The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority William Collins Donahue � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 103 Bernhard Schlink: Lawyer, Writer, Public Intellectual: A Bio-Bibliography Heidi Madden � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 125 Autorenverzeichnis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 150 Introduction 3 Introduction: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and the Problem of German Victimhood Eva B. Revesz Denison University This special issue grew out of a 2015 MLA panel commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Bernhard Schlink’s runaway bestseller Der Vorleser ( The Reader), 1 a novel whose controversial reception has only increased over the years. 2 When it first appeared in 1995 (the English translation by Carol Brown Janeway was published in 1997), it was for the most part enthusiastically received. Critics lauded Schlink’s refreshingly unconventional and thought-provoking Holocaust narrative from a second-generation perspective, particularly his bold attempt to conflate victim and perpetrator in the character of the illiterate former SS guard Hanna Schmitz. Yet a number of critical ( Jewish) voices—among them Omer Bartov, Eva Hoffmann, and Cynthia Ozick—raised serious concerns from the start not only regarding Schlink’s portrayal of a Holocaust perpetrator as victim, but also regarding his use of illiteracy as an alibi for Hanna’s criminal behavior in a nation that was, after all, highly educated. Especially Bartov and Ozick accused the author of pursuing a revisionist agenda in his attempt to minimize German guilt. As this more critical reception of The Reader has gained momentum (especially in the United States and Great Britain in contrast to its more commendatory reception in Germany), so too have defenders of the novel on both sides of the Atlantic responded in a number of ways. These advocates generally concede that its apologetic portrayal of a Nazi perpetrator may indeed have problematic aspects, but warn that the author Bernhard Schlink must not be confused with his (supposedly) unreliable narrator Michael Berg, through whose sole perspective the character of Hanna is presented to the reader. The controversy surrounding the novel persists to the present day; indeed, as a number of the contributions to this issue demonstrate—foremost among them the response by William Collins Donahue to the articles in this issue—it is far from resolved. 3 Despite its controversial reception, the novel has nonetheless been canonized as an important contribution to the problem of Vergangenheitsbewältigung . A 4 Eva B. Revesz staple in the German school curriculum, it also continues to be required reading for the A-exam in Great Britain and remains a perennial favorite on American college campuses as well. Narrated in sparse, matter-of-fact prose, it tells in flashback form the “coming of age” story of a German teenager born at the end of World War II —one of the “Nachgeborenen,” to use the Brechtian idiom—who becomes entangled in the guilt of his parents’ generation by falling in love with a former Nazi perpetrator. Michael Berg comes to represent an entire generation condemned to being “schuldlos schuldig,” as the expression has it. This no doubt struck a cord with German readers whose national identity has been stigmatized by the Holocaust and who welcomed a more apologetic approach to German guilt that permits finally laying the Holocaust to rest. That The Reader would go on to capture the international market as well relies on a general sense of Holocaust exhaustion worldwide, as William Collins Donahue has argued in his groundbreaking monograph on Schlink’s work, to which I shall return shortly. The immense international success of Der Vorleser , translated at last count into fifty languages and adopted in 2008 into an Academy Award-winning Hollywood film, did not take its author entirely by surprise. Bernhard Schlink had anticipated the novel’s appeal especially for an American audience, having had his eye on Hollywood from the start. At the time a judge and law professor who had published a couple of moderately successful detective novels when Der Vorleser appeared in 1995, Schlink intended to have the book published initially in English in an attempt to attract the Hollywood film studios. According to Spiegel correspondent Volker Hage in an article for which he interviewed the author, Schlink even went so far as to commission a translation for which he paid out of pocket (242). Yet his agent at Diogenes convinced him to publish the novel in German first, also negotiating the film rights for the book under condition that a Hollywood producer would be given preference. In 1998, Miramax bought the film rights, nearly a year before the novel topped The New York Times bestseller list in March of 1999, for which Schlink had especially Oprah Winfrey to thank after she selected it for her popular book club and invited him as a guest onto her show. 4 Schlink’s initial plan to publish his novel in English first was also influenced by his apprehension about being misunderstood in Germany: “Schlink fürchtete, in Deutschland