eJournals Colloquia Germanica 48/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Taking the articles published in this special issue as its point of departure, this essay explores the enduring appeal of Schlink’s Der Vorleser / The Reader, offering a broad, synthetic overview of recurrent controversies in Schlink scholarship. Two issues are central: the use of history and the status of the narrator. Critics – including those published here—have proposed conflicting perspectives on these key matters, often with an eye to invalidating (rather than engaging with) the approaches of their opponents, and sometimes in ways that unwittingly diminish their own agenda. The depiction of the perpetrator Hanna is an equally salient issue, one that is intimately bound up with the other two. This essay concludes by viewing the notably “weak” portrayal of Hanna as a principle reason for the novel’s (and even more so, the film’s) broad cultural resonance.
2015
481-2

The Schlink Abides

2015
William Collins Donahue
102 Sascha Feuchert und Björn Bergmann Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust Lite: Bernhard Schlinks “ NS -Romane” und ihre Verfilmungen . Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011. Erpel, Simone, et al., eds. Im Gefolge der SS : Aufseherinnen des Frauen- KZ Ravensbrück : Begleitband zur Ausstellung . Berlin: Metropol, 2007. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . London: Vintage, 2003� Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium - gymnasiale Oberstufe / die Gesamtschule - gymnasiale Oberstufe / das Fachgymnasium / das Abendgymnasium / das Kolleg. Deutsch � Ed. Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium, 2009. Web. 27 May 2015. Lehrplan Deutsch. Gymnasialer Bildungsgang. Jahrgangsstufen 5G bis 9G und gymnasiale Oberstufe . Ed. Hessisches Kultusministerium, 2010. Web. 10 May 2015. Moritz, Rainer. “Die Liebe zur Aufseherin.” Die Weltwoche 23 Nov. 1995. Mullan, John. How Novels Work . Oxford: Oxford UP , 2006. Praxis Sprache 10: Sachsen . Ed. Wolfgang Menzel. Braunschweig: Westermann, 2015. Schlink, Bernhard. “Gegen die Verlorenheit an sich selbst.” Interview by Tilmann Krause. Die Welt 3 April 1999. Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995. Winkler, Willi. “Vorlesen, Duschen, Durcharbeiten.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 30 March 2002, Literatur: 16. The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 103 The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority William Collins Donahue University of Notre Dame Abstract: Taking the articles published in this special issue as its point of departure, this essay explores the enduring appeal of Schlink’s Der Vorleser / The Reader , offering a broad, synthetic overview of recurrent controversies in Schlink scholarship . Two issues are central: the use of history and the status of the narrator. Critics—including those published here—have proposed conflicting perspectives on these key matters, often with an eye to invalidating (rather than engaging with) the approaches of their opponents, and sometimes in ways that unwittingly diminish their own agenda. The depiction of the perpetrator Hanna is an equally salient issue, one that is intimately bound up with the other two. This essay concludes by viewing the notably “weak” portrayal of Hanna as a principle reason for the novel’s (and even more so, the film’s) broad cultural resonance. Keywords: Holocaust, German, generation, perpetrator, suffering “I even feel sorry for the young Germans because to be maybe sons or daughters of killers is different than to be sons and daughters of the victims. And I felt sorry for them. I still do. […] [But] the Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.” —Elie Wiesel (1988) This year Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997; Der Vorleser, 1995) turns twenty-one, a milestone in a cultural trajectory that shows no sign of weakening or waning. In these pages The Reader is examined as a specimen of phenomenally successful “global literature” (Ryan), considered as a symptom of arrested postwar political development (Baker); and as an exemplar of the “compet- 104 William Collins Donahue ing victimhood” discourse, which while rooted in the specifics of post-unification Germany, possesses wider-ranging implications (Holub). This accessibly written novel—often cited as a representative of the “new readability” (“neue Lesbarkeit”)—is firmly entrenched in the German school curriculum (Feuchert and Bergmann); has spawned a lengthy (and growing) roster of publications, including a daunting list of teacher and study guides in Germany (Madden); and has inspired a film that is only now beginning to be contextualized within the broader scope of Holocaust-themed cinema (Prager). Niven widens the aperture even further by linking the novel to prominent debates on the legacy of the student movement and that of the so-called 1968ers, while Della Rossa’s pedagogical engagement with The Reader illustrates the enthusiasm with which Schlink has been adopted throughout German Studies curricula in North American higher education. Finally, Claudia Rusch’s full-throated encomium illuminates, I would argue, the manner in which The Reader continues to speak not only to Schlink’s own “second generation,” but also to the “Nachborenen” (those born after) more generally. Collectively, the diverse contributions gathered in this issue confirm nothing if not the irrefutable fact of Schlink’s continuing relevance. This in itself is worthy of notice. For this special issue is not a top-down affair that creates the very trend it then purports to examine. We are by no means a partisan literary guild (the “Schlink-Gesellschaft,” if you will) that in marking an anniversary seeks to enshrine or promote its pet author. On the contrary, Schlink—and The Reader in particular—are part and parcel of a powerful popular culture phenomenon (illustrated most memorably by the author’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show) that operates within but also far beyond the bounds of academic discourse. It is worth keeping this fact in mind as we ponder The Reader at twenty-one, because a large part of our task must surely be to take stock of a cultural event, rather than merely to offer additional individual “readings” of our own. Or, if we do the latter, we ought to do so in light of the former. It is for this reason that I advocate a broadly phenomenological approach as articulated by Rita Felski in The Uses of Literature , namely one that does not check hermeneutic credos at the door, but rather takes account, to the extent possible, of the full extent of readerly experience. 1 We need to ask not only, how should the novel be read, but also how is it being received and why? Does this vary from place to place and time to time? The approach I am recommending is a manner of critique in dialogue with reception criticism, capaciously conceived. In the spirit of the 2014 MLA panel that gave birth to this special issue, I will confine myself essentially to the role of respondent to the work of others. Rather than provide a full précis and response to each piece, I have, as a rule, The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 105 chosen topics that cut across a number of articles, providing a more synoptic and comprehensive treatment of salient issues that might interest anyone currently engaged with Schlink and The Reader . One consequence of this is that I will leave many good things unaddressed, on the assumption that readers will be more interested in a divergent point of view and a contest of ideas than in me repeating points with which I already agree. I should confess to a certain “history” with Schlink and The Reader. With publications stretching back to 2001, and culminating in a book with the impertinent title Holocaust Lite: Schlinks “ NS -Romane” und ihre Verfilmungen (2011), I have been a vocal and persistent critic. I cannot summarize here what has taken me far too many pages to argue elsewhere. 