The Construction of Cultural Identities in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader - Book Report/Review Example

The Construction of Cultural Identities in Bernhard Schlinks The Reader Introduction First published in 1995, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader exploresthe collective guilt of post war Germany and how the atrocities of the past shape and form the current cultural identities of Germany and its people. (Schlink) Schlink explores the role that history plays in the construction of cultural identities by taking the reader through the 1960’s Auschwitz trials of the German Second World War SS Guards which were the first Nazi war crimes’ trail in German courts. By doing so Schlink demonstrates how the conduct of the Nazi war criminals required accountability not only for the actual perpetrators but for generations that followed. By paralleling these events and the consequences for one nation of people, Schlink makes the point that history contributes to the construction of cultural identities. Discussion Schlink speaks through Michael Berg, the narrator of the first part of his novel The Reader. Through Berg, the idea of guilt by association transcend to mark the cultural identity of post war Germany. Berg writes: “Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally and legally—for my generation of students it was a lived reality.” (Schlink, 169) While acknowledging the Third Reich’s active role in the atrocities of World War II, and his acquiescent complicity under the auspices of the Third Reich, Berg is also accepting that the entire nation of Germans has been stained by the war crimes. The fact remains, the Third Reich acted in an official capacity and as such represented an entire nation of people. As Berg goes on to explain: “It did not just apply to what had happened in the Third Reich. The fact that Jewish gravestones were being defaced with swastikas, that so many old Nazis had made careers in the courts, the administration, and the universities, that the Federal Republic did not recognize the state of Israel for many years, that emigration and resistance were handed down as traditions less often than a life of conformity—all this filed us with shame, even when we could point at the guilty parties.” (Schlink, 169-170) All of the countries attributes, past and present are skewered by recollections of this unpleasant past. In this way, Germans can rarely take pride as a culture in their accomplishments and if and when they do, that pride is fractured by the collective guilt and shame that blemishes the country’s history. Berg’s love affair with and his feelings for Hanna an SS guard are symbolic of the dilemma for Germans cultural identity. The following excerpt from The Reader is demonstrative of this kind of cultural symbolism: “The worst were the dreams in which a hard, imperious, cruel Hanna aroused me sexually; I woke from them fill of longing and shame and rage. And full of fear about who I really was.” (Schlink, 47) Berg’s feeling for Hanna can be construed in such a way as to represent the collective feelings of Germans with respect to their own cultural identity and how they relate to Germany and its past. Any feelings of love and pride for Germany are compromised by the guilty knowledge of the war crimes committed by Germany in the Second World War. Hanna, likewise can be symbolic of Germany, the country with virtues that are fractured by its own past. The past can penetrate the present in such a way as to retard positive growth in a social way. Berg continues in his narration as follows: “I knew that my fantasized images were poor clichés. They were unfair to the Hanna I had known and still knew. But still they were very powerful. They undermined my actual memories of Hanna and merged with the images of the camps that I had in my mind.” (Schlink, 47) Through Berg, Schlink sets the tone for various elements of German cultural identity by depicting the lack of German petition against the Third Reich during the Second World War and in the years that followed through Berg. What emerges is a propensity to avoid rather than confront. It therefore appears that German cultural identity which appears to have been consistent with the Third Reich’s conduct is no more than a coping mechanism. Moreover, through Berg, Schlink portrays the attitude toward the Third Reich as one brought on by desensitization. For instance Berg says in his narration: “It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness that he brings to the murders and deaths themselves...I was preoccupied by this general numbness, and by the fact that it had been taken hold not only of the perpetrators and the victims, but of all of us, judges and lay members of the court, prosecutors and recorders, who had to deal with these events now; when I likened perpetrators, victims, the dead, the living, survivors, and their descendants to each other, I didn’t feel good about it and still don’t...Can one see all as linked in this way?” (Schlink, 102-103) There is yet another aspect to German cultural identity in Schlink’s The Reader. The novel makes an attempt to portray Germans in general as victims of circumstances, a new trend in German cultural identity. (Niven, 2003, 381-396) This aspect of German cultural identity is illustrated yet again through Hanna a Berg and their relationship. The underlying rationale is create a gap between the