falsch verstanden zu werden” (Hage 242). Labeling his book as “politically incorrect” himself, Schlink feared that it might appeal to a “wrong” readership. That Schlink concedes his novel might attract readers with a revisionist agenda (“der befürchtete Zuspruch von falscher Seite” 242) is certainly telling, since this is precisely the concern that the novel has raised, particularly among Jewish reviewers. The vexing irony of Schlink’s prediction Introduction 5 lies in the novel’s enthusiastic reception especially in Germany by readers and critics alike, raising the question of the extent to which a latent revisionism isn’t more mainstream than Schlink himself anticipated. By distancing himself from such an agenda while at once adhering to it, Schlink uses a strategy similar to the one that William Collins Donahue has worked out as the narrative ploy upon which Der Vorleser relies by simultaneously having it both ways. In Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Their Films , 5 an in-depth analysis of the novel alongside Schlink’s detective novels, Donahue demonstrates that the moral ambiguity that commentators have lauded does not complicate the question of guilt so much as reduce it to an either-or binary by rendering Michael and Hanna as guilty and not guilty at once. Not only is Hanna in Donahue’s reading a “garden variety perpetrator at best” (86); by continuously drawing an analogy between Michael’s suffering and the suffering of Hanna’s Jewish victims, the novel serves up “soothing fictions” (51) that invite the reader to identify with Michael’s predicament and to share his apologetic view of Hanna, thus making Michael a much more reliable narrator than defenders of the novel contend. The novel’s apparent moral ambiguity and complexity by co-opting a “gray zone” 6 falls flat, according to Donahue, since it serves to obfuscate a necessary distinction between German perpetrators and Jewish victims. As a case in point, Hanna’s employment as an SS guard in Auschwitz is rendered analogous to the “choiceless choices” of the Jewish victims, brought to a climax when Hanna asks the judge in helpless desperation what he would have done in her place. Hanna thus becomes a mere victim of circumstance whom the reader is invited to pity. Her victimhood becomes analogous—both implicitly and explicitly—to that of Holocaust victims. Pointing out how problematic such a conflation of victim and perpetrator is, Donahue quotes from Schlink’s Gedanken über das Schreiben : Deutsche waren Täter und Opfer […] Juden haben gelitten und waren beteiligt. Was bewährt und beschützt werden muß, ist […] ein vollständiges Bild, in dem die Beteiligung der Judenräte nicht verschwiegen, sondern erklärt wird, in dem die Tatsache, dass Deutsche Opfer waren, nicht für Relativierungen und Entschuldigungen benutzt wird. (“Taking Jewish Cover” 252) As Donahue emphasizes, “sermonizing on the fact of ‘involvement’ on both sides can easily become a comforting platitude—one that quickly devolves into the commonplace: ‘There was good and evil on both sides’” (252). The extent to which Schlink comes to the defense of Germans while blaming Jews for their own fate is not only exemplified in the quotation from Gedanken über das Schreiben above, but also in the following claim from his essay on “Kollektivschuld? ”: 6 Eva B. Revesz Aber zu verstehen ist vieles. Sogar in der kaltschnäuzig gestellten Frage, die ich in einer einschlägigen Diskussion gehört habe, liegt etwas, das verstanden werden kann und sogar muss: Wenn nicht einmal die Juden Widerstand und Widerspruch geleistet haben, obwohl es um ihr eigenes Leben ging und sie nichts mehr zu verlieren hatten, warum sollten dann die Deutschen widerstehen und widersprechen, die selbst gar nicht betroffen und bedroht waren? (31) Schlink’s admonishment as to what we need to understand about the Holocaust is problematic on a number of levels. First, to claim that the Jews offered no resistance (to say nothing of “Widerspruch,” a particularly elastic term) 7 misrepresents historical fact, since Jewish resistance took many forms. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents over a hundred armed Jewish ghetto uprisings, and the many Jews who joined partisan resistance fighters numbered in the thousands (“Jewish Resistance”). Second, the very assumption that the Jews were responsible for their own fate rests on a misapprehension of the entirely hopeless situation in which they found themselves, leading to the very common form of passive resistance by committing suicide. While the number of suicides is impossible to document (given their high number in the concentration camps), most of the Jewish ghetto uprisings were effectively suicide missions. As is well known, any overt resistance was brutally crushed, exemplified by the Warsaw ghetto uprising, in which over 13,000 Jews were killed. In effect, the Jews had little means of successful resistance, being for the most part dependent on the help of non-Jews for their survival. Yet another questionable aspect of Schlink’s comment is the clear distinction he draws between Germans and Jews, which tends to obscure the fact that Jews were Germans as well, thus emphasizing the “otherness” of the Jews and their perceived difference from “the Germans.” To justify the failure of the majority of non-Jewish Germans in coming to the aid of their fellow countrymen and women in their time of need by saying they were not personally “betroffen” or “bedroht” betrays an indifference and lack of empathy towards their lot, an indifference (that Hanna arguably also shares) that went a long way to making the Holocaust possible. 