2 However, one way of expressing a core concern that animates many others would be this: Like Claudia Rusch, I fully endorse Schlink’s stated effort to give voice to the second generation’s pain and suffering that derives from having loved Nazi perpetrators. That is indeed a profound dilemma that has both historical and supra-historical (dare I say universal? ) dimensions. And perhaps one should simply pause here to credit the novel for its soaring ambition, generous posture, and gutsy gamble. For the mere articulation of that problem in the mid-1990s, when the public commemoration of the Holocaust was approaching its crescendo, is itself an accomplishment one can celebrate. I take issue, rather, with the execution of a plan that in the end actually sells the second generation short. Because of the numerous ways in which The Reader obscures, shrouds and diminishes the Holocaust, and even seeks to explain away the careers of certain Nazi perpetrators, we cannot fully appreciate the pain of second-generation Germans who loved actual perpetrators. To have loved an air-brushed, second-tier, once-removed, and obviously handicapped Hanna is thus, as Feuchert and Bergmann argue (and recall they are determined promoters of the novel! ), to have been infatuated with a fictional persona who bears little resemblance to any of the historical actors in the Nazi genocide. Hanna is indeed so “cleaned up” that teachers bent on teaching this book under the rubric of “Zeitgeschichte” (contemporary history)—a justification frequently given for including it in the school curriculum—immediately run into problems; for students will quickly discover that this fictional figure has little to do with any of the historical female defendants in war crimes trials. In this context, Wiesel’s term, “the embellishment of the tragedy” (which he contrasts with “the denial of tragedy”), comes to mind. 3 An upgraded, or “embellished” Hanna, whose guilt is systematically mitigated, moderated, and mystified, simply cannot adequately sponsor the second generation’s real and undisputed agony of having loved an unvarnished perpetrator. 106 William Collins Donahue And yet the very same reception data I otherwise find so compelling poses a problem for my own hypothesis. What are we then to make of the ongoing investment of secondand third-generation Germans—here illustrated by Claudia Rusch’s very personal essay—in the novel? I can posit the novel’s inadequate answer to its own question all I want, but I still need to account for the documented affirmation and resonance experienced by so many (German) readers. I try to do just that in my response to Rusch, below, by reflecting on the way in which an “embellished” perpetrator figure such as Hanna precisely suits the needs of those who believe—or want to believe—that their beloved culprit was never much of one in the first place. Like no other author I know of, Schlink really does allow us to have it both ways; indeed this bimodal quality structures the entire novel. 4 And what if we take the “pain of loving a perpetrator” theme metaphorically, as Schlink has urged us to do, particular in the aftermath of the novel’s international success and its transformation into a Hollywood film? Leaving aside the specifics of Nazi Germany, as Ryan rightly suspects many younger and non-German readers will do, we are perhaps liberated from the stern claims of history that have bedeviled the reception of this book, and that I too will treat once more below. Yet even if we for the time being agree to unfetter the novel from its historical moorings, we may find ourselves dissatisfied. For the novel’s premise is only dulled—also on the metaphorical reading—if the perpetrator is muted and the crime is muffled. The ongoing attraction of the theme itself, however, is undeniable. For we clearly remain fascinated by the possibility of deep emotional attachment (whether our own or someone else’s) to unadorned criminals, as is clear—to give just two examples—from the critically-acclaimed film Dead Man Walking (1995) , or the phenomenally popular HBO series The Sopranos (1999-2007). When, however, a perpetrator’s agency is repeatedly questioned, her de facto responsibility diluted by the patent criminality of others, and the proximity of victims is diminished or downplayed, then one might begin to ask if the premise has been properly formulated in the first place. Maybe it is not, after all, so much about loving an undisputed criminal as it is about ratcheting down the criminality to a more loveable level. Hanna’s function would thus be to denote the culprit (an Auschwitz guard) while systematically draining that signifier of its murderous sting. She can in this way embody a distinctly less “willing” accessory to murder—to echo Goldhagen’s controversial study—while rendering the bulk of the parent generation much less guilty in comparison. For if she can stand as a credible concentration camp guard, as the novel’s exposition requires, the other mere “Mitläufer” (fellow travelers) who played no such particular roles look a lot better in contrast. As a nominal, and yet undisputed criminal, Hanna adds a new twist to the “lov- The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 107 ing the perpetrator” trope, one that draws the reader’s attention away from the beloved and focuses it instead upon the lover. This systematic diversion of attention away from the criminal and the crime means that the competing victimhood to which Robert Holub refers—the proximate depiction of German and Jewish victims of wartime suffering—never really comes to the fore in The Reader . As Omer Bartov pointed out long ago, Jews make a very meager appearance in the novel in the first place, and when they do, it is only to serve as an occasion for depicting the suffering of Germans. What is more, the particular pain of Michael and Hanna has little to do with the wartime misery and death occasioned by Allied bombing and the Soviet advance from the east, which is what we normally mean by German wartime suffering. Not to belittle Michael’s genuine woes, but second-generation discomfort, or even psychological deformation, was never part of the “competing victimhood” debate. Holub is right to point out, however, that it is not the depiction of Germans as victims per se that is new in the mid-1990s, but rather the bold juxtaposition of German and Jewish suffering. The issue is, as Holub says, very much one of proximity and juxtaposition. But what does this mean practically? I don’t think the other examples he gives (Ransmayr and Wilkormirski) make the point: the former is a patently allohistorical revenge fantasy (as Gavriel Rosenfeld would say) in which Germans (or Austrians in this case) are punished for the Holocaust. But this is an invented fiction—like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds— that every reader recognizes as such. And the latter is in any case a book about Jewish suffering—however fraudulent it may have turned out to be under the rubric of memoir. The pain experienced by Grosjean (the author’s real name) as a postwar displaced person emerges only much later once the book is proven to be counterfeit, and is in any case never seriously pitted against the suffering of the Jews within the diegesis. The challenge Holub faces in illustrating the point is, however, itself telling. I would suggest that the “proximity” at issue was rarely given within a single work of art after all, and much more an attribute of public discourse and debate. At any rate, The Reader proves the opposite point. It is an exemplar of the inverse relationship of proximate German and Jewish wartime suffering: one of the two, I contend, is typically held to a minimum, so that the other can make its case. Jewish suffering is muted—not out of ill will, we can safely assume— but because it would be difficult, if not impossible, to properly frame Michael’s pain if it were depicted cheek by jowl with a vivid, thick description of beatings and murders of Jewish inmates. He would look like a whiner. Schlink is simply caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of victimhood writing in Germany in the mid-1990s. His good will is surely not at issue. 