Schlink's The Reader Reading Order

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (1995) — originally Der Vorleser, published in Germany in 1995 and translated into English in 1997, becoming the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list — is the most widely read German novel about the Nazi period since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. Its narrator, Michael Berg, describes two relationships with a tram conductor named Hanna Schmitz: first, when he is fifteen and she is thirty-six, an intense affair in which she asks him to read aloud to her before they make love; second, when he is a young law student and she appears as a defendant in a war crimes trial, having served as an SS guard who selected prisoners for the gas chambers. The novel's central revelation — which the reader understands before Michael does — involves Hanna's literacy, and the question it raises: whether the explanation it provides can also function as mitigation. The Reader is a novel about the relationship between the postwar German generation and its parents' complicity in the Holocaust, about the way that love (or the memory of love) can contaminate moral judgment, and about what it means to feel for a person whose actions cannot be forgiven.