Memory Play: Bernhard Schlink's The Reader
Marie Cornelia

Remembering the Holocaust and World War II is an ongoing concern in modern German literature. One of the more recent publications in this vein is Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (1995) which explores Germany's continuing preoccupation with the Holocaust and guilt. Schlink, professor of law, judge (and by avocation crime story writer), has with this novel achieved something not granted more exalted German literary figures: weeks on the New York Times best seller list, dizzying numbers of copies sold, translation into twenty-six languages, and the promise of a Hollywood film.

Working to unearth the truth of those war time years, Schlink probes deeply into memory and the way in which it roots us in the past, mingles with dream, metamorphoses in the present, and affects the future. Fragmentary and selective, memory both chronicles and constructs the past. Dogged and demanding, it allows no escape, forces us to revisit the past in a continuing effort to come to terms with it. The term "memory play," chosen for analysis of Schlink's novel, is an allusion to a work by Tennessee Williams, his Glass Menagerie (1945), which he calls a "memory play."1 It too has a young male narrator troubled by images of a woman which have haunted him over many years and through long distances. But for an English reader, the writer most strongly evoked by this novel is James Joyce, the Joyce of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Like Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, Michael Berg, protagonist of The Reader, recalls his past, constructs its narrative, attempts to flee it, and ultimately discovers that it cannot be escaped for it is inextricably woven into the fabric of his life and that of his nation. This paper will deal, therefore, with the way in which memory functions in the novel: the forms it takes, the characteristics given it, some metaphors used to describe it. And it will discuss the way in which personal memory merges with public history to become a record of both Michael's and Germany's past.

Perhaps the first thing one notices about Schlink's novel is that it is divided into very brief chapters, chapters as fragmentary as is memory itself. Michael remembers his relationship with Hanna not as a long sustained narrative but as a series of vignettes and images, a succession of heightened moments: the onset of a serious illness at age fifteen; his first love making with a woman; subsequent intimate moments with her in the bath and on the bicycle tour - and finally the wordless encounter at the swimming pool where he inevitably turns away from Hanna and toward his adolescent friends. These fragmentary images appear like pop up pictures in a child's book and are put into orderly sequence only much later by the adult narrator of the novel. But Schlink has captured the way in which we do in fact remember - not in sustained narrative sequences, but in flashes and flashbacks to moments of heightened significance.

The images are sharp and clear: Hanna in her sleeveless blue smock, lifting the iron and setting it down again; Hanna's "leg, pale and naked, then shimmering in the silky stocking"(14);2 Hanna's "blue dress with a big skirt that fluttered in her wake" as she pedaled along the bank of the Rhine (53); Hanna in the aubergine silk nightgown he has stolen to give her, dancing and checking her reflection in the mirror (64); Hanna seeking him at the swimming pool, "in shorts, with the tails of her blouse knotted, her face turned toward me but with an expression I cannot read at all" (80). These images are indelibly etched on the boy's memory, and on the reader's as we attempt with him to "read" the significance which these moments have for his life.

The narrator is very conscious of the fact that his memory is selective. He remembers Hanna's apartment house vividly (though it is no longer there), but on all his early visits "cannot remember meeting another tenant on the stairs" (11). He does not remember how he first greeted and thanked Frau Hanna Schmitz after his illness, but recalls perfectly Hanna's motions as she handles her laundry in her kitchen (12). He has no memory of the lies he told his parents to cover the Easter trip with Hanna (59), but can recount in vivid detail his planning for the trip and their quarrel over the note explaining his absence. He conjures no image of his mother for us, but offers multiple pictures of Hanna. And finally, he tells us that he has no memory of the Friday seminars which propelled him into attendance at Hanna's trial, but can describe with great clarity its proceedings and his responses to them.