108 William Collins Donahue Yet some have acted as if it were. Or more precisely, in order to ward off any criticism of the novel along the lines that it perhaps evokes the Holocaust only to skirt it, or gloss over it, some critics rush in to assure us that such a reading of the novel is ipso facto impossible because of the impeccable credentials of its author. Schlink himself responded this way to me once in an email after having read some of my publications. He referred me to his legal scholarship and to his essays written as a public intellectual: there I would find incontrovertible proof, he averred, of his actual sentiments with regard to “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (confronting the Nazi past). Yet as Wimsatt and Beardsley argued many years ago in “The Intentional Fallacy,” works of art, no matter how “rooted” within the consciousness of a particular author, or embedded in a particular historical context, take on a life of their own. And given the multiple, proliferating contexts of global literature, this is all the more likely to be true. To be fair, a novel’s reception can both realize and distort the work. The point, however, is that these are typically complicated, tangled matters that need to be argued , and cannot be settled merely by vouching for the author’s good character. Yet while critics are quick to cry foul when Schlink is too easily identified with Berg (I shall return to the author / narrator distinction below), they don’t always object to citing the master to rule certain kinds of criticisms out of court. We encounter this ploy in an endnote to Rusch’s essay, where she admits to some misgivings about the characterization of Hanna as illiterate—a critique, by the way, that prominent American Jews lodged forcefully following the U. S. publication of the novel in 1997. Trying to square the circle, Rusch concludes: “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.” What requires more careful formulation, I would submit, is the short-circuited attribution of criticism to the author rather than to the work. In concluding her essay, Rusch imagines a group of benighted critics who only seek simple answers from the novel—critics, in other words, who not only misread The Reader, but literature in general. “Ich glaube,” she writes, “ein gutes Buch hat keine Antworten. Ein gutes Buch stellt die richtigen Fragen. Dieses Buch tut es. Nach den Antworten müssen wir schon selbst suchen. Das kann uns niemand abnehmen.” But this is surely to misstate the problem, for the issue is rather the freedom of critics to raise “richtige Fragen” without immediately reducing this to a question of the author’s character or political sentiments. For to claim that rendering Hanna illiterate is problematic—with all that that entails regarding mitigating circumstances and impaired judgment—is clearly at least an argu- The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 109 able point that deserves a thoughtful response, rather than an ad hominem rebuke. In the abstract, none of these literary-critical issues seems very controversial. Though we might find it a bit too dogmatically stated (for clearly an author’s biography matters in some way), who would seriously dispute the New Critics’ fundamental objection to the overreliance on authorial intention? But when it comes to the Holocaust, things can heat up rather quickly. Even after the air has largely gone out of the Holocaust “bubble,” that emotionally charged two decades of discourse that followed upon German Unification, 5 the issue retains its power to inflame and outrage, such that a criticism of a novel for its wan treatment of the Holocaust can very much feel like an indictment of the author. It would be naïve to dismiss this phenomenon on the grounds that it simply shouldn’t be the case—that would be to mistake “is” for “should.” How do we move forward? One way of dealing with this whole assemblage of critique centering on the novel’s depiction of the Holocaust is simply to deny that it is a Holocaust novel in the first place. Feuchert and Bergmann do just this. It is both a strikingly economical and breathtaking dismissal: Vielleicht beginnt man eine solche Auseinandersetzung am besten mit der Feststellung, was Der Vorleser nicht ist, trotz gegenteiliger Einordnungen in manchen Lektürehilfen und Curricula (etwa Niedersachsen): nämlich ein Roman über den Holocaust. Dabei liegt es schon bei einer oberflächlichen Lektüre auf der Hand: Der Roman erzählt nichts, was den Leser verstehen lassen würde, wie der Holocaust wirklich zustande kam oder organisiert wurde, er erzählt nicht einmal etwas über eine tatsächliche oder glaubwürdige Täterfigur: Eine Analphabetin hätte schlichtweg nicht die - wenn auch nur kurze - Ausbildung zur Aufseherin in einem Konzentrationslager absolvieren können, sie wäre vermutlich noch nicht einmal soweit gekommen. If this strikes one as reasonable, it is because it is mostly true: the novel doesn’t explain either the genesis or the execution of the Holocaust, and neither does it provide a credible perpetrator figure in the persona of Hanna Schmitz. But is the conclusion justified? Are these valid criteria for Holocaust literature or more apposite of Holocaust historiography? Are they theoretically rigorous criteria for any genre? One could go through a catalogue of Holocaust “classics” and disqualify one after the other based on this dubious measuring stick. The Diary of Anne Frank would be the first to go, and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben would be soon to follow, as it does not meet all of these standards. 6 If we restrict ourselves to non-documentary literature, Sophie’s Choice would not pass muster, and neither would George Tabori’s controversial The Cannibals be admissible despite 110 William Collins Donahue the fact that it is frequently taken to be an “Auschwitz play”. Even Elie Wiesel’s classic Night does not meet these criteria. 