Reconciling with Schlink’s Reader

A lecture at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German, 2021.05.30

Abstract

In her recent book Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that the United States needs to learn from Germany how to deal with a racist past. Herself a child of the American south who now lives mostly in Germany, Neiman finds that German memorialization of the Holocaust, when compared to the near total absence of American memorials acknowledging the evil of slavery, speaks volumes about the two societies and their relationship to shameful histories of human rights abuses.

Neiman concentrates on public memorials to demonstrate Germany's attempts at reconciliation. Literary and cinematic narratives don't figure strongly in her thinking about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, a term she prefers to the more common Vergangenheitsbewältigung. For example, she mentions Bernhard Schlink just once, in passing, a curiosity considering the oversized role that Der Vorleser has assumed in representing German society's efforts to confront and learn from its past.

Neiman's account of German acknowledgement (and American insensitivity) gives us an opportunity to revisit Der Vorleser and its role in processes of reconciliation. This novel occupies an odd place in German Studies. A search of university syllabi reveals its popularity across a variety of courses even though the academic critical reception of the novel is marked by strong reservations. William Collins Donahue's well-known 2001 article warns against embracing the novel for its moral complexities because doing so runs the risk of enforcing "a ban on further thought and judgment" (Collins Donahue 80).

The complex Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung valued by Neiman gives Collins Donahue pause and fuels his skepticism, and it is this tension that sets the context for this presentation. I will argue that Neiman's approach echoes the moral outlook underpinning truth and reconciliation processes. Reconciliation happens when there is "awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour" (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 113). Examining the extent to which the novel reflects this definition will help us determine whether Collins Donahue's rejection of the novel's treatment of guilt should give way to a more optimistic reading. This discussion will not only help us evaluate the place of the novel in the German studies canon; it will also encourage us to consider what role German studies and its critical scholarly engagement with Germany’s past can play in furthering reconciliation in Canada.

References and Citations

Adams, Tim. “Read ’em and Weep.” Observer Review, 13 July 2003.

Adler, Jeremy. “Letter.” Times Literary Supplement, 5164th ed., 22 Mar. 2002, p. 17.

Della Rossa, Denise M. “Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom.” Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift Für Germanistik, vol. 48, no. 1–2, 2015, pp. 75–82.

Donahue, William Collins. “Illusions of Subtlety: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and The Moral Limits of Holocaust Fiction.” German Life and Letters, vol. 54, no. 1, 2001, pp. 60–81. Scholars Portal Journals, doi:10.1111/1468-0483.00189.

Hall, Katharina. “Text Crimes in the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Case of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser/The Reader.” German Text Crimes: Writers Accused, from the 1950s to the 2000s, edited by Tom Cheesman, Brill Rodopi, 2013, pp. 193–208. doi:10.1163/9789401209496_010.

Krause, Tilman. “Keine Elternaustreibung. Ein Höhepunkt Im Deutschen Bücherherbst: Bernhard Schlinks Roman Über 68er Und Die Deutsche Schuld.” Der Tagesspiegel, 3 Sept. 1995.

Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans. Race and the Memory of Evil. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

Raphael, Frederic. “Letter.” Times Literary Supplement, 5162nd ed., 8 Mar. 2002, p. 17.

Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway, Vintage International, 2001.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. What We Have Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation. 2015.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. Volume One. 1998.