8 But to reduce my discussion of Schlink’s novel to the question of the extent to which he himself pursues a revisionist agenda does not do justice to the many other issues he raises and the ways in which he ingeniously combines these with Germany’s troubled past. Schlink himself has emphasized that he has not written a novel about the Holocaust (albeit in the wake of criticism about his problematic Holocaust portrayal) so much as a novel about the vicissitudes of intergenerational love and the shame and troubling silence that result from them. The novel is foremost an illicit love story—indeed, a love story that Schlink explicitly places into the tradition of the German bourgeois Introduction 7 tragedy through its intertextual references to the two most celebrated bourgeois tragedies in German literature, Lessing’s Emilia Galotti and Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe . Schlink thereby invites the reader to view the relationship between Michael and Hanna also in terms of their class difference—an aspect that Daldry’s cinematic adaptation clearly foregrounds 9 —which becomes just one more socially unacceptable aspect of the relationship between them. But the provocative taboo Schlink breaks with his novel has more to do with the age difference between the couple and the criminal context into which this relationship is ultimately placed. Strictly speaking, Michael becomes a victim of statutory rape. By switching the gender in the usual case of a female minor seduced by an older man, Schlink exposes the double standard regarding this transgression when it comes to the gender of the seduced. Here again, one can detect Schlink’s strategy of having it both ways by making Michael both indulged and victimized at once. For despite the sense of bravado and feelings of confidence that Michael Berg’s sexual initiation through the much older Hanna give him, there is no question that Schlink wants the reader to feel that Michael was also a victim of Hanna’s abuse, and not only in the scene in which she violently lashes out at him. As Ursula Mahlendorf and others have already pointed out, Hanna dominates the relationship in disturbing ways through the sexual and emotional power she exercises over him. The much more sensitive Berg, it is clearly implied, walks away from the relationship as psychologically damaged even before he finds out about Hanna’s Nazi past. This is brought to a point when he confesses to the affair for the first time to the surviving daughter of the church fire at the very end of the novel when in New York. The daughter replies, “Was ist diese Frau brutal gewesen,” upon hearing about the affair, asking him if he believes she was aware of “what” she had done to him. Michael responds by evoking Hanna’s Holocaust victims, “Jedenfalls wußte sie, was sie anderen im Lager und auf dem Marsch angetan hat” (202). Michael is, in other words, also a victim of Hanna’s immoral and criminal conduct, if to a lesser degree, and it is important for the reconciliatory logic of the novel that a Jewish Holocaust survivor validate Michael’s suffering and victimhood, as Ernestine Schlant first pointed out (216) and as Donahue’s in-depth analysis has reinforced. There can, in other words, be little question that both Hanna and Michael are configured as victims in Schlink’s novel and that their victimhood parallels that of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. The Reader may therefore be seen as representative of an increasing tendency in German literature since 1990 towards a “normalization” of the Holocaust that scholars such as Bill Niven have already identified. 10 This shift in German memory politics has resulted from a climate of reconciliation between the GDR and the FRG that has noticeably moved the discourse around Germans as perpetrators more towards a preoccupation with 8 Eva B. Revesz Germans as victims. This can be seen in the number of books that have been published since reunification that deal with German suffering, primarily with the victims of Allied bombings, of which W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) and Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (2002) are two prominent examples. Indeed, an Allied bombing also plays a pivotal role in The Reader since the main crime for which Hanna receives a life sentence is hardly a crime usually associated with perpetrator guilt but rather with the war crimes of the Allies. For Hanna’s failure to open the church doors that led the victims trapped inside to burn alive as a result of the bombing also clearly alludes to the tens of thousands of Germans who died in similar firestorms in the final phase of the war. Through the juxtaposition of her passive crime with the