A summary of Bernhard Schlink’s "The Reader"

"The Reader" by German lawyer Bernhard Schlink is a novel about the guilt, shame, and drama of a generation in postwar Germany. Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg begins an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who is hiding her illiteracy and her service as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. The author wrote the book in the early 1990s and published it in 1995.

The book won Germany’s Hans Fallada Prize in 1998. In 2008, director Stephen Daldry released a film adaptation, for which actress Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her leading role.

Meeting on Bahnhofstrasse and the reading ritual

One October day in 1958, Michael fell ill with jaundice. A wave of nausea overtook the teenager right outside a stranger’s apartment building on Bahnhofstrasse. A stranger helped him wash his hands with cold water at the courtyard faucet, wiped his face with a handkerchief, and walked him to his apartment. Months later, his mother told her son to bring a spring bouquet to his savior.

The apartment smelled of soap. The woman was ironing clothes on the kitchen table. The teenager stood frozen in the hallway doorway, watching every movement of the woman as she pulled stockings onto her pale legs. Embarrassment pushed the visitor out into the street.

A week later, the boy returned. Hannah was working as a tram conductor and was returning from her shift tired. She ordered coal from the basement, laughed at the schoolboy’s dirty face, ran a hot bath, and shared his bed.

They began a romance. A consistent routine emerged before bathing and bedtime. Hannah demanded to be read aloud. The teenager spent hours reading Lessing’s plays, Schiller’s poems, Hemingway’s stories, and chapters of Tolstoy’s epics. She listened avidly, reacting vividly to the bookish dialogue.

Trip and sudden departure

In the spring, the lovers set off on a four-day bicycle trip. The young man booked hotels under the guise of mother and son. He left a morning note with words of love on the nightstand in Amorbach and went out to buy fresh buns.

The woman greeted him with fury. The leather belt cut the young man’s lip. She sobbed in fear, unable to find the piece of paper on the table. The young man meekly took the blame. He was used to giving in at the first sign of her icy wrath.

That summer, the schoolboy began spending time at the city beach with his peers. Hannah was angry at his tardiness. Shame forced the young man to hide the affair from his new friends. One sultry day, the woman appeared in the swimming hole, silently looked at her lover, and disappeared.

The next day, the room on Bahnhofstrasse was empty. At the tram depot, Michael was informed that the employee had refused to train as a tram driver. Hannah had left the city without a trace.

The courtroom and the secrecy of the accused

Eight years later, Michael was studying law. An elderly professor’s seminar was studying Nazi war crimes. The students attended an open trial of the guards of a women’s camp near Krakow. Hanna Schmitz was among the defendants.

The prosecution accused the guards of selecting hundreds of emaciated female prisoners monthly for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The central incident in the trial was a fire in the village church during the winter evacuation. A bomb destroyed the bell tower and the ceiling. The defendants refused to unlock the burning building. Hundreds of trapped prisoners burned to death.

Hannah testified frankly. The judge asked about her reasons for refusing to unlock the doors.

“We were supposed to maintain order,” the defendant replied, confused. “What would you have done in my place?”

The other guards quickly shifted the blame to Schmitz, declaring her the author of the official evacuation report.

The prosecutor demanded a handwriting expert examination. Hannah was terrified of the experts. At that moment, Michael remembered the note in the hotel, his companion’s reluctance to read maps, and his sudden flight from a promotion at the conductor’s station.

She couldn’t write. Hannah chose life imprisonment over the shame of illiteracy. The student didn’t reveal her secret to the court.

Cassettes to prison

Michael married a fellow student, Gertrude. The marriage broke up five years after the birth of their daughter, Julia. The legal historian’s past haunted him.

At night, the scientist began reading his favorite books on tape. Parcels containing tapes of "The Odyssey," poems by Goethe, and prose by Chekhov were regularly sent to the women’s prison. His voice replaced the letters. He added no personal remarks.

In her fourth year, a notebook page arrived with scribbled lines of gratitude. The prisoner learned her letters from library books and tapes of a reader. She mastered reading in her prison cell.

A will in a tin can

After eighteen years of imprisonment, the prison director secured a pardon for the elderly seamstress. Michael agreed to find her housing and work in a tailor shop. He arrived for a visit a week before the woman’s release.

A heavyset, gray-haired woman with deep wrinkles on her cheeks sat on the bench. She exuded the scent of old age. The former lover felt alienated. Hannah’s voice remained the same.

On the morning of liberation, Hannah hanged herself in her cell. On her shelf stood books by Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and memoirs of Auschwitz prisoners.

The woman left behind a tea tin containing her savings. Her will instructed that the money be given to a surviving church prisoner who had written a memoir about the tragedy.

In the fall, the historian flew to New York. The surviving woman hosted him in an apartment near Central Park. She refused to accept the criminal’s money for personal use. They decided to donate the money to the Jewish League for Aid to the Illiterate, leaving a tea tin as a memento of the deceased family. Michael visited Hannah’s grave only once in his life.