The Reader

Content Warning: This guide summarizes and discusses statutory rape, the Holocaust, and Nazi brutality, which feature in the source text.

Hanna joined the Nazi party. Despite their name, a shortened version of National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis weren’t socialists; their political program centered on fascism, violence, and hate. Their totalitarian leader was Adolf Hitler, whom the journalist Konrad Heiden calls “one of the most tremendous phenomena of all world history” (Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, Houghton Mifflin, 1944, p. 35). Hitler exploited Germany’s economic woes and despair over losing World War I and gradually gained total power. He started World War II to expand Germany’s power over the entire European continent. He and the Nazi party were also responsible for multiple genocides, systematically killing Jewish people, Romani people, people with intellectual and physical disabilities, political opponents, and anyone who allegedly deviated from the Nazi agenda. The mass genocide of Jewish people is often referred to as the Holocaust.

Initially, the Nazis used special commandos to execute large groups of people. In the novel, Michael gets a ride from a man who tells him about a picture he saw of a death-squad member. The driver describes the man’s expression as “satisfied, even cheerful” (118). Some historians provide alternate perspectives. In The Destruction of European Jews: Student Edition (Holmes & Meier, 1985), Raul Hilberg quotes a death-squad leader who describes the executioners as “deeply shaken” and “finished for the rest of their lives” (137). To accelerate and depersonalize the genocides, the Nazis built gas chambers in the concentration camps. Hanna is a guard at Auschwitz, where over 1.3 million people died. She then works at a camp in Kraków, Poland, where she and the other guards regularly select 60 prisoners to go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The Nazis killed around six million Jews and five million people from other groups. After the war, Germany was split into two nations: America and England exerted influence over West Germany, and the communist Soviet Union dominated East Germany. Michael lives in West Germany. World War II’s Allied nations—America, England, and the Soviet Union—prosecuted surviving Nazis with the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46. West Germany also put former Nazis on trial in the post-war decades, and in The Reader, Hanna is tried for her crimes as a Nazi guard.

Though Hanna receives a life sentence in the book, many former Nazis got light sentences or no punishment. The 1968 West German student movement formed mainly as a reaction to the government’s reluctance to confront the Nazi past. Former Nazis continued to work in the legal system and politics. In The Reader, some former Nazis serve as lawyers for the other defendants.

At first, Michael wants to expose the Nazi past and punish those who participated in the atrocities. As Hanna’s trial unfolds, Michael changes his mind. His ideas about guilt and punishment grow complex and link to the philosophy of Simone Weil, the French Christian ascetic who witnessed the Nazi invasion of France and protested by refusing to eat more than the paltry rations that the Nazis gave their victims. In her 1987 book Gravity and Grace, Weil writes about why people want to punish and harm others, arguing, “[It’s] to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make” (6). With his thorough examination of guilt and complicity, Michael expends the energy that the student and the court arguably offload onto the former Nazis. Hanna is guilty and complicit, but so are countless other people who are not on trial.