Illusions of Subtlety: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and The Moral Limits of Holocaust Fiction

Abstract

In presenting the case of SS guard Hanna Schmitz from the perspective of her young lover, Bernhard Schlink's award-winning Der Vorleser would seem to represent that cutting edge of Holocaust literature interested in depicting perpetrators in a more nuanced fashion. However, this gesture toward complexitya welcome trend in itself -is not ultimately supported by the text, which insistently obscures Hanna's role in a series of crimes against humanity. The likeable narrator's attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust, which is espoused as exemplary, proves in the end to rely on a problematic conception of dual victimisation: of Hanna as victim of circumstance, and of himself as victim of Hanna. This essay draws liberally upon reception data in order to discover the manner in which the novel exploits a number of entrenched assumptions on the part of readers. Chief among these are 1) the diffuse sense that confronting the Holocaust presents a demanding burden, rendering present day observers as victims of a sort; and 2) the presupposition that moral sophistication -an attribute with which Der Vorleser has been frequently credited -is tantamount to indecision or undecidability. The real 'limits' to Holocaust fiction are thus found to inhere within both the critical climate and the unfulfilled ambitions of the novel.In the Broadway version of Cabaret there is an unforgettable song in which an older Berlin widow recounts personal and economic hardships she experienced throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and particularly during the early tumultuous, inflation-riven years of the Weimar Republic. This time around she will marry for money, not love. Starkly, the white spotlight isolates this solitary figure on a large, dark stage; and with a haunting refrain that does not lack a touch of defiance she implores the theatergoers to put themselves in her place: 'What would you do?' Any impulse we might feel to judge this beleaguered roominghouse proprietress is thereby muted. Hanna Schmitz, in Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel Der Vorleser (1995) poses the same question, but the stakes are now much higher. As a guard in an SS unit assigned first to Auschwitz then to a women's camp near Krakow, Hanna's last assignment is to oversee inmates as they are being evacuated westward near the end of the war. One night, while the prisoners are incarcerated in a local church, an Allied bomb ignites the steeple, gradually setting the 1 My sincere gratitude to the Erasmus Institute (University of Notre Dame) for a year of fellowship leave, and to the following readers whose comments aided me in rethinking my argument:

Silencio y libertad en "El Lector" de Bernhard Schlink: los dilemas de la Ilustración

“…La crítica favorable había aplaudido la forma en la que Schlink presentaba una serie de problemas morales en la generación de la posguerra, adjudicando a la novela una visión novedosa de la guerra, el Holocausto y los problemas presentes en la Alemania de los 50. Sin embargo, y debido a su impacto y temática, el libro también sufrió una serie de críticas que apuntaban a una simplificación de la experiencia del pueblo alemán, los horrores de la Guerra y el fenómeno nazi, y a que la novela inducía a una suerte de expiación de la culpa general alemana por estos sucesos, representados en la paulatina redención de Hanna Schmitz, la protagonista, y en la actitud condescendiente de Michel Berg, el narrador, al descubrir el gran secreto de Hanna (Niven, 2003;Collins Donahue, 2001).…”

“…3 De acuerdo a William Collins Donahue (2001), una de las críticas a esta novela, era el problema de la verosimilitud del analfabetismo de Hanna, cuestión prácticamente imposible para un alemán en aquellos tiempos. 4 Basta recordar la importancia que Hitler le daba a «probar» que los pueblos llamados bárbaros por romanos y griegos no eran tal cosa y que la grandeza alemana había iniciado ya su viaje, a través de la lengua, el conocimiento, la inteligencia y superioridad general germanas, desde hace más de 2.000 años.…”