active crime of the Allies—hers is, after all, a crime of omission rather than a crime of aggression—Schlink further mitigates Hanna’s guilt. Whether one finds such a downplay of guilt in the portrayal of a Holocaust perpetrator questionable or not, one cannot deny that Schlink’s novel raises provocative questions. These he purposefully leaves unanswered: about the nature of guilt (moral, legal, and even existential guilt); about the nature of love and shame; about gender and class relations; about intergenerational conflict— questions that reach beyond the scope of the Holocaust per se and give the novel its universal appeal. And in the context of intellectual European history, it also raises complex questions regarding the extent to which the celebrated values of the Enlightenment, foremost among them the faith placed in Bildung , hold true. It remains, after all, ambiguous as to whether Hanna’s newfound ability to read actually fosters a moral consciousness . In short, the richness of The Reader as a literary text cannot be denied, as also evidenced by the scores of academic articles the novel has elicited. The MLA International Bibliography lists ninety entries to date, which also include close to a dozen teaching guides. To those will now be added the articles in this special issue, some of which take up the debate surrounding the novel while others open up new lines of inquiry. Thus, no matter what stance one takes on the novel (and on Schlink’s work as a whole), it is Schlink’s grappling with controversial issues and purposefully provocative positions that account for The Reader ’s enduring legacy. And as a book focused on the nature of reading—indeed, on the benefit and purpose of reading literary classics—its popularity, especially in the literature classroom, is not in danger of waning soon. It is as such well on the way to becoming a literary classic. The articles in this issue are conceived for the most part as shorter position papers in order to accommodate a wide range of responses (to Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser / The Reader as well as other works by Schlink). In the opening article, “Schlink’s Vorleser , Süskind’s Parfum , and the Concept of Global Literature,” Judith Ryan compares these two international bestsellers in terms Introduction 9 of changing tastes in global readership. She contends that the postmodern complexities that made Süskind’s 1985 novel such a success are largely absent in Schlink’s 1995 novel, which is much less demanding of its readers. This trend towards a more popular readership is also reflected in the different ways in which each novel deals with the Holocaust, Das Parfum engaging Holocaust themes on a much more complex aesthetic and allegorical level than does Schlink’s realistic text. The second paper by Robert Holub, “Germans as Victims in 1995,” begins with an overview of German victimhood in German postwar literature and film in order to contextualize the changing landscape in the representation of German victimization since 1990. What is new since reunification is not a focus on German victimhood as such, he argues, but the direct juxtaposition of German victims with victims of the Holocaust. Comparing Der Vorleser with two other novels published in 1995 that juxtapose German and Jewish victimhood in different ways, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fraudulent memoir Fragments and Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King) , Holub demonstrates how all three are part of a new trend towards a normalization of the Holocaust by including German suffering as part of a more complex historical totality. In the third paper, “Bernhard Schlink and the Legacies of 1968,” Bill Niven sees Der Vorleser as setting the tone for Schlink’s later oeuvre insofar as it already touches on Schlink’s coming to terms with Nazism in a much broader context, namely as a reaction to inadequacies of the 1968 student movement. By analyzing three recent works that each have a negatively conceived former 68er as their protagonist—the short story “Zuckererbsen” from his collection Liebesfluchten and the two novels Das Wochenende and Die Frau auf der Treppe — Niven demonstrates how Schlink ultimately discredits the moral grandstanding of the 1968 generation. Brad Prager argues convincingly in the next article, “Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader ,” that the courtroom in which Hanna Schmitz is tried is modeled on the courtroom of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-65. By having Hanna’s trial devolve much like the Frankfurt Trials into a media circus, Prager poses the provocative question of whether Daldry (and indirectly Schlink) are thereby disparaging the proceedings and thus challenging the very legitimacy of Holocaust trials on the whole. The fifth paper by Gary L. Baker, “Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser : A Problem for Democracy , ” places the lack of emotion pervading the novel into a political context. He argues that Michael’s and Hanna’s absence of feeling represents the emotional coldness of the entire German nation and stands at odds with the establishment of a true democratic society in the new Federal Republic. 