74 Claudia Rusch Notes 1 Auf den Analphabetismus von Hanna möchte ich hier nicht gesondert eingehen. Er spielt für den Fortlauf der Handlung ein wichtige Rolle, zudem hat Bernhard Schlink meine ganze kollegiale Solidarität, sind doch fiktionale Figuren so wie sie sind und man kann sie als Schriftsteller längst nicht derart beliebig verändern, wie sich Nicht-Schriftsteller das gern vorstellen. Und doch sehe auch ich, dass Hannas Analphabetismus ein, wie die Schwaben es nennen, “Gschmäckle” hat. Zu leicht lässt er sich symbolisch als Unmündigkeit lesen. Ich weiß nicht, ob Schlink das unterschätzt hat oder ob es ihm gar entgangen ist. Ich weiß nur, dass die Entlastung von NS -Tätern nie sein literarisches Thema war. Ganz im Gegenteil. Ihm deshalb über die Figur der Hanna NS-Verharmlosung vorzuwerfen, finde ich, vorsichtig formuliert, ein wenig wohlfeil. 2 Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis . Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. Works Cited Maffay, Peter. Und es war Sommer . Teldec, 1976. LP � Schlink, Bernhard. Der Vorleser . Zurich: Diogenes, 1997. Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom Denise M. Della Rossa University of Notre Dame Abstract: This chapter explores reasons for teaching Der Vorleser and why it remains relevant to today’s college student. I chose this novel as a way to access German cultural history related to the legacy of the Holocaust. Over the years, the novel has remained appropriate and timely, above all in discussions having to do with taking responsibility for one’s guilt and the theme of moral guilt versus legal guilt. While the novel itself has been faulted on the grounds of “inauthenticity” in regards to the teaching of content knowledge, my pedagogical goals extend beyond this aspect and use the novel as a catalyst for other debates. One significant conversation the novel opens up for the American college classroom is the debate around the memorialization and musealization of the Holocaust. Finally, I believe the subject matter has the potential to foster empathy, care, insight and awareness in students about their world today. Keywords: student, German, history, literature, classroom, teaching My intent in this chapter is not to provide a comprehensive lesson plan with classroom activities and sample essay assignments related to the novel, though I will discuss some syllabus details in context. All of these elements can be found in a variety of teacher’s guides written in German and English for both the high school curriculum and the college classroom. Rather, my intent is to give an impression of why I choose to teach the novel, why it remains relevant to today’s college student, and what the novel’s big idea(s) might be. In the context of a special issue on Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser twenty years after its first publication, this chapter is meant to reflect upon the value and benefit of teaching the novel. Perhaps too often today, such reflections are discussed only in relation to the larger questions of “Why teach literature? ” and “What is its value to undergraduate education? ” 76 Denise M. Della Rossa I first taught Der Vorleser during spring semester 2007 in a college-level survey course on German cultural history. Taught in German, the course is designed as an interdisciplinary cultural studies course to introduce students to various textual genres as well as film, the visual arts and the current research on it. The main goal is for students to become familiar with the basic techniques of approaching and interpreting cultural “artifacts” (literary texts, film, architecture, etc.) within their social, historical, cultural and intellectual contexts, which will prepare them for a wider range of more specialized courses in the department. I often teach the course chronologically backwards with the rationale that the language and historical content of contemporary texts may be more accessible than that of older texts covered over the semester. This means that Der Vorleser has been consistently the first text I teach in the course. Students come to this course generally in their fifth or sixth semester of German and are or intend to be a declared major and minor in our department. Therefore, I assume the students have basic, though often incomplete, historical knowledge about World War II and the Holocaust before they enroll in the class. I spend one class period filling in any gaps they may have in this general knowledge before we begin the novel. Classroom discussion of the novel takes seven class meetings with one class devoted to introductory material, four devoted to the novel, and two follow-up sessions. Other materials we read and discuss include the May 2005 Spiegel article “Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Der Buchhalter von Auschwitz”; a book review by Michael Stolleis in the Frankfurter Allgemeine from 1995 when the novel first came out; and a second Spiegel article from 1999 after Schlink appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the novel topped the New York Times bestseller list. Over the years, the Spiegel interview with Oskar Gröning, the former SS officer and so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” has remained appropriate and timely, above all in discussions having to do with taking responsibility for one’s guilt and the theme of moral guilt versus legal guilt. The