7 The “utility” of this broadly dismissive gesture is suspicious: soon there is hardly a book left standing, save, perhaps, Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung— but even it fails to satisfy critics on the matter of the Holocaust’s genesis. With one fell swoop, then, the field is cleared of any challenge that arises out of a concern for the quality and scope of such literature, because it simply doesn’t exist in the first place. But do we really want to agree to this? Shall we in fact assent to the exclusion of The Reader from the realm of Holocaust literature—a novel that features an Auschwitz camp guard, places her trial at its center, presents a death march at a key point in the narration, has the young protagonist visit a former camp, and deploys Jewish survivors, albeit sparsely? To understand the extent to which this claim is in fact a wholesale dismissal of critical responses to The Reader, one needs to recall that the principal objection throughout has been made precisely on these grounds: it falls short, even by its own internal standards, in its depiction of the Holocaust. Admittedly, one can in response raise a host of questions: How shall we define the novel’s “internal standards,” and who is to decide the proper depiction of the Holocaust? Is the critic preempting the novelist’s freedom by expressing prescriptive criteria, by “imposing” them from without? All these are legitimate ways to initiate a debate that would of course elicit a chain of further responses and objections. This is in fact exactly the debate that has been carried out in much of the secondary literature. What is not acceptable, I would argue, is to set aside the discussion entirely, to declare it out of bounds and inadmissible—the result of a careless reading of the novel. It is surprising that the pedagogues Feuchert and Bergmann should make such an argument because one of the leading reasons teachers recommend The Reader for inclusion in the school curriculum in the first place is that it offers an effective vehicle for teaching about the Nazi period, and makes possible for young Germans a less fraught relationship to their very troubled past. Such are the stated justifications one finds in not a few of the teaching guides (Lehrwerke) that Feuchert and Bergmann treat otherwise so fastidiously. In abandoning this rationale, they are left with only a wan notion of “literarisches Lernen” (literary learning), a set of close reading and narratological skills which, while valuable as a school lesson, could be easily gleaned from virtually any piece of literature. They don’t answer the question, why The Reader? Underlying many of the articles in this volume—and many more again in the secondary literature—is a pervasive unease about Hanna, significantly greater, I would say, than about Michael. 8 Even Feuchert and Bergmann pause to chide one of the teaching guides they examine for minimalizing Hanna’s guilt and The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 111 trivializing her role as a perpetrator. But what does it matter, if the novel is, as they say, so evidently not a Holocaust novel? What is more, when the authors focus on Michael’s trauma, we observe a renewed (and unavoidable) interest in Hanna precisely in her historical role as a camp guard at Auschwitz: “Er will und muss mit seiner Erzählung auch noch das Trauma seines Lebens bewältigen: Immerhin hat er eine Frau geliebt, die in Auschwitz tätig war. Hanna ist und bleibt eine Mörderin—und Michael muss damit zurechtkommen, dass er sie eine Zeitlang zum Zentrum seines Lebens gemacht hat.” For Rusch as well, Hanna matters in her function as a “Täterin,” but really only insofar as she explains Michael’s emotional challenges. Beyond this role as his antagonist we are not permitted to inquire—or to critique: “Alles andere bewegt sich gedanklich an diesem Text völlig vorbei. Tut mir leid.” Thus does Rush disallow further discussion. On closer inspection, we observe in both cases a fundamental ambivalence about history: up to a point permissible, even necessary, but then no further. The Holocaust may be used as exposition, as a way of “motivating” the protagonist’s dilemma; but when critics come with unwelcome questions about the nature and quality of that Holocaust depiction, the discussion is summarily shut down and ruled irrelevant. Does The Reader deploy a questionable instrumentalization of the Holocaust, as I have suggested? The question deserves a hearing, even—or especially—if the larger question of fiction’s relationship to history remains a difficult and contested matter that can probably not be decided in the abstract. Declaring The Reader not a Holocaust novel, however, simply cuts it off from some of the richest criticism the novel has ever generated—most of it very positive, by the way. And it is a dubious strategy, intended or not, for disengaging from some of the most compelling arguments in favor of its deployment in the schools. Yet the anxiety about Hanna persists. And one way of explaining (away) her questionable characterization is to say that Michael Berg—our narrator and fictional memoirist—is getting things wrong all along because he is after all an “inadequate narrator” (“inadäquater Erzähler,” as Feuchert and Bergmann phrase it). Ryan thinks that an appreciation of Berg as an “unreliable” narrator opens up the novel to higher levels of contemplation, and she may be right. Schlink himself has staked out a similar position about his narrator, emphasizing, particularly in light of pointed critique of the novel, that we are after all meant to be critical of Berg, not his witless ally. All well and good, as far as it goes. However, there is a way in which this observation about narrative perspective, a fundamental point, after all, becomes a plenipotentiary instrument for preemptively ridding the novel of virtually any criticism. Everything we learn stems from the consciousness of our fictional memoirist, so once we “discover” his limitations, we can chalk up the respective blemish to his misperception. 112 William Collins Donahue Poor Michael Berg has been so traumatized by Hanna that he really doesn’t know which end is up. The “unreliable narrator” argument has indeed proven remarkably useful in the armory of those who wish to defend the novel against all comers. For the answer is always the same; one needn’t even consider the objection for very long: the narrator, not the novelist, got it wrong! Feuchert and Bergmann even deploy this point to explain the novel’s entire reception history: early critics were too enthusiastic because they simply didn’t appreciate Berg’s “inadequacy,” and later critics were far too negative because (in another twist of the same argument) they confused Berg with Schlink—in other words, they now recognized the narrator’s flaws, but mistakenly equated them with those of the author. Unfortunately, this is a version of the novel’s reception history that holds no water—unless, of course, one wishes to believe that a critic as astute as George Steiner liked the novel because he didn’t realize that the narrator is somewhat blinkered by his distressing experiences. First, Hanna cannot be explained away by a troubled Berg. Her controversial conception as illiterate stems from the author, and is not attributable to the narrator’s perceptual distortion. And we might note in passing that the concern about Berg systematically soft-pedalling Hanna’s Nazi past also runs into a limit: the central court scene, for example, introduces an array of data that we simply cannot dismiss at will, as if Berg were perhaps hallucinating. A careful weighing of perspective is surely crucial throughout, but when we are told that Hanna is certainly “much worse” than she appears to Berg (as Feuchert and Bergmann contend), then we can only turn to history to provide the corrective to Berg’s jaundiced perspective. (How else would we know she is worse? No other character in the novel can do it, because the entire work is filtered through his consciousness, and thus susceptible to the same “modifications” in perspective.) In other words, the novel is asking—even requiring—the reader to assess its central figure against the backdrop of the historical record of Nazism and the Holocaust. History is back. Second, and more fundamentally, an unreliable narrator is not the simple or monolithic thing many critics take it to be. As Rita Felski has recently argued (in both The Limits of Critique and Uses of Literature ), reliability and identification are far more complex phenomena than we have taken them to be. Allying ourselves with fictional figures is, she argues, much more provisional, intermittent, and context-dependent. 