Bernard Schlink's Reader

Sharmila Mukherjee

Jul 29

I had not read Bernard Schlink's "The Reader" but had seen the film of the same name with Kate Winslet's Oscar winning performance (2009) as Hanna Schmidt in it. Consequence of watching the Hollywood production: Remember Kate Winslett's astonishing acting; and the fact, insinuated by the film that literature has redemptive qualities capable of transforming beasts into beauties (in a non-physical and highly moral-compass sense of the term).

But upon reading the novel, on which the film is based, I came out with a more nuanced understanding of Hanna Schmidt and her entrapment in the history of her time. I had to fight hard to evanesce the image of Kate Winslett's face from my mind while getting to know Hanna, for to conflate one with the other is to mis-get much of the life forces that shaped Hanna in the novel.

Hana was shaped by Nazi ideology, at least during the time she was under its spell.

The film (strangely categorized as a "romantic drama"), among things, foregrounds the role that the humanities play in humanizing Hanna. Inspired by the real-life character of the Concentration Camp guard, Ilse Koch, also known as the "Bitch of Buchenwald", Hanna Schmitz is illiterate and hence shut out of the empathy regime that literature putatively fosters. But there is no indication in the novel that Hanna's complicity in the death-by-burning of about 300 Jewish female prisoners, including children, in a camp she was a guard at (during the waning years of Nazism when the Allies were getting an upper hand) is on account of her illiteracy. She was obeying orders blindly and had been conditioned by the Nazi order to objectify Jewish people as non-people. Indeed, she didn't have the intellectual or moral wherewithal to counter the forces of deep propaganda, but would books have provided her with said tools? History shows that illiteracy did not prevent many Germans from refusing to join the Nazi cadre and the mass butchery of innocent people. My take in this matter is the illiterate can be human; the assumption that books are a natural, and sometimes only, catalyst of change from inhumane to humane, is a false one because it excludes critical thinking and the necessary planking of thought and judgement on historical contingency.

After all, the top rung of Nazi leadership was supremely well-read not only in German literature and philosophy, but in world literature, including Vedic/"Hindu" texts by way of German Orientalists and Sanskrit translators. Adolf Hitler was known to be an avid reader himself and is said to have read up all the books in the library of Vienna in his youth. It can be claimed that fascism has complex imbrications with literature.

However, for a moment we can converge on Hanna and the books that she reads while in prison. Michael Berg, the narrator of "The Reader" (both novel and film) makes audio tapes of the Western classics and sends them to Hanna. The prison warden has a deep faith in the panacea-like ability of books to "cure" prisoners of the virus of criminality and encourages the book-reading and the tape-listening. Hanna also campaigns for a prison library with the support of the reform-minded warden.

So, what do these books do to Hanna? Do they plant the seeds of doubt and guilt in her mind about her role as an SS guard? In other words, does the reader become a "better" person by the sheer volume of the reading that she does in prison? It's hard to pinpoint the precise effect books have on Hanna. The novel tells me that Hanna was on the road to "recovery", if Nazism is a contagion, well before she met Michael and made him read and discuss books while making love. In fact, there is a fleeting mention during Hanna's trial that out of all the guards, she was the only guard who would make the sweetest of Jewish prisoners read to her before marching them off to death. Reading was a part of Hanna's life even when she was a Nazi. But that reading--or a keen listening to literature, a ghastly audible, if you will--did not speak to her about the mindless atrocities she was an instrument of. Why? Why didn't the transformative power of reading work on Hanna the Ss guard? Perhaps because, books, like today's technological devices, are value-neutral in essence. It's the impression I get from reading Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Books are containers of meaning, but mere transmission of meaning from book to reader won't have a significant impact on the reader's mind. The mind of the reader has to actively process the meaning thus transmitted.

I am posing a very provisional thought here: Books are not organic transmitters of values, but like technology, books are, what Marshall McLuhan said, in another context, the medium, not strictly the message. Once Guy Montag, the hero of "Fahrenheit 451" processes or interprets the meaning of "There is a time to die," from the Book of the Ecclesiastes to mean what he is experiencing in real life--eye witnessing the bombardment of his beloved city and the decimation of his wife therein--the city and it's corrupt order must die in order for a new order to be born, and his wife, howsoever innocent, is a casualty of the war for greater good, he is an "improved" man, fit to be a part of the inchoate civilization to be led by the "book people" instead of the book burners.

As with Guy Montag, so with Hanna Schmitz. As a prison guard, Hanna would be partial to the beauty of literature, and an imbiber of its aesthetic value. The world she lived in and the world she was entering through the portal of books were divergent worlds. Hanna did not have the interpretive power to connect the two. The Nazi order was way too powerful to allow a deep contemplation of the meaning of what she heard the prisoner-readers read to her. Hanna was an inert listener.

It is as Michael Berg's lover in a changed world order that Hanna begins to acquire interpretive power as Michael reads Homer. I wouldn't call this changed world order as an order of pristine "love" but I would certainly say that it's a world of peace and service. For what is Hanna in the presence of the teen Michael but a server, in service of Michael, bathing him, bestowing the confidence of a post-sexual intimacy young adult. which Michael sorely lacked as a gangly teen in school, dressing him up for occasions? In short, Hanna is helping Michael grow. In this world Hanna flourishes too and makes meaning from listening to Michael read Homer. I have read both Iliad and Odyssey and my takeaway from these epics is that moral choices can be made in cultures and politics of extreme constraint. My belief is that Hanna begins to understand that she could have opened the door to the church in which the female prisoners were trapped and saved them somewhat. Even if the orders were to the contrary.

In prison, Hanna's world is utterly peaceful; she reads without interference by the noise of the outer world. In there, she also dedicates herself to service. Hanna goes on a hunger strike in demand that the state disburse funds to set up a library inside the prison.

But then the question remains, why does Hanna hang herself at the end? The film implies that the cause of Hanna's death is hurt from Michael's indifference to her. But that is clearly challenged by the novel in which "love" is nothing more than a self-serving tool for humans to advance their various degrees of ego and narcissism. Besides, the novel clarifies that Michael's narcissism makes him see Hanna's death as his fault. Michael wallows in the luxury of guilt. However, as the prison warden tells Michael in the novel, Hanna did not die of neglect from an ex-lover. She died of superannuation. She read everything she could, was at extreme peace with the world, and finally arrived at a self-understanding of herself as someone who would not be a good fit in the world outside the prison walls. She had been at peace for 15 years within; the world outside had destroyed her once and Hanna may have been apprehensive of being corrupted again were she to interact with it again.

Immersion into the literary world can do this to us: a feeling of superannuation creeps up on us, (but only if we read and do nothing else besides). Hanna died happy.

Or such is my interpretation of Bernard Schlink's The Reader.

My personal motto: Words come first, then image.

order SS guard As a humanities professor and a passionate reader, myself, I should wear a T-shirt with a logo of "The Reader" to flaunt the value of reading (only certain kinds of books), but the novel and the concomitant history of Nazi perpetration

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