Students learned that ''many of our professors as young men entered positions from which Jews had been thrown out or driven to suicide.'' In some cases they also discovered what their parents had done. ''Then interest turned to the political, military and industrial'' figures, he said. Schlink said.ĭespite the Nuremberg trials after the war, the truth of the Holocaust did not really seem to seep into German public consciousness until the late 1950's and early 60's, especially during the Frankfurt trials of Auschwitz guards, Mr. The man had joined the SS, but ''he just knew that he had taken part in unforgivable things,'' Mr. Schlink worked in a factory with a Romanian of German descent who came from a family of migrant workers. ''Well, I mean, they all built legends,'' he said.ĭuring semester breaks in his student days, Mr. ''He wanted to strengthen the state against the party.'' A professor ''who I owe a lot to, who made me aware of how fascinating law was,'' had written an anti-Semitic book in the 30's: ''He jumped on the wagon.'' That professor's explanation made little sense, Mr. Schlink attended Freiburg University and received his legal training at Heidelberg. There were rumors he had done something awful.'' ''One of my teachers, whom I admired and to whom I owe my love of the English language, was in the SS. Schlink said, as if the past's poisonous secrets were locked away, hidden from children, ''and only the mother has the key.'' Occasionally there were glimpses of truth. Growing up in postwar Germany was ''a weird experience.'' It was, Mr. Schlink said, ''but he was not in danger of his life.'' During the war the police harassed his father because of his sermons, Mr. In 1930 the Government shut down his father's school and he became a minister in Bielefeld, in northern Germany, where Bernhard was born. Schlink's father, Edmund, was a professor of theology and a member of the Confessing Church, an anti-Nazi group. ''The theme of collective guilt, of what the first generation did means for the second generation, has been on my mind for a long, long time,'' Mr. He is 54, a bearer of what Germans call ''the second guilt'' of those who grew up in the shadow of their parents' generation's complicity in the Holocaust. He is also a justice of the Constitutional Law Court in Munster and has written treatises on moral issues, including collective guilt. Schlink is a professor of constitutional law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University in Berlin. ''I liked her very much,'' he said in a soft voice, with a shy smile. Schlink flew to Chicago to meet Oprah Winfrey and tape her show. To top it all, ''The Reader'' has been chosen as the selection for Oprah's Book Club. ''The Reader'' has been translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway from the original German and sold to Miramax for a film. At it is outselling even the Monica Lewinsky biography. 1 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list on Sunday for the second consecutive week. Yet ''The Reader,'' published in hardcover by Pantheon and in paper by Vintage, was No. It has a distinctly Mitteleuropean feel, an air of allegory and moral meditation. ''The Reader'' is a small, quiet, intellectual book that asks big moral questions. Hanna is imprisoned, and Michael, a detached figure closed off from his emotions, helps her from a distance, sending her tapes of himself reading Homer and Chekhov. She is illiterate and so ashamed of it that she pleads guilty to writing a damaging report that she could not have written. And he realizes Hanna has another astonishing secret. Years later, as a law student, Michael discovers that Hanna has been charged with war crimes committed while she was a guard in a slave-labor camp. The woman, Hanna, calls Michael ''jungchen'' (''kid'') and continually asks him to read to her. Part 3, Chapter 2 AnalysisĬhapter 2 is very similar in narrative construction to Part 2, Chapters 1 and 2 - the chapter spans.''When I was 15, I got hepatitis.'' So begins Bernhard Schlink's novel ''The Reader,'' about a German student, Michael, who collapses on a sidewalk and is rescued by a woman more than twice his age. Michael then takes a few other temporary sexual partners but is never able to emotionally connect with them. Michael feels an enormous amount of guilt about the divorce, especially because his young daughter has a difficult time accepting it. Michael is never able to emotionally connect with Gertrud, however, and they divorce around 1974. Michael does not tell Gertrud about Hanna, and when Gertrud becomes pregnant, the two marry in the late 1960s. He meets a woman named Gertrud who is also a law school student. Michael finished law school but does not want to practice law. Chapter 2 summarizes a period of several years - the events will be further explored in greater detail throughout later chapters.
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