The Reader summary

He dreamt of her every night for a week; when he woke, he was drenched in sweat and tormented by shame. Desire to sin, he’d been taught, was as bad as the thing itself. He wanted to atone – and so he went back to Frau Schmitz. 

She didn’t look surprised when she found him waiting in the stairway. She said she was tired and asked him to fetch her some coal from the cellar. When he returned, he looked like a chimney sweep. She burst into laughter and said he couldn’t go home like that. She ran a bath and told him to undress – a matter-of-fact command he obeyed. She beat the coal dust out of his clothes as he lay in the tub. Then she told him to get out and began drying him. She let the towel fall and put her hand on his erection. “That’s why you’re here!” she exclaimed. 

An airplane continues to glide through the air long after its engines cut out. Their relationship was like that: it continued even after its failure. The ritual – the showering, love-making, and reading – went on, but he thought of her less often when he wasn’t with her. And there was always a reason not to tell his friends about her – a betrayal worse than cheating.

And then it was over. Hanna was gone. She left no note, no clue, no forwarding address. She gave her employer enough notice to cover her shift but said no more. It was a mystery, her boss told Michael: she was about to be promoted. 

Hanna gave precise answers to the prosecutor’s questions. She mostly confirmed his outline of events; when she contradicted him, it was to set the record straight, not to defend herself. 

Michael understood the words and followed the legal arguments, but it was like watching a hand pinch an arm that’s been numbed by anesthetic: he felt nothing. The numbness helped, though – he could pretend it was someone else who’d loved and desired Hanna, not him.

The final part of Michael’s memoirs looks back on the time between Hanna’s imprisonment in 1968 and the novel’s present – 1989, the year of Germany’s reunification. 

Michael’s life hasn’t been a happy one. He married Gertrud, a fellow law student, but the marriage faded into amicable indifference: she couldn’t understand what she was failing to give him and he couldn’t explain that it was Hanna that was missing. Affairs came and went. He finished his studies but couldn’t decide what to do next. Both prosecuting and defending seemed overly simplistic; judging, an arrogant pretence at certainty, was even worse. Instead, he found himself a quiet position at a research institute. Gertrud called it an evasion and she was right. Michael had built himself a safe little niche far away from the “real” world.

Hanna was found hanging in her cell on the morning she was due to be released in early 1986.

The prison’s governor told Michael about her life there. It had largely been a purposeful one, she said. Hanna worked hard. Her fellow prisoners respected her: when she intervened in their squabbles, it usually ended on terms acceptable to each party. Rather than take classes, she borrowed the books Michael had read onto his tape recorder and followed the text beneath her fingers. In time, she puzzled out which signs went with which sounds.