhaps deserved.

After Court

Michael’s life after graduation is a failure. He hides from the world, becoming a professor of legal history. His wife separates from him. But one day he decides to write to Hanna, or rather to read to her. He sends her recordings from various books, so that she can listen and enjoy herself at prison. She eventually learns to read by following in the books his words. Michael’s attitude towards illiteracy in some way reflects the problem of Nazism itself, and the way it took hold over the German people. “Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation”. She has come to think for herself.

The final section of The Reader I shan’t spoil here. It is difficult and morally challenging. We are not asking ourselves “who is to blame”, because that’s a relatively straightforward question. The much harder question The Reader poses is “how much are they to blame?” This is an area of uncertainty, of gradations. I don’t have a clue myself what the answers might be. But Schlink orchestrates his novel carefully, and in doing so he makes sure we ask ourselves what we think. That’s commendable, in its way.

Conclusion

The Reader is on my university reading list for the same reasons it’s often read at German schools: it’s short, it’s morally complex, it’s historically relevant. It’s not unlike those pre-made meals you can buy at the supermarket – ready to eat (or analyse), but there’s something missing when you compare them with other meals (or books). You know, it might just be that it has no soul. I know that sounds ridiculous, especially when we’re talking about a relatively engaging love story with some guilt and redemption sprinkled on top. But what I mean is that I felt the book was too short – its themes, their weight, overwhelmed the human element it tried to explore.

That’s not to say you can’t write about people’s complicity in the German past in a short novel – Grass’s Cat and Mouse does it perfectly well. But the Holocaust is perhaps a little much. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I felt the book was written for its themes, rather than its characters, or the story. And when you have that impression, it’s hard to enjoy it. The characters lose their internal energy; they seem like automatons, just advancing the themes. The feeling is in no way as bad as reading Tolstoy’s later works, but it’s similar. The Reader just feels too simple, too formulaic, in spite of its great themes. It feels like a book you read at school. I enjoyed it at the time. I even went out and bought my girlfriend a copy as soon as I finished. But it’s hardly a book I’ll revisit.