DALLAS GOETHE CENTER

German Books in English Translation

Presented by Rainer Schulte

The Dallas Goethe Center launches a new feature, German Books in English Translation with occasional reviews of contemporary works that have not yet been translated into English, but are receiving considerable attention in the German Press.

THE READER

By Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink. The Reader. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. New York. Pantheon Books. 1997. 218 pages.

The Reader vividly describes the love affair of Michael Bern, a young boy of fifteen, with Hanna Schmitz, a woman in her thirties. Michael contracts hepatitis, which causes him to vomit frequently on his way home from school. On one of those occasions when his stomach turns again in the middle of the street, a woman, who turns out to be Hanna, comes to his rescue. She takes him into a courtyard and cleans him up. After Michael recovers from his illness, his mother asks him to take some flowers to Hanna. He delivers the flowers and becomes fascinated by this woman, which prompts him to repeat his visits to her apartment. During one of these visits, she asks him to carry a bucket of coal from the basement to her apartment. However, something goes wrong in the basement, and Michael returns to the upstairs apartment with black dust all over his face, his hands, and his clothes, whereupon Hanna insists that Michael take a hot bath. She fills the bathtub, and when Michael gets out of the bathtub she covers his back with a big towel and dries him. Here is how Schlink describes this scene in Hanna's apartment:

She [Hanna] was holding a big towel in her outstretched arms.

"Come!" I [Michael] turned my back as I stood up and climbed out of

the tub. From behind, she wrapped me in the towel from head to foot

and rubbed me dry. Then she let the towel fall to the floor.

I didn't dare move. She came so close to me that I could feel her

breasts against my back and her stomach against my behind. She was

naked too. She put her arms around me, one hand on my chest and

the other on my erection.

"That's why you're here!"

"I..." I didn't know what to say. Not yes, but not no either. I

turned around. I couldn't see much of her, we were standing too close.

But I was overwhelmed by the presence of her naked body. "You're so

beautiful!"

"Come on, kid, what are you talking about!" She laughed and wrapped

her arms around my neck. I put my arms around her too.

I was afraid: of touching, of kissing, afraid I wouldn't please her

or satisfy her. But when we had held each other for a while, when I had

smelled her smell and felt her warmth and her strength, everything fell

into place. I explored her body with my hands and mouth, our mouths

met, and then she was on top of me, looking into my eyes until I came

and closed my eyes tight and tried to control myself and then screamed

so loud that she had to cover my mouth with her hand to smother the sound.

The love relationship between the two intensifies over the weeks and months. Michael begins to read passages from literary works to Hanna, which becomes a ritual before they make love. It is only much later in the novel that Michael discovers that Hanna is illiterate.

Then, one day, Hanna suddenly disappears without leaving any forwarding address. Nobody, including her landlady, knows where she went. Naturally, Michael is devastated by the news and tries to get his own life back together. He studies law, marries, has a daughter, gets a divorce and finally takes a job in a law office. The entire novel becomes a series of episodes that center around the theme of human beings who love each other and then grow apart.

The background of Hanna remains mysterious throughout the novel. Hanna reenters Michael's life one more time. He is the spectator in a court of law in which Hanna is being tried for crimes that she committed under the Nazi regime. The reader never finds out what the exact nature of her crime is, but she is condemned to eighteen years in prison.

While Hanna is in prison, Michael decides to send her tapes with readings from various literary works: Kafka, Homer, Schnitzler, and others. He never writes to her, just sends the tapes to the prison warden to be delivered to Hanna, who, after a while, begins to acknowledge the receipt of these tapes by writing one-sentence thank-you notes to him.

A year before Hanna's release from prison, the warden contacts Michael to see whether he would be willing to help Hanna to be reintegrated into the outside world after her release. Michael, who never did visit Hanna in the prison, goes to visit her after he receives the note from the warden. When he sees Hanna in her cell, he realizes that she has become an old and ugly woman, but he reassures her that he will take care of her upon her release from prison. On the day of her release, Michael travels to the prison, only to find out that Hanna had hung herself in her cell that morning.

Michael learns from the warden that Hanna had spent her time in prison learning how to read. She had borrowed the books that Michael had sent her on tape from the prison library so that she could follow the texts line by line. The novel ends with Hanna's death. Strangely enough, Hanna had accumulated a little money, which the warden gives to Michael. He, in turn, donates the money to the Jewish League Against Illiteracy.

The charm of the novel lies in the detailed description of human situations. The author takes the reader rapidly from one episode to the next, he delights in the small things of life that make people happy, he knows that a moment of happiness is always accompanied by the destruction of that happy moment, and he realizes that we will never be able to explain the motivation of human actions. And all of these episodes are played against the background of the Nazi regime. Schlink, as a novelist, creates enough ambiguous moments in these pages that the readers can fill them out with their own imagination. Schlink's novel intrigues us, the readers, by the lightness of language that uncovers the deeper layers of human existence.

In conclusion, a short comment about the translation of the German title is appropriate. The novel appeared in Germany under the title of "Vorleser," which becomes "The Reader" in the English translation. The association of "Vorleser" creates a clear picture for a German reader: someone is reading a text aloud in front of someone else. However, the English title "The Reader" is less directed in its immediate connotations. It can be a person reading a text alone, it can also be a person reading for someone else. Obviously, there is no exact equivalence for "Vorleser" in English.

Biographical Note:

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor of law at the University of Berlin and a practicing judge, he is also the author of several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

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Updated 12MAR98 2343 CST