Clearly his memory selects and stores what it deems important, those events which have branded him and marked his life. The task then becomes one of constructing from these selected fragments a coherent narrative, a book which he (and we) can read. But constructing this narrative is beset with difficulties. Memory sometimes has a tendency to slip into dream. The narrator confesses that Hanna's remembered building appears to him again and again in dreams - but each time in a different setting, a foreign landscape, shifting and unreliable, confusing and closed. He wants to go in but can get no further than turning the knob of the door (8-9). And once the trial is underway, he tells us that "again and again, my thoughts wandered off and were lost in [fantasy] images. I saw Hanna by the burning church, hard-faced, in a black uniform, with a riding whip" (145). Fantasizing, he imagines her among the prisoners, "her screaming face a mask of ugliness" (146). But "alongside these images, I saw the others," the Hanna of old, the Hanna he had known in life, "listening to me, talking to me, laughing at me, loving me" (146-147). Then, what is worse, he has dreams of a cruel Hanna who arouses him sexually, so that he wakes "full of longing and shame and rage. And full of fear about who I really was" (147).

This commingling of fantasy, dream and memory is both confused and confusing. But it is precisely through this maze that the narrator must pick his way if he is to reconstruct his past and construct his identity. Michael wants to be a reliable narrator of his own life but to be a reliable narrator is a remarkably difficult task. How difficult a task has been documented by many post-holocaust writers, in particular Christa Wolf who reminds us again and again that "memory puts a deceptive color on things."3 And Timothy Dow Adams goes further still, claiming that "all human beings are liars, and yet, to be a successful liar in one's own life story is especially difficult. Because what we choose to misrepresent is as telling as what really happened, because the shape of our lives misrepresents who we really are."4

But Michael does not wish to deceive either himself or the reader. He wishes to be not a liar but a truth teller. He is indeed anxious to record no false memories, so he rejects the fantasy images of the jack booted Hanna as unfair to her, as "poor cliches" (147), yet he has to admit that these fantasy images are "very powerful," recognizing that "they undermined my actual memories of Hanna and merged with the images of the camps that I had in my mind" (147). But ultimately Michael knows -- and so does the reader -- that even these "actual" memories are selected, fragmented, and blurred.

In addition, he fears that these reconstructed images of Hanna may be self serving. Like the other defendants at the trial who through their testimony construct a false image of a wickedly domineering Hanna in order to exonerate themselves, he fears that he is imagining a dominant and powerful Hanna in order to exculpate himself, wondering, "Who had I been for her? The little reader she used, the little bedmate with whom she'd had her fun? Would she have sent me to the gas chamber if she hadn't been able to leave me, but wanted to get rid of me?" (158) This sudden depiction late in the novel of himself as a "little reader," "little bedmate," little boy strikes us forcibly as false. Although the "daughter" in the novel, a Jewish survivor and witness at the trial, as well as some critics, sees the relationship between Michael and Hanna as a case of sexual child abuse,5 I believe it should be read as the coming of age experience of a sixteen year old on the verge of young adulthood. For it has been made clear to us through all the earlier chapters that his affair with Hanna had empowered Michael, had made him feel like a man, act like an adult. In their lovemaking he had learned to take possession of her, and then to share equally and become one with her (57-58). But most importantly, their relationship had enabled him to take charge of his own life, as his father silently acknowledged in Michael's decision to return to school after his illness. Michael declares: "I'm going back to school tomorrow." And his father agrees, noticing "that I had not said I was wondering whether I should go back to school" (31). The boy has issued a declaration of independence and recognizes that "I'd just said my final goodbyes" to childhood (31). So he cannot escape into false memories of a put upon child. He must be more honest. He recognizes that he is complicit and says: "I had to point to Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her" (170).

A year or so after Hanna and Michael part, he tells us that "the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station" (88). This is a wonderfully telling metaphor. Hanna is not erased from his memory. She is there, as the city is still there, always awaiting his possible return. And return he will, forced to revisit by sight of her in the dock. And once he returns, there is no escaping the memories of Hanna. He tells us of his pictures of Hanna:

I have them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed. There are long periods when I don't think about them at all. But they always come back into my head, and then I ... have to run them repeatedly through my mental projector and watch them (62).