inclusion of this interview on the syllabus was particularly topical during the fall 2014 semester when Oskar Gröning was indicted under a new line of German juridical construction allowing that anyone who helped in a death camp function can be accused of being an accessory to murder without evidence of participation in a specific crime. One of the student assignments I require is to write a letter to the editor in response to the original Spiegel interview. Some students choose to respond in the persona of a German, thus demonstrating their understanding of the complexities of contemporary German culture and history from their perspective. Other students, however, respond as themselves, as a young adult American. Both approaches, after all, are the perspectives from which we discuss the legacy of the Holocaust and struggle with the main ideas of the novel. Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom 77 Therefore, both approaches are valid, and I find that students who write from their American perspective tend to exhibit more empathy toward Gröning than those who write from the German perspective. Perhaps this has to do with a certain amount of emotional distance the students feel from the subject matter as Americans and the indifference they hope to display toward Gröning as they think a German would. I chose this novel for my survey course on German literature and culture as a way to access German cultural history having to do with the legacy of the Holocaust. Schlink envisioned a scenario where an accomplice would be tried and convicted years after the end of the war. To a certain extent, both the fictional case of Hanna Schmitz and the factual case of Oskar Gröning engage in the nuances of moral versus legal guilt. For Hanna, her illiteracy is a moral failing, one that transcends in her mind the culpability of her actions. Only after her conviction does she understand the full extent of her legal guilt. Learning to read allows Hanna to understand fully her culpability. Gröning obfuscated his legal guilt by focusing on his moral guilt and relied upon the law’s inability to prosecute him for being a “Schreibtischtäter.” It is the change in the law that allows his prosecution and conviction. I also have students consider the issue of Hanna’s illiteracy because it is what drives the major decisions in her life—the decision to take the job with the SS rather than at Siemens; to refuse the promotion with the streetcar company and leave town, thus abandoning the relationship with Michael; and finally, the decision to admit falsely to writing the final report that condemns her. I ask students to consider that for Hanna illiteracy is a greater shame than having been an SS guard and why that might be so. I also ask them to consider what they would have done with the information regarding Hanna’s illiteracy if they were Michael and what the accompanying moral obligations might be in this case. A further, and perhaps more significant conversation that the novel opens up for classroom discussion for the American reader is the debate around the memorialization and musealization of the Holocaust. Reviews and critical work on the novel mostly skip over the plot line that takes Michael to the lesser-known concentration camp Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace. At this point in the trial proceedings, Michael seeks “reality” in the form of “first-hand knowledge” by visiting the concentration camp in the hope of replacing the “clichés” created by books, photographs, and films his generation had internalized about the Holocaust. Ultimately, he fails in this endeavor of discovering the truth he is looking for. This plot line opens up conversations beyond the novel that have to do with how collective memory and the collective imagination are created and what they do and do not represent. It is indeed unfathomable how contemporary these discussions remain, when each time I teach the novel something new 78 Denise M. Della Rossa and relevant to these discussions is in the news. For example, in 2005 and 2015, the sixtieth and seventieth anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz elicited numerous articles in both the American and German popular press having to do with the role of authenticity in relationship to preservation and conservation of Germany’s National Socialist past. Similarly, the theft in 2009 of Auschwitz’s infamous sign, “Arbeit macht frei,” which was later recovered in three pieces, evoked further debate in this realm (see Connelly 2015 and Kolbert). The sign was rewelded in place, but showed the scars of the weld, and museum authorities believed this new history overwhelmed the sign’s initial meaning. Therefore, they decided to replace the original sign with a replica which set off a debate regarding to what extent authenticity trumps representation of “how it was.” I randomly assigned students to the two sides of the debate and had them defend their point of view. Clearly, this issue is not one addressed in the novel, but one relevant to the larger conversation of the Holocaust legacy. While the novel itself has been faulted on the grounds of “inauthenticity” in regards to the teaching of content knowledge about the Holocaust and the implausibility of a Hanna Schmidt, my pedagogical goals extend beyond this aspect and use the novel as a catalyst for other debates. Other topics of interest to