10 Eva B. Revesz Claudia Rusch’s enthusiastic defense of Der Vorleser in her essay “Dem Unaussprechlichen begegnen” is based on what she sees as a misapprehension on the part of Schlink’s critics as to what the novel is actually about. It is not a Holocaust novel; it is a novel about coming to terms with having loved a Nazi perpetrator that raises a number of complex questions regarding the nature of shame, guilt, and intergenerational love, questions that purposefully remain unanswered. The next two contributions deal with Schlink’s novel as a pedagogical tool. Denise M. Della Rossa’s article, “ Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom” discusses the use of the novel in the American college classroom. She argues for its continued relevance not only for German Studies but also beyond a specifically German context. Sascha Feuchert and Björn Bergmann’s contribution, “Immer wieder Schlink? Der Vorleser und seine literaturdidaktischen Chancen und Grenzen im Spiegel schulischer Praxis in Deutschland,” affirms the canonical status of Der Vorleser in German high schools, and examines two recently published teaching guides (Lehrbücher). Heidi Madden concludes the issue with the first comprehensive primary bibliography of Bernhard Schlink, including also his legal writings. Her contribution substantiates that Schlink is without question one of the most prolific writers in Germany today. The penultimate contribution by William Collins Donahue is conceived as a response to the articles in this issue, taking on predominantly those who argue for reading Michael Berg as an “unreliable narrator” ( Judith Ryan and Sascha Feuchert / Björn Bergmann). He also counters Claudia Rusch’s enthusiastic apologia of Schlink’s novel by demonstrating how Schlink invites the kind of subtle conflation of author and protagonist that she falls prey to herself. Both Rusch’s contribution and that of Feuchert and Bergmann also dismiss viewing Der Vorleser as a Holocaust novel (following here the lead of the author himself). Donahue finds this position especially troubling since it takes any problematic features in its Holocaust portrayal automatically off the table. Donahue’s contribution demonstrates how charged the debate around The Reader remains to the present day. Indeed, this issue shows us that the jury is still out on the merits and demerits of Schlink’s novel and the extent to which the novel employs a questionable instrumentalization of the Holocaust. Hence the controversy surrounding the novel continues. Notes 1 The special session at the 2015 MLA convention in Vancouver that I organized was entitled, like this introduction, “Bernhard Schlink’s The Read- Introduction 11 er and the Problem of German Victimhood.” It included Robert Holub, Gary L. Baker, and William Donahue. 2 For an excellent overview of the novel’s controversial reception, see Hall. 3 Those that view Michael Berg as an unreliable narrator include Bill Niven, Stanley Corngold, Daniel Reynolds, and Kim Worthington; in this issue, Judith Ryan and Sascha Feuchert / Björn Bergmann promote this reading; Bill Donahue analyses the pitfalls of the “unreliable narrator” approach to the novel in his response to Ryan and Feuchert / Bergmann. 4 The novel first reached The New York Times paperback bestseller list in mid-March 1999 after Schlink appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in late February. It was listed as #1 for four weeks straight from March 21 to April 11� 5 The book appeared in German translation in 2013 under the title, Holocaust Lite: Bernhard Schlinks ‘ NS -Romane’ und ihre Verfilmungen. 6 “The Gray Zone” is a chapter in Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved that deals with the morally compromised situation in which many Jewish victims found themselves, such as those in the Sonderkommando who worked the crematoria or the Judenrat leaders in the ghettoes, and who made it impossible for Levi to pass judgment on them. 7 I thank Bill Donahue for pointing out how vague Schlink’s use of the term “Widerspruch” (meaning any kind of dissent or opposition) in this context is; he has made the same point about Schlink’s repeated use of the vague term “Beteiligung” in his German Quarterly forum discussion “Taking Jewish Cover.” 8 That the general population of certain countries came to the aid of their fellow Jewish countrymen and women while other countries did not is substantiated in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. As she reports, especially Bulgaria and Denmark resisted the Nazis when it came to their “Jewish problem”. Indeed, Arendt reports that not a single Jew was deported from Bulgaria thanks to the non-Jewish Bulgarians’ sabotage of Nazi deportation orders by holding outright demonstrations against them in the streets (Arendt 188). This was certainly not the case among the German populace. 9 See Brad Prager’s contribution to this issue. 10 See especially the introduction to his edited volume, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany. Taberner and Berger advance a similar argument in their introduction to Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic.