A Literary Analysis of The Reader By Bernhard Schlink Free Essay Example, 2250 words

III. Hanna’s Notorious Past Hanna turns out not to be as innocent as she would suggest—even though we already know that Hanna is an utterly daring, witty, wise and capricious soul. Of course, there are some factual errors that must be cleared up, in analyzing The Reader. One of those factual errors is that actually, most women would not have been SS guards—in fact, none of them would be, except in the case of auxiliary SS guards. Auxiliary SS guards were assistants but not on par with actual SS guards. Also, the amount of these were relatively few in number. According to Patricia Heberer of the Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, â€Å"Women could not be members of the SS Proper†¦. [They] were technically termed†¦[female SS attendants] and were†¦an auxiliary group of SS†¦a minority in the concentration camp world†¦[thusly] misrepresent[ing] the historical role of women in SS posts†¦Ã¢â‚¬ 3 Another difficulty that we have in parsing Hanna’s notorious past is the fact that this novel focuses on is the suffering of Germans in terms of coming to grips with what the Nazis had done. We will write a custom essay sample on A Literary Analysis of The Reader By Bernhard Schlink or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now While we know that Michael has severe moral hang-ups with the Nazi occupation, Hanna maintains at the trial that she was just doing her job—but she also maintains that she did not murder anyone, she was just following orders. And, indeed, even though she did not murder anyone—Schlink’s book still does a delicate balancing act between trying to drudge up empathy for the Germans without trying to sound too schmaltzy or offensive. â€Å"Crownshaw argues for a more nuanced reading of Bernhard Schlinks novel as a text that problematizes the moral binaries of perpetrator and victim in a useful and productive fashion†¦how [does one] best represent German suffering in a balanced manner†¦without relativizing [Jewish suffering] or sentimentalizing German victimhood. †4 So, yes—on the one hand, in making the readers of The Reader feel sorry for the Germans who were against the Nazis, one must also keep in mind that those same Germans had the power to do something about the injustices they saw happening in their communities. Thus, Germans who were sympathetic to the Nazi government cause although they were not directly involved, still implicates them on a moral level to the crimes committed by the Nazis. Hanna, however, is definitely a character whom we believe was just doing a job—being a guard. The prosecutor and the witnesses take advantage of this fact and accuse Hanna of having the order signed for the building to be burned, with Jewish men, women, and children inside.