But the quality of the images alters. Sometimes the film whirring through the projector is blurred (41). At other times, the images are closed, impossible to read - as Hanna's face had been closed in her parting visit to the swimming pool, as her expression is closed at the trial, "a look that wished to see nothing and no one" (163). He also recognizes that earlier memories can be contaminated by later ones, be undermined and made ugly. He says, speaking of his early days with Hanna:

Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happiness - for I was happy in the weeks that followed.... Is it the knowledge of what came later, and that what came out afterwards had been there all along? Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? (37)

Confused and tormented by his memories, he tries a variety of defenses. He attempts to treat memory like a retrieved file which leaves him impassive and emotionless, and indeed, during the weeks of the trial, he feels nothing (100). He retreats into his studies. He travels to Ceylon, Egypt and Brazil. He consciously risks injury while skiing; and finally, he welcomes the oblivion induced by the high fever of a serious illness contracted on the ski trip (168). But eventually, the opening of a window on the past, which at first had been only an intellectual exercise initiated by the law seminar (91), opens emotional floodgates for Michael. Emerging from his fever, he finds that

the numbness was gone. All the questions and fears, accusations and self-accusations, all the horror and pain that had erupted during the trial and been immediately deadened were back, and back for good (168). The memory had been awakened, and .... it was as if I had an appointment with the past that I couldn't miss (175).

All his memories of Hanna have returned. Relentless and inescapable, they demand two things of him. The first is understanding. Who is this Hanna who so dominates his memory play? And why did she act as she did on that terrible night of the church fire? Or rather, why did she fail to act? Why did she not open the doors and free the women? Had she been the brutal leader of the guards controlling the prisoners? Had she, as the other defendants insist, been the sole writer of the fatal report? The judge and jury say yes, and Hanna acquiesces. But this is not the truth. The truth lies in only one place (outside of Hanna) and that is in the boy's memories. Only the boy's memories hold the truth about Hanna: that she has never been a leader rushing into action, but only a frightened woman running away from exposure of her weakness. She could not have been the writer of the report, any more than she could have prepared her defense by reading the indictment against her, because Hanna is an illiterate who can neither read nor write.

This secret, imbedded in the boy's correlated memories, suddenly emerges and he understands (132). But with this understanding comes the second thing demanded of him: this truth that emerges from memory demands action from him. He must speak this truth. This, however, he fails to do. He visits the trial judge and they talk of many things, but he fails to give the information that might alleviate Hanna's sentence. As she had failed to act to free the prisoners, he now fails to speak and condemns her to life in prison. As her questions to the judge indicate, Hanna did nothing because she truly did not know what to do - except to continue doing her job of guarding the prisoners and preventing their escape.6 And in the end she is convicted of doing something she was incapable of doing. The Hanna who literally ran away from all advancement, at Siemens and at the trolley car company, is convicted of taking command; and the Hanna who can neither read nor write is convicted of writing the damming report.

This does not mean that Hanna is innocent, but rather that she is not guilty of taking the leadership role of which she is convicted. Insecure, feeling profound inferiority because of her illiteracy, Hanna chooses to hide her weakness and is therefore branded as the vicious leader responsible for the mass incineration in the church. But what of Michael? Why does he not speak out the truth of his memories? It is in part because of vengefulness against the Hanna by whom he felt "left, deceived and used" (160); but also because he wants to be done with her, to eliminate her from his thoughts so that he can "continue to live my everyday life" (160). He retreats from horror into the everyday life of the banal.