students related to the fictional Michael’s visit to Struthof-Natzweiler have questioned what we think about a city or village making money from what has become Nazi tourism or why one would visit a site of trauma. We ask ourselves: Where does education end and tourism begin? Why does it matter? What are a visitor’s expectations and what effect does such a visit have on the viewer? The examples above illustrate just two of the larger discussions that have emerged in my classroom from teaching Schlink’s novel, but that reach beyond the scope of second-generation German guilt. Through such exercises I hope that my students are not, to use Michael’s word, “numb” to the images of the past but are able to engage with similar ideas, debates, and questions relevant to their own lives. In April 2011 Schlink was invited by the university’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies to be the inaugural speaker for the Nanovic Forum. This three-day event was heavily promoted across campus and in the local community. It included a reading from Schlink’s then recent novel, The Weekend (2010), a screening of the film The Reader (2008) at the campus movie theater introduced by Schlink, two classroom visits, and a lecture at the Notre Dame Law School titled, “Proportionality in Constitutional Law: Why Everywhere but Here? ” Clearly, the goal was to reach as broad an audience as possible from across campus and beyond. The Nanovic Institute’s website states that the Forum was established to “deepen Notre Dame’s rich tradition of connections to Europe by bringing prominent figures to campus in a wide range of fields to explore, discuss, and debate the most pressing questions about Europe today.” Other Forum invitees since 2011 have been Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Horst Koehler, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany; Wolfgang Herrmann, President of the Technical University of Munich; and Hanna Suchocka, former Prime Minister of Poland and former Ambassador of Poland to the Holy See. The inclusion of Schlink among these academics and politicians who write and speak to a larger audience than their professional colleagues says something about his public stature beyond that of bestselling fiction writer and why I continue to include his novel on my syllabus. As is often repeated in essays, news releases, and publicity materials about Schlink, he began his career as a professor of public law and legal philosophy and served as a judge at a German constitutional law court before publishing his first detective novels in the late 1980s. He has retired from Humboldt University in Berlin, is a visiting professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City and continues to publish both scholarly and belletristic work. No doubt, his fiction is shaped noticeably by having lived in the world of jurisprudence and its mentality; furthermore, these experiences give credence to his public lectures as well as to the subject matter of his fiction. Ultimately, the inclusion of Schlink among the Nanovic Forum speakers tells us Schlink’s training and professional appointments situate him as an important voice for his country and his generation. I would argue that his activities as writer and public speaker also give others, Germans and non-Germans alike, access to a place to talk about what Germans face because of their specific history. The spring semester Schlink was on campus, a colleague teaching a lecture course on modern German history invited him to her class for an informal question and answer session. As preparation, she had the students read his Guilt About the Past (2009), a collection of essays based upon lectures he held at Oxford University in 2008. This colleague in the history department described the classroom visit as an opportunity for the students to interact with a person who had been discussed as a historical figure, as an eyewitness to the second-generation experience. It was different from a video or interacting with the historical documents. It was a historical activity in which the source responded to student inquiry and gave candid responses. In other words, there was an immediacy to the experience that is rarely achieved in the classroom. In reply to my question about what she thought the takeaway was for her students, my colleague believed the students wanted to understand what it is like to be a German today and wanted to empathize with what it must be like to actively care for a past Schlink’s generation had nothing to do with. I was struck particularly by my colleague’s choice of words, “to actively care for a past”; immediately, the terms “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” and “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung” came to mind. Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom 79 80 Denise M. Della Rossa Historians and Germanists alike struggle with how to best translate these terms into English, and whether one chooses “mastering,” “overcoming,” “coming to terms with,” or “working through” the past, or any of its related connotations, there always seems to be something missing that doesn’t quite represent the nuance of the original German. I believe my colleague and her students have discovered another fitting translation that embraces the dynamic nature of Germans’ relationship to their history, and they were able to do so through their encounters with a text and with its author in person. Another related and valuable teaching opportunity came during spring semester 2015 when I arranged a campus screening of Olivier Morel’s film documentary, Germany as told by writers Christoph Hein, Wladimir Kaminer, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, & Bernhard Schlink ( ARTE France, 2014). 