The Iron Rule

Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ He has lost his belief in post-Enlightenment law as enacting a gradual but steady progress towards ‘greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats’. Now the law seems to him more like Odysseus’ journey – a process that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’

On its publication in English in 1997, The Reader was heaped with praise, but also severely criticised for its apparent prevarication about judgment. We are drawn into sympathy with Hanna as it gradually emerges that she was illiterate. Women in the camps were given a temporary reprieve from the gas chamber on condition that they read to her. Was her inability to read being offered as a partial excuse for her crimes? Was Schlink playing on the emotions of his readers in order to blur distinctions where, for the sake of history and justice, there should be none? (The reader of the title could be any one of her blighted reading companions, Hanna herself who finally learns to read in prison, or of course each of us.) In fact, the narrator dispenses judgment liberally throughout the novel. Hanna is guilty. When she insists in her final confrontation with him that only the dead can call her to account because only they understand her he finds it ‘shabby and too easy, the way she had