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The Reader summary
Bernhard Schlink
A Novel
19 mins
Brief summary
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink delves into the complex relationship between a young boy and an older woman, exploring themes of love, guilt, and post-World War II German history as it grapples with moral and legal consequences.
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The Reader
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Frau Schmitz
“When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis.” Thus begin the memoirs of Michael Berg, a successful – though dissatisfied – 45-year-old legal scholar. It’s an unlikely introduction to the erotically charged account of an affair with an older woman that follows. But it’s ultimately a fitting one: sickness, albeit of the moral kind, haunts Michael’s memories.
Our story starts thirty years earlier, in the fall of 1958, in a German town near the French border still pockmarked by American bombs. Michael was walking home from school one afternoon when he began to feel faint. He collapsed against the crumbling facade of a once-grand townhouse and vomited. When rescue came, it was “almost an assault.” A woman heaved him up, dragged him into the courtyard, and washed him under a pump. He started crying and she became tender, hugging him until he stopped. Then she walked him home.
He spent the next six months in bed. It was spring when he finally left it. His mother sent him back to his rescuer with a bunch of flowers. He climbed the stairs in a hallway that smelled of boiled cabbage and fresh-washed laundry and knocked on the door a neighbor had told him belonged to the woman he’d described. On a brass plaque were the words Frau Schmitz.
He can’t recall what he said to her, but he can still picture the cramped kitchen with its window looking out onto the old train station, now a pile of weed-choked rubble. Frau Schmitz, who he guessed was in her mid-thirties, was ironing bedding. He remembers her ash-blond hair fastened with a clip, her high forehead and cheekbones; her blue eyes and pale arms.
He was about to leave when she stopped him. She needed to run an errand; they could go down together once she’d changed. Her bedroom door was ajar and Michael could see her reflection in a mirror. If he’d been at the swimming pool, where he’d seen naked women often enough, he wouldn’t have stared. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. It wasn’t just her body. Later, he would sometimes ask his girlfriends to put on stockings the way she had, but it was never the same. They teased and performed. What had fascinated him, though, was the absence of seductive intent; the way she’d withdrawn into herself and become entirely oblivious to her surroundings – an invitation, he’d felt, to forget the world entirely.
When she looked up, their eyes met in the mirror. She looked surprised, sceptical, knowing, and reproachful all at once. Michael’s face blushed. He ripped open the door and fled.
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What is The Reader about?
The Reader (1995) tells the story of Michael Berg’s love affair with an older woman, Hanna, and his subsequent discovery that she was a concentration camp guard. How could a woman capable of arousing such passion, warmth, and joy have been complicit in the Holocaust? Michael’s question is the question that haunted an entire generation of Germans born after the war: what drove ordinary men and women to commit such extraordinary horrors?
Who should read The Reader?
- Readers drawn to morally complex love stories
- Anyone interested in postwar German identity
- Fans of introspective literary fiction
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