9 Contradictions, limitations, and outright flaws do not ipso facto render a character unreliable. On the contrary, these very weaknesses may render him / her more endearing and in a sense more trustworthy, especially when the figure (like Michael Berg) is so incessantly self-aware and confesses them to us so obsessively. Perspectivized narration is a fact of literary life. But it is rarely the simple catch-all answer that some defenders of The Reader have The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 113 taken it to be. Noticing perspective is the beginning—not the culmination—of the work of interpretation. So let us begin by looking at three examples taken from the contributors to this volume, all sophisticated readers who, I think we can assume, are wellversed in the basics of narratology. The first, Judith Ryan, may seem counter-intuitive in this context, because in suggesting a bimodal reading of the novel (dividing up readers into the less-critical “absorptive” and more reflective “critical” groups), she advances the “unreliable narrator” as the key to a higher-level appreciation of the novel—sounding on this point very much like Feuchert and Bergmann. Her notion of a novel with ascending levels of difficulty begins with a simple love story (level one), and continues in level two as a kind of detective story; both are popular genres. At these relatively simple stages (which constitute the majority of the novel! ), she seems willing to accept the fact that Berg functions as a consonant narrator, that is, we tend to “absorb” his point of view. 10 At any rate, she approvingly quotes Joseph Metz, who comments upon The Reader ’s “smoothly accessible realist prose, stereotypical scenarios, and power to seduce readers into passively accepting the values and viewpoints of the hypnotic narrator [Michael] Berg.” The portal to the third level is the appreciation of Berg as unreliable; and here properly alert readers, we are told, engage in the critical distancing necessary for the appreciation of abstract issues that make their appearance in this final section. Ryan selects two incidents that allegedly highlight our need to “take an increasingly skeptical position toward what Michael writes.” They are the shoplifting scene (when as a fifteen-year-old he pilfers a negligee to impress Hanna), and the moment a few years later when, as a young law student, he fails to reveal Hanna’s illiteracy to the judge. 11 But do these events necessarily undermine his trustworthiness? I would venture that most readers do not even recall the shoplifting episode, and that those who do are willing to chalk it up as a youthful indiscretion, or to place the responsibility for this entire phase of the relationship on the much older Hanna. And as for his moral “failure” to speak openly to the judge in the war crimes trial: however much we may want him to be a hero, do we really judge him for this—especially when his (philosophy professor) father instructs him, drawing upon the authority of Kant, that it would actually be wrong to do so? That doing so would violate Hanna’s agency, freedom, and dignity? Is it not in fact possible that these errors of judgment, especially when they are openly admitted and accompanied by much breast-beating, actually endear the narrator to the reader even more? And insofar as these very failures are portrayed as the price he has paid for his ill-fated love affair, is it not possible that he emerges with his authority not only intact but perhaps enhanced? 114 William Collins Donahue Robert Holub seems to think so. Speaking of the way in which both Michael and Hanna are figured as victims, he observes: “As readers we are drawn into identification with the unfortunate fate of Michael and Hanna, made to feel empathy with their suffering and misfortune. They are flawed protagonists, to be sure, but they are therefore all the more human for their deficiencies.” The empathy of which Holub speaks saturates the narrative, one could argue, neutralizing our urge to correct, judge, or condemn. Proximity and consonance predominate over moments of outrage and distance. But one needn’t see this exclusively through the lens of the Frankfurt School—e.g., that it is sleek realism or cheap emotionalism that dupes its readers into unthinking narrative alliances. On the contrary, Berg is a highly reflective and self-accusing narrator who guides us through the labyrinthine struggles of second-generation Germans. Ryan herself observes: “Michael’s reflections on law and its place in society are shown through a widened aperture that allows for complex historical and moral considerations. Michael is acutely aware of the ambiguities that arise in such reflections, and through them, the reader is brought to a third level of abstraction.” Here we see that the obverse of Ryan’s initial contention is also true: an opening to the novel’s complexity not by way of distancing ourselves from the narrator, but by following his very lead. As a writer of fiction and memoir herself, Claudia Rusch clearly needs no lessons on the distinction between author and narrator. It is nevertheless instructive to see how readily she merges the person of narrator and author in order to enhance the former’s authority. In an attempt to demonstrate that Hanna serves as an indisputable exemplar of the perpetrator generation (a debatable claim, to be sure), Rusch exuberantly asserts: “Auch hier interpretiere ich nicht, das führt Schlink selbst so aus: ‘Wie sollte es ein Trost sein, dass mein Leiden an meiner Liebe zu Hanna in gewisser Weise das Schicksal meiner Generation, das deutsche Schicksal war, dem ich mich nur schlechter entziehen, das ich nur schlechter überspielen konnte als die anderen.’ Das deutsche Schicksal , wie er es nennt, ist der Angelpunkt dieses Romans.” Setting aside Rusch’s understanding of Hanna for the time being, I would note that in the preceding sentence she employs the word “er” to refer both to Michael and Schlink. Not only do we miss the critical distancing that an unreliable narrator would seem to call for; on the contrary, the narrator’s reliability is placed beyond question: “[…] hier interpretiere ich nicht, das führt Schlink selbst so aus”! If a student in a literature course were to offer this defense, we might raise our eyebrows. Yet the honest sentiment is compelling and clearly central to our concern. An accomplished young author who has taken the time to read Schlink’s novel twice trumpets her conviction that the book’s central theme is the plight of the children and grandchildren of those complicit in Nazism: “In meinen Au- The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 115 gen ist Der Vorleser […] ein wirklich großartiges Buch über die Hilflosigkeit und Scham der Kinder mit der Schuld umzugehen, die ihre Eltern als Angehörige der ‘Generation der Täter, Zu- und Wegseher, Tolerierer und Akzeptierer’ auf sich geladen haben.” In focusing so relentlessly upon the “Nachgeborenen,” Rusch echoes the warm and enthusiastic welcome the book received in the German press after its initial publication. Numerous critics—presumably not all benighted in matters of narratology—sided unabashedly with Michael as spokesman for their generation, as representative of their pain. And they did it not because they had no other differences with Michael. I assume that they don’t endorse shoplifting, that their better selves would speak up for an illiterate in a more timely fashion, and that they would want the protagonist to do the same. The point, rather, is that when novels create distances from their narrator, they do so in all kinds of ways, many of which have local and particular consequences for the narration, while others are more global. Clearly, The Reader is no exception. Michael himself is his own most intense critic—and in some this might incite distrust and distance, whereas others will find it admirably circumspect. These moments have to be identified, worked out, weighed one against another—in other words, interpreted . What is not persuasive is to cite narratology in the abstract, as a kind of metacritique that prophylactically invalidates any objection that might be lodged against the novel. 