"It is definitely not a book about the Holocaust. It is a book about how the second generation attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and the role in it played by their fathers' generation."
Bernhard Schlink
Reading and Misreading The Reader
Abstract.
Bernhard Schlink’s popular novel, The Reader, set in post-World War II Germany, deals with love and remorse, guilt and responsibility. The narrator, as a teenager, falls in love with an older woman who served as a prison camp guard during the war. He relates the events of her life and war crimes trial with understanding for her plight and an inability to condemn her. Some charge this sympathetic portrayal mitigates the guilt of all Nazi collaborators, but this is a misreading of the novel. The Reader tells the story of Germany’s “second generation” coming to terms with their parents’ conduct and their country’s policies during World War II. It is a novel that seeks to uncover and assess guilt rather than to hide or attenuate it.
And have we ever before, in or out of fiction, been asked to pity a direct accomplice to Nazi murder? —Cynthia Ozick
To read the full journal article on JSTOR, click HERE.
Trauma Narrated, Read and (Mis)understood: Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader": "... Irrevocably Complicit in Their Crimes ..."
Abstract:
This article explores the bonds, conflicts and ambivalences the Post-WWII generation experiences with Holocaust perpetrators and by-standers through an analysis of Bernhard Schlink's fictional autobiography The Reader (1995). Using object relations, psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic trauma theory, the essay’s first part examines the adolescent protagonist's family and sexual relationships. Understanding the protagonist's autobiographical narrative as representative of a Post-WWII generational experience, the essay demonstrates the traumatization of a member of this generation by the power mis/abuses and the silence of the preceding generation and traces the consequences of the traumatization through the protagonist's life history. The essay's second part reviews the history of German Holocaust representation and reception in view of the traumatization and silence of the succeeding generations. It places the extraordinary success of Schlink's novel in that historical framework and examines the work's suitability for teaching the Holocaust in the contemporary German school system.
Click HERE for the full article on JSTOR.
Mahlendorf, Ursula R. “Trauma Narrated, Read and (Mis)Understood: Bernhard Schlink's ‘The Reader’: "... Irrevocably Complicit in Their Crimes ...".” Monatshefte, vol. 95, no. 3, 2003, pp. 458–481. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30161685. Accessed 29 May 2020.