The Reader

The Reader (1995) tells the story of Michael Berg’s love affair with an older woman, Hanna, and his subsequent discovery that she was a concentration camp guard. How could a woman capable of arousing such passion, warmth, and joy have been complicit in the Holocaust? Michael’s question is the question that haunted an entire generation of Germans born after the war: what drove ordinary men and women to commit such extraordinary horrors? 

• Readers drawn to morally complex love stories
• Anyone interested in postwar German identity
• Fans of introspective literary fiction

Bernhard Schlink was born in 1944. He holds a doctorate in constitutional law and was a law professor in Bonn and Frankfurt. He currently holds a chair in public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin. Schlink’s first work of fiction, the crime novel Self’s Punishment, was published in 1987. The Reader appeared in 1995. Translated into forty languages, it was the first German book to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list.