Third Reich and the people of Germany in such a way as to make the perpetrators as victims powerless and completely subordinate to the will of a tyrant regime. At Hanna’s trial for instance, Berg sets up the argument in favour of perpetrator as victim under the Third Reich. Berg who has finally come to the realization that Hanna is illiterate goes to see the judge prior to her verdict and subsequent sentence. Hanna is presented as sorely misunderstood as a result of her illiteracy and her attempts to conceal it. In an attempt to conceal her illiteracy Hanna falsely testifies that she had written the report on the church’s fire which ultimately vests in her more responsibility for the crime over and above her accomplices. In Schlink’s representation of Hanna’s illiteracy he panders to this new trend in German cultural identity to present the perpetrator as victim of the Third Reich and the circumstances existing at the time. This is manifested by Berg’s remarks: “I was no longer upset at having been left, deceived, and used by Hanna. I no longer had to meddle with her. I felt the numbness with which I had followed the horrors of the trial settling over the emotions and thoughts of the past few weeks. It would be too much to say I was happy about this. But I felt it was right. It allowed me to return and continue to live my everyday life.” (Schlink, 160) Therefore, whether or not the perpetrator was the powerless victim of the Third Reich’s regime or not, it is helpful to Germans as a cultural group to take this position. By doing so, like Berg with his rationalization of Hanna’s conduct, German’s can go on with their lives with a modicum of pride and dignity. The Reader as a cultural artefact which represents a break from the cultural tradition of shame and guilt to one of perpetrator as victim has been staunchly criticised by Americans and British alike. (Bartov, 2000, 29-40) Be that as it may, the relationship between Berg and Hanna represents a changed tradition in the German cultural trend toward the stand that Nazi Germany placed on its cultural identity and historical development. The cultural artefact depicted in The Reader, demonstrates a shift away from the acknowledgement of shame and shift toward some form of justification. Hanna and Berg therefore represent the divide between the Third Reich and the civilian population then and now. In the first half of The Reader the inequities between Berg and Hanna are symbolic of the inequities between the people of Germany and the Third Reich. To begin with Michael Berg, The Reader’s narrator is no more than a schoolboy aged fifteen when he commences an intimate relationship with Hanna Schmitz who is a 36 year old woman. (Schlink) These differences are merely superficial when compared to others. For instance, Berg comes from a family with an academic background, his father is a philosophy professor and Berg himself is receiving an education calculated to qualify him for university and an academic career. Hanna however, is a tram conductor and is illiterate. This discrepancies are designed to portray the relative sophistication of the Third Reich and its ability to manipulate and commandeer the German citizenry. (Swales, 2003, 7-22) The cultural artefact displayed in The Reader presents a propensity both toward recognition, shame and justification of the atrocities committed by and during Nazi Germany under the auspices of the Third Reich. The Reader attempts to represent the discrepancies between the Third Reich as a justification for this new cultural trend. In an interview with talk show host Oprah Winfrey and reported in the New York Times, Bernhard Schlink explains the cultural artefact that motivated his representations of German perpetrators as victim. (Smith, March 30, 1999) He explains that during the 1960s Germans were only just beginning to come to terms with the reality of the Nazi crimes. (Smith, March 30, 1999) This was particularly so during the Suschwitz guards’ trials a Franfurt where the trials brought to light some atrocities that had largely been kept contained. (Smith, March, 30, 1999) Prior to that time the cultural trend had been to regard the past as done and to protect the post war generation from the knowledge and the shame associated with it. However, with the trials’ publicity the post war generation: “...learned that ‘many of our professors as young men entered positions from which Jews had been thrown out or driven to suicide.’ In some cases they also discovered what their parents had done.” (Smith, March 30, 1999) Although largely ignorant of their parents’ and their professors’ complicity in the war crimes until after the fact, post war Germany was part of the culture that shared guilt. This is the underlying cultural artefact depicted in The Reader. As Schlink himself explained in his interview with Oprah Winfrey, by refusing to expel the perpetrators and by permitting them to remain in public office as “judges, administrators, professors and politicians” Germans shared “the guilt for their crimes.” (Smith, March 30, 1999) This sentiment is expressed through Berg in the reader and particularly in the citation on page 2 of this paper. Schlink explains: “...you can’t expel your parents, you are within that collective guilt too.” (Smith, March 30, 1999) While Schlink’s explanation serves to explain the current trend German culture toward rationalizing the complicity of the perpