#THE READER BY BERNHARD SCHLINK WRITING TRIAL#

She called him, at first sarcastically 'kid,' but it becomes obvious that she loved him. When they first met he could see her tough side, her coldness at times. Hanna had a cold-blooded streak, and Michael had a selfish, cowardly stripe. She realized he was in the courtroom but didn't acknowledge him.

#THE READER BY BERNHARD SCHLINK WRITING TRIAL#

Michael attended all of Hanna's long trial and watched her tortured and damaging testimony. It is not a story of redemption, and no one gets off easy in this sad story. He lacks moral courage and conviction and is willing to let events take their course. He goes to his father and is satisfied with non-answers to his problems. He goes to the judge to give him information, and he chickens out. In the sections of the book in which Michael is trying to probe his own moral predicaments and dilemmas, his philosophical positions, his reasoning is complicated and convoluted. That is nothing compared to his betrayals of her during the trial and in her prison years. In Part One Michael thinks he has betrayed Hanna by disavowal, by not admitting her existence to his friends. The narrative is divided into three sections: one, the affair, two, Hanna's trial as the perpetrator of war crimes atrocities while she was serving as an SS guard in concentration camps, and three, Hanna's years of imprisonment following the trial and Michael's half-life seeking answers and salvation. A story as old as the hills, yet their affair became a life-altering event for both of them. 'The Reader' is an intensely moving novella in which Michael, a fifteen-year old German boy, falls in love with a thirty-six-year old woman, Hanna, a streetcar conductor.

The reader by bernhard schlink writing