12 What is more: the novel’s form needs to be considered in this discussion. While Feuchert and Bergmann rightly draw our attention to Michael’s rhetorical misgivings about his writing, they don’t attend to the fact that he has achieved what he once doubted was possible: the completion of a rounded, meditative, self-critical memoir. The voice that introduces the book is that of the thoughtful fifty-something jurist who is clearly no longer the hormone-driven teen and young man guilty of various missteps and misjudgments. While perhaps scarred for life in certain ways, he has also come of age and expresses confidence in his story. The memoir itself, the very act of coherent narration is coded as a sign of healing. This of course doesn’t mean that readers will, or should, read with Michael in every instance. But first, we will want to identify which Michael is speaking, and from what perspective. The larger point remains this: narratology needs to be applied both holistically and differentially, that is, to the myriad textual features that create authority, as well as to those that undermine it. It cannot be evoked in lieu of the hard work of interpretation. That this has not been the case in the history of The Reader is due to the fact that the “unreliable narrator” thesis was polemically charged from the outset. It has been championed by Schlink himself, as I’ve noted, and not coincidentally invoked widely in the wake of the second wave of largely negative criticism to which Feuchert and Bergmann refer at the close of their article. 13 In other words, 116 William Collins Donahue the suspicious “discovery” of Michael as inadequate or unreliable was from the beginning—with some exceptions, to be sure—a way of defending Schlink and the novel against strong criticism of Hanna; of justifying the novel’s soft-pedaling of the Holocaust; and of explaining Berg’s one-sided dismissal of the socalled ’68ers. But this polemic is by no means necessary. Paying close attention to narrative voice, reliability, and identification should not be the province of any one particular critical camp. All readers need to do so. One of the most powerful and lasting ways of effectively merging The Reader ’s author and narrator, even if it flies in the face of narratological niceties, has been to show how the two think alike. On a number of diverse issues, the jurists have remarkably similar views, and perhaps nowhere more strikingly than on the topic of so-called ’68ers, those activist students who so angrily rejected their Nazi fathers. In his contribution to this issue, Bill Niven argues that “Schlink’s oeuvre […] needs to be understood as a deconstruction and indeed discrediting of 1968 and its representatives, and as preparing the way for an approach to the Nazi past freed from what is clearly perceived as a moral censure,” noting in particular the manner in which Schlink and Michael Berg are of one mind on this matter. 14 Niven carefully works out Schlink’s consistently critical attitude toward “1968” as it appears in a number of fictional and non-fictional texts over the years. 15 Readers can hardly avoid the conclusion that Michael Berg, who in a central passage of The Reader memorably denounces the ’68ers for their undifferentiated condemnation of the parent generation, functions himself as a kind of de facto mouthpiece for the author. 16 If this results in shoring up Michael Berg as an authority figure, rather than a patently unreliable narrator, we should not be surprised. But there is more to suggest that Berg’s trajectory may be one toward greater maturity and perhaps even wisdom. Gary Baker makes an intriguing connection between the characters’ notable “coolness” and the requirements for a successful democracy: drawing on the work of the Mitscherlichs, Helmut Lethen, Hannah Arendt and others, he moves the discussion as no one yet has into the realm of postwar German politics. Baker discusses the period of the Economic Miracle as a time of stunted emotional expression that inhibits the development of character traits necessary to the unfolding of a true democracy: “The national fate,” he observes, “lies in not being capable of shedding these anti-democratic propensities that marked German social interactions.” Baker’s argument possesses cogency for the period of the 1950s, 1960s, and perhaps well into the 1970s when many prominent leftists were skeptical as to the quality of West German democracy. But when one reflects on the fact that Germany—certainly by the time of the novel’s publication in 1995—had since emerged as a model European democracy, one can only conclude that the malady of emotional ar- The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 117 rested development that Baker diagnoses has, accordingly, also somehow been overcome. The perhaps inadvertent implication of Baker’s argument is thus to focus our attention upon the Michael Berg of the mid-1990s, an accomplished man now in his mid-fifties, the narrator of the frame narrative who, scarred though he may still be, has nevertheless substantially surmounted the challenges of his harrowing youth. He may not be emotionally effusive, but he is clearly emotionally engaged, a point the film pursues to perhaps kitschy ends. 17 Ironically, there was a time when allying Schlink with his narrator was good business. During the initial phase of the book’s phenomenal success (and, to be honest, long thereafter), one found frequent references to the striking parallels in the biographies of the two: both jurists, both members of the second generation, both deeply pained by attachments to the perpetrator generation. And both involved in some kind of steamy youthful affair with an ex-Nazi? Not alone among interviewers, Oprah Winfrey did not hesitate to pose the question (from which, however, Schlink coyly demurred). Paratextual materials, marketing strategies, talk-show appearances, teachers’ guides—all of these have played a huge role in elevating the novel to a global success, and in framing the terms of its reception. And one common thread throughout has been the often explicit assertion that Michael Berg is the author’s benevolent alter ego. If we wish to understand these broad social meanings, which of course do not respect all the rigors of narratology, we will want to augment our strictly textual and normative readings with data from this larger realm. The “Schlink phenomenon” has the The Reader at its core, but it is surely larger than the novel itself. “Hanna in Frankfurt? ”, Brad Prager’s provocative article on Daldry’s (and Schlink’s) film The