1 I was teaching Kaminer and Ӧzdamar in a seminar that semester and had taught Der Vorleser in the prior semester. As the promotional materials state, “Morel’s film focuses on how renowned contemporary writers living in Germany and writing in German are interacting with the country’s history in their personal, public, and creative lives.” The four authors interviewed for the documentary come from very different backgrounds (East Germany, Russia, Turkey, and West Germany) and “bear witness to a new way of depicting Germany’s trauma in modern literature and culture” in different ways. To this end, the director retreats completely into the background and allows the authors to speak for themselves about the role of their art. In the film, Schlink states that, “the role of literature is to help us to handle the horror, the pain, the grief that in their formless nature can be overwhelming. It can give them form and make them more bearable. More bearable because they have a form that we can confront and come to grips with, to which we can react.” I would argue that the teaching of literature further fulfills such goals. For the opening shot for the documentary, Morel chose Berlin’s U-Bahn stop Savignyplatz at night with a voice-over of Schlink reading from Der Vorleser � The selection Schlink reads describes how and why the main character, Michael Berg, began to record his reading aloud of the literary classics on a cassette tape recorder for Hanna. As the voice-over continues, the scene switches from Savignyplatz to a close-up of a cassette recorder circa 1970. As Schlink reads the following closing line to the chapter, “When the text was finished, I waited a moment, closed the book, and pressed the stop button,” the film viewer sees a finger press the “stop” button on the cassette recorder, then Schlink snaps his novel shut. This is an effective establishing shot that was not lost on my students who had read the novel. One student commented in his written response in German to the film that he felt this opening sequence “elevated the discourse immediately to a higher level because the sequence transcended the standard conversation [about the role of literature] and grasped more important questions about how literature can be an archive of the past.” The student further explained, “this documentary also becomes an archive of the past and is represented metaphorically by the cassette recorder of the opening shots.” The same student went on to say that he understood the documentary to be about more than literature or history, or literature and history; it seemed to him that Germans can engage with their past, but they cannot resolve it nor extinguish it. This comment echoes the remarks made by the students in the history class as they struggled to empathize with Schlink’s generation. I have found that the issues and discussions raised by Der Vorleser are quite compelling for the students if they are guided through the complexities of the historical background. In this chapter I have tried to argue for the value of not just reading, but also thinking, discussing, and writing about one novel. Often enough, the study of literature in today’s college curriculum is questioned. The most common response has something to do with how it fosters critical thinking skills. But what do we mean when we give that “easy” answer? I think it has to do with engaging students in a time and place not theirs. If students can learn to think critically about the events and characters in a novel, the themes it presents, the author’s purpose in writing it, and the ways it fits into a certain time period, then they may be able to understand existing and potential problems and solutions in their own time and place. In other words, what they learn is transferrable and they can also analyze an event’s impact on society and the ways it compares and contrasts with other contexts. As a class we can bring the questions we raise into our lives and relate the intent of a text to our own lives. Recently, as events in U. S. cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston have exploded, I have envied my colleagues in History, American Studies, and Africana Studies who seemingly have easier access through their discipline to conversations with their students about ways in which Americans can and should take responsibility for our past. I ask myself, how can I engage with my students about these events as they dominate the headlines? If I am doing my job as an educator, the discussions I foster in the classroom will inspire my students to reflect upon the ways in which our conversations relate to their own lives. Teaching a novel such as Der Vorleser , a text that presents the ambiguities, debates, and polemics of history and culture in one particular context, can provide that access. Consequently, the inherent cultural and historical distance of the students to the subject matter has the potential to foster empathy, care, insight and awareness in them today. Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom 81