The evening before her release, Hanna hangs herself in her cell. Though he does not directly correspond with her, Michael finds her a job and an apartment. The warden asks for Michael’s assistance in helping Hanna return to the world. After 18 years in prison, Hanna’s sentence has been commuted. Other letters follow, but he never answers them. One day, he receives a “thank you” note from Hanna she has learned to read and write in prison. Moved by his knowledge of Hanna’s secret, however, he tapes himself reading literature and sends the tapes to Hanna in prison throughout this period of his life. Michael again moves on with his life, practicing as an attorney, marrying and having a daughter, then divorcing. He cannot make peace with himself, as a German, or with his feelings for Hanna in the aftermath of her trial. He visits concentration camps, in an attempt to understand what happened. Additionally, he tries to understand his own complex feelings of guilt, revulsion, and love, as a German one generation removed from the Nazi’s rule of Germany, and to reconcile those feelings with his compassion for Hanna.
Michael finds himself unable to reconcile the taciturn, but honest and hardworking, woman he loved with the undoubtedly cruel, unremorseful woman appearing at her trial. Michael’s failure to stand up for Hanna mirrors the guilt of all ordinary Germans for failure to stand up against the Nazi war machine. Should he reveal her secret, which might mitigate some of the blame for the crimes of which she stands accused? In the end, like so many people facing a difficult moral choice-as Schlink indicts both the reader and his characters-Michael, conflicted and helpless, does nothing, says nothing. Here, Michael faces his own moral dilemma. However, Michael discovers that she is hiding a secret that she considers more shameful than being sentenced for war crimes: Hanna is illiterate. He is bewildered when she puts up no defense, refusing to give a handwriting sample that might acquit her, and takes full responsibility for the deaths. She stands accused, among other crimes she committed as an Auschwitz camp guard, of the deaths, in 1945, of 300 Jewish women who were locked inside a church that was firebombed by the allies, following a winter death-march in evacuating Auschwitz. When he arrives at the courtroom, he is appalled to see that one of the women on trial for war crimes is Hanna. In 1966, Michael is a law student, and he is sent to observe a Nazi war crimes trial.
0 kommentar(er)