Reader is a welcome release from the prison-house of structuralist textual inquiry into the unruly, rich world of visual studies. We know that Schlink altered Hanna for the film—making her prettier, less threatening, and far less violent. While Prager attends to the relationship of book to film, his principal focus remains on the visuals, and like other scholars considered above (and like so much of the secondary literature) he is intrigued by the figure of Hanna. If it is somehow necessary (or useful) to deploy an anodyne, fictional evocation of the Holocaust in order to portray the genuine suffering of second-generation Germans, as I have argued, Prager helps us understand how the film furthers this agenda. Hanna is visually “softened” not only in obvious ways (such as casting), but also more subtly, e.g., by placing her in settings that evoke the horrors of both the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and the Eichmann trial. These evocative sets draw a contrastive image of Hanna, for she so little resembles the infamous “Excesstäter” of these trials. “She comes across,” Prager says, “as unthreatening, even helpless—less a villainous beast 118 William Collins Donahue than a version of Elizabeth Proctor, wrongly accused of witchcraft in Arthur Miller’s Crucible .” Another technique identified by Prager—perhaps an allusion to Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List —is a protracted visual parallel of Hanna and Michael on the morning of her sentencing, suggesting in a way that the novel cannot how their lives are intertwined and analogous. Their parallel and interdependent victimhood, firmly rooted in the novel, but not yet fully realized there, now comes into clearer view: “In encouraging us to understand and pity Hanna, the novel and the film place her and Michael on similar footing.” Prager’s piece reminds us of the rich fund of allusive material associated with Holocaust representation, and in this way serves as a corrective to more blinkered discussions of the novel (my own included) that fail to consider the many unexpected and perhaps unintended “intertexts” that impinge upon a novel of this kind. His analysis exemplifies the insight that comparative criticism can bring to bear on an otherwise fairly simple novel and formula film. We have noted the fact of Schlink’s durative presence, and we have discussed how and why he is taught in the schools and elsewhere. But why should The Reader persist? We cannot mark this twenty-first anniversary without posing this question of value. Of all the pieces gathered in this volume, I find that Denise M. Della Rossa and Claudia Rusch answer this question most compellingly. In the hands of Della Rossa, the novel proves an effective vehicle for inculcating social-critical thinking among her students at the University of Notre Dame. For Rusch, it already possesses an intriguing metaphorical quality: the quintessential novel about second-generation children coping with their parents’ complicity or passivity in the Nazi era proves amazingly adaptable to the context of the demise of the German Democratic Republic almost forty-five years later: “Ich weiß genau, wie schwer Kollektivschuld und der Umgang damit aufzuarbeiten sind. Literarisch wie im richtigen Leben. Und machen wir uns nichts vor: Im Alltag meines Landes spielt das noch immer eine nicht zu unterschätzende Rolle. Nur redet davon kaum jemand. Weil es nicht schillert, weil es nicht angenehm ist. Wie Michael wollen wir uns bis heute am liebsten um eine Konfrontation drücken.” Reading herself and her generation into the role of the wounded yet somehow perspicacious Michael, Rusch gives us a hint as to the novel’s staying power. Surely there is a no more emotionally intense passage in all the essays of this volume than that where Rusch unabashedly takes on Michael’s story as her own. The “counterpart” to Hanna in Rusch’s narrative is her grandmother, whose only sin was to have participated as a child in the activities of the Nazi Bund Deutscher Mädel ( BDM , League of German Girls). Rusch writes: “Ich hatte schon schwer genug daran zu schlucken, dass meine über alles geliebte The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 119 Großmutter als kleines Mädchen mit dem BDM auf Wandertouren gegangen ist. Als Heranwachsende habe ich sie oft harsch angegriffen deswegen. Wie sie, obgleich nur ein Kind, nichts von dem hatte merken können, was damals um sie herum geschah. Warum sie nichts getan hat.” This extremely personal outpouring is poignant; and it illuminates the particularly German resonance of this international bestseller. Beyond that, it reveals the way in which The Reader offers a powerful mirror for Rusch to understand her own family story. As I have said on more than one occasion, a more explicit (and perhaps more historically accurate) depiction of Hanna as perpetrator would very likely have pulled the focus of the novel away from Michael, obscuring his utility to readers like Rusch. Now, in light of Rusch’s story about her grandmother, it is possible for me to see in this a strength. For without such a wanly drawn perpetrator figure, Rusch could not have projected her own family history into Schlink’s fictive constellation. An enfeebled, childlike Hanna makes it possible for readers like Rusch to participate in this therapeutic psychodrama, without coming too close to the consuming fires of the Holocaust. The Reader has now reached the age of majority. But Hanna, in her illiteracy and incomprehension, must in a sense forever remain “unmündig,” weak, a bit of a child. For that is the secret of the novel’s success. Notes 1 Felski articulates a “neo-phenomenology that blends historical and phenomenological perspectives, that respects the intricacy and complexity of consciousness without shelving sociopolitical reflection” ( Uses 18). She specifies her approach as in consonance “with Ricoeur’s recasting of phenomenology as the interpretation of symbols rather than the intuition of essences,” agreeing with “his insistence that the self is always already another, formed at its core through the mediating forces of stories, metaphors, myths and images” (16). It is therefore “an impure or hybrid phenomenology that latches onto, rather than supersed[es], my historical commitments” (17). 2 As a consequence, I will refrain from documenting here what is already fully cited in those earlier works. Both the German and English editions of my monograph are indexed to allow easy access to more in-depth arguments, should that be desired. 3 The distinction is valuable, and applicable, I would argue, to The Reader. It should be noted, however, that it is one of degree, not kind; for both come under the rubric “false witnesses” (Wiesel). 4 See especially the introduction to the English-language version of my study (2010), entitled “Mighty Aphrodite,” where I argue that the novel is perme- 120 William Collins Donahue ated not so much by rich ambiguity, but rather by mutually interdependent antipodal notions of, for example, guilt and innocence. In any single reading, one is necessarily dominant and the other recessive, but both are available, allowing readers to assert Hanna’s guilt while enjoying her relative innocence—just as we might reasonably insist on Aphrodite’s chastity (noticing her undeniable gestures of modesty) while fully enjoying the exhibition of her almost full-body nudity. 5 See my article “‘Aber das ist alles Vergangenheitsbewältigung’: German Studies’ ‘Holocaust Bubble’ and Its Literary Aftermath,” where I set forth this development in some detail. 