![]() Michael then contemplates the nature of his relationship with Hanna and compares it to the sociopolitical relationship of the post-war German generation to the generation of their parents. When Michael arrives to receive Hanna the prison warden informs him of Hanna's suicide and allows him to enter the prison and view Hanna's small prison cell. On her last night in prison Hanna hangs herself in her jail cell. ![]() Michael obtains an apartment and a job, but he does not communicate with Hanna directly. The prison warden writes to Michael and asks him to become involved in Hanna's release from prison and reintegration into society. ![]() In 1984, after serving a term of 18 years, Hanna's sentence is commuted. He eventually receives a 'thank you' note from Hanna who has used her time in prison to learn to read and write. He forwards the cassette tapes, devoid of any personal communication, to Hanna in prison. Instead of writing her letters, however, he records himself reading aloud from books. Eventually Michael begins to correspond with Hanna in prison. He is largely uninvolved with his family and does not have any strong friendships. He is unable to succeed in a long-term relationship, however, and divorces after only a few years. Michael gets married and fathers a child. During the trial Michael realizes that Hanna is illiterate - and to hide her shame of illiteracy she has made several poor decisions in her life. Hanna, accused of several atrocities, is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. As an SS guard Hanna would have younger, weaker, prisoners read to her before she sent them off to their murder. Through the trial he learns that Hanna was a member of the SS and a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp and another satellite work camp. Michael is stunned when he recognizes one of the accused war criminals is Hanna. One of his law seminars requires him to attend a Nazi war crimes trial, and he is randomly assigned to a particular trial, which begins in the fall of 1966. Michael finishes high school and advances to university where he studies law. Then one day Hanna simply vanishes, and Michael is left feeling guilty and sickened by the strange end of the relationship. When Michael is not having sex with Hanna he attends school, develops friendships and infatuations, and otherwise behaves like a typical teenager. Upon Hanna's request Michael begins to read aloud to her on each of his visits. Michael falls in love with Hanna, but the emotional attachment is not reciprocated. Hanna mentally dominates Michael and controls the relationship. Guileless and unrepentant, she cites her duty to guard the prisoners. Michael begins regularly to visit Hanna at her apartment where they have sex. The motion picture, The Reader, based on Bernhard Schlinks book of the same name. Hanna quickly seduces Michael, and the two characters begin a relationship that lasts for several months. As he is recovering from a prolonged illness, he meets a 38-year-old working-class woman, named Hanna Schmitz. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.In 1958, Michael Berg is a middle-class, 15-year-old living in West Germany. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Such an intervention needs to be understood in relation to the binary thinking that governs the remembrance and construction of Germany’s victims and perpetrators. ![]() This chapter argues that Schlink’s novel actually attempts to intervene critically in these proclivities of German cultural memory. 2 Such an appropriation of victim status is part of a wider discourse of German suffering, prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s, which has often sought to elide the memory of suffering caused by Germans. Bernhard Schlink’s novel of 1995, Der Vorleser (published as The Reader in 1996) 1 has attracted a critical consensus that deems it to have reconfigured the perpetrator generation as victims of Nazism and second generation Germans as victims of Nazism’s legacy. ![]()
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