He tries one final escape from the demands of memory. He takes up a career in legal history. And it is precisely here that he comes face to face with his past. For "history is a story that we tell about ourselves."7 It is our publicly recorded memories. And so Michael's memories and Germany's coalesce. Let me quote Schlink at some length:

Now escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. And the past I arrived in as a legal historian was no less alive then the present. It is also not true, as outsiders might assume, that one can merely observe the richness of life in the past, whereas one can participate in the present. Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides. One of my areas of research was law in the Third Reich, and here it is particularly obvious how the past and present come together in a single reality. Here, escape is not a pre-occupation with the past, but a determined focus on the present and the future that is blind to the legacy of the past which brands us and with which we must live (180-181).

There is an old cliche that not only is the past not dead, it is not even past. Michael learns this through his memories of Hanna. He struggles with the knowledge of what she had been and done, and thus with what he, her chooser, her lover, had been and done. And so for Germany. In an analogy on the national level to Michael's puzzle on the personal level, Schlink asks the central question of the novel: "What should our second generation have done, what should it do, with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews?" (104) Michael's private memories and Germany's public one become identified. He says: "...the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate;...it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to manage than for others"(171). And he confesses: "I was ....guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal" (134). Sorting out his personal memories of Hanna and answering questions about his private relationship with her thus forces him to face the larger public dilemma which faces everyone in his generation of Germans: " That some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame and guilt - was that all there was to it now?" (104)

He has no answer - except to determine that in the end he must record his memories. He wants to write (his)tory which is not only his story but the story of the second generation and the history of Germany after the war as well. Burdened with the tale of Hanna who was lover and beloved, mother and motherland, he wants to write their story - at first in order to be free of it, and later to recapture it. But the memories will not come for either of these purposes. Finally, after leaving his story alone for a time, "it came back, detail by detail," in "a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion" (217). He finds his story to be neither sad nor happy, and feels the question of sadness or happiness to be irrelevant. What is important is that he thinks his recorded memory to be true, and he accepts that "Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me - it was the path my life had taken" (216). He even accepts that things which he had not consciously decided to do constitute his behavior, which he must claim as his own, just as thoughts and decisions taken were his thoughts and decisions (20). Thus, no longer does he attempt to flee the past and its memories but embraces them as the true record of his life. Imperfect, incomplete, inconclusive perhaps, but a record of his life as he recalls it.8

At this paper's end, let me return to its beginning and to James Joyce. It is striking to see at the end of Joyce's Ulysses the date (1914-21) and the places in which it was written (Trieste-Zurich-Paris), and to note that it is a novel written in three major cities on a continent torn by war and experiencing in those years the destruction of its social order and social fabric. Yet Joyce's great novel deals with none of this. It harkens only to the past and a day in 1904 in Dublin which Joyce's imagination never left. So too Schlink's Michael on the last page of his novel sees his time with Hanna as absolutely central to his life and ever present in his memory. Deeply imbedded in his imagination, she is at the heart of his emotional life. Having loved her and been hurt by her, all subsequent relationships have been mediated by his determination "never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose" (88). She will always be there in the bedrock of his life "for the tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this" (217).

At the end of the novel the reader has come to understand this too and is grateful that he has been allowed to explore so deeply this complexly layered memory play.

NOTES

1. Tennessee Williams, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. I (New York: New
Directions Books, 1971) 131.

2. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York Pantheon: 1997). All citations in my text are to this edition of the novel.

3. Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) 3.

4. Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) ix.

5. See for example Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York, London: Routledge, 1999) 216.

6. Another interesting topic for exploration would be Hanna's journey through memory into her past as she searches for the decisions she made which have inevitably led her to her trial. She is sincere in her questions to the judge: "What would you have done?" (111 and 128), and her tentative "So should I have ... should I have not ... should I have not signed up at Siemens?" (112).

7. Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 384.

8. We might do well here to recall an observation made by Timothy Dow Adams when speaking of autobiography, for his words have equal validity with regard to fictional memoir: "autobiography is the story of an attempt to reconcile one's life with one's self and is not, therefore, meant to be taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic." Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography ix.