6 Alex Sagan argues that it is precisely the paucity of Holocaust depiction that made The Diary of Anne Frank (and particularly its stage version) so popular in Germany. The play gestures toward the Holocaust by alluding to Anne’s demise, but graciously keeps the horror off the stage, making it possible for the audience to affirm young Anne’s famous line about the essential goodness of humankind—a child’s declaration made long before her incarceration in Bergen-Belsen. 7 As Wiesel says in the context of his memoir, Night, “all the questions I had remain open. I really don’t believe that I found any answer to any one of the questions I had. I don’t know the meaning. I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how it happened. I still don’t know anything, really” (Wiesel). 8 For example, in her contribution to this volume, Denise M. Della Rossa argues: “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 […].” This inaugurates a rather strained and essentially incommensurate analogy of a documented, historical perpetrator to a tenuous, fictional one. It is as well a case in which recourse to the historical record resurfaces as a way of making sense of the elusive, and in some ways insubstantially drawn, Hanna. 9 Felski distinguishes between “formal alignment ” and “experiential allegiance, ” arguing that the former does not reliably predict the latter. But the matter is yet more befuddled: “Among literary theorists,” she observes, “the usual language for explaining such sparks of affiliation is identification, a term that is, however, notoriously imprecise and elastic, blurring together distinct, even disparate, phenomena. […] The idiom of identification, in other words, is poorly equipped to distinguish between the variable epistemic and experiential registers of readerly involvement” ( Uses 34-35). For further discussion of issues regarding differential identification and varying modes of narrative sympathy, see Felski’s “Digging Down and Standing Back” in The Limits of Critique (52-84). The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority 121 10 Yet even this assumption may be mistaken. Felski argues that “absorption” itself does not guarantee identification: “[…], while critics often assume that absorption is tied to the experience of identifying with fictional characters, the catalysts for such involvement turn out to be less predictable” ( Uses 62). 11 To be fair, I think Ryan is referring as much to Berg’s strategically delayed revelation to us as readers as to the judge within the diegesis. Is this move necessarily manipulative such that we must now judge Berg with a high degree of skepticism? Perhaps. But withholding Hanna’s illiteracy can equally well be seen as a necessary way of communicating the mindset of the younger Berg, who of course did not know of Hanna’s handicap. It is at any rate a standard gambit of childhood / youth autobiography, according to which an adult self adopts—sometimes selectively, sometimes more uniformly—the limited view of the experiencing youth. To do otherwise in this case would, as I’ve argued elsewhere, undermine Berg’s relentless case to depict himself as a victim of Hanna’s deceptions. For to have us learn too soon of Hanna’s verbal deficits could easily shift our sympathies to her at a time when Berg very much wants to direct the reader’s commiserations to himself. Schlink’s deployment of a frame narrator in his mid-fifties who adopts the voice of his younger self for most of the interior memoir is not in itself an exceptional or particularly objectionable narrative stratagem. 12 In fact, narrative theory appears to be moving in the opposite direction. For example, Katra Byram proposes that the “dynamic observer narratives” she studies—and Schlink’s novel certainly belongs to this group—“encourage readers’ tendency to equate narrator and author—that is, to blur the distinction between fact and fiction.” See the chapter “Structural and Historical Tensions in the Dynamic Observer Narrative” (43-64, here 63). 13 I do not quite agree, however, with this somewhat schematic and bifurcated rendition of reception history. Not only is the causality implausible (insofar as it attributes, respectively, a single kind of narrative naivety to both groups), as I’ve argued above, but the basic outline is itself wanting. The “two waves” thesis is simply not finely-grained enough to register, for example, the serious objections to the novel voiced already in 1997 and 1998. The second wave is firstly dated improperly, and secondly draws in its main objections upon the earlier work of American (or US -based) critics, e.g., Ozick, Hoffmann, Bartov, et al. For an extensive treatment of reception data for the early period, see my “Illusions of Subtlety”; for more recent phases, consult Hall. 14 Whether or not Niven mistakes the author for the narrator, or merely conflates the two because of their ideological similarities is of less consequence than the fact that he emphasizes their mental consonance from the per- 122 William Collins Donahue spective (as this can only be) of the adult Berg, who, despite those youthful indiscretions, has evidently matured to the level of the author. 15 Toward the end of his essay, Niven rightly identifies the ’68ers as a vocal but tiny minority of the second generation. This explains how it can be that Michael Berg has been frequently seen both as a benevolent representative of the second generation, and as a harsh critic of that, in his view, fanatical and boisterous generational subgroup. In fact, the revisionist view of ’68 (perhaps no longer as revisionist today as it was in the mid-1990s) is precisely what helps to credentialize him as a worthy generational spokesman. 16 While Niven concludes his essay by pointing out an apparent contradiction in Schlink’s thinking (namely his moralizing about ’68ers in the very process of disparaging moralizing in the context of the Holocaust), it is nevertheless true, I think, that Schlink’s tremendous social capital, and his stature as a social and political commentator, only serve to enhance the image of Michael Berg once the two have been linked in terms of their political sentiments on ’68. 17 One thinks here of the tears in Berg’s eyes as he receives the scolding from the Holocaust survivor and recalls Hanna’s “brutal” treatment of him. More formulaic still is the healing implicit in the scene when Berg visits the grave of Hanna with his daughter, thus repairing the rift between father and daughter by overcoming the emotional reserve that had begun with the ill-fated relationship with Hanna and continued into his years as young father. Daldry’s concluding scene to The Reader makes explicit what is already present in the novel, namely a firm linking of the ability to narrate with psychic healing. Works Cited Byram, Katra A. Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State UP , 2015. Donahue, William Collins. “‘Aber das ist alles Vergangenheitsbewältigung’: German Studies’ ‘Holocaust Bubble’ and Its Literary Aftermath.” The Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies. Ed. Jennifer Kapczynski and Erin McGlothlin. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2016. 80-104. ---. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ---. “Illusions of Subtlety: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and the Moral Limits of Holocaust Fiction.” German Life and Letters 54.1 (2001): 60-81. ---. “Revising ’68: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser , Peter Schneider’s Vati and the Question of History.” Seminar 40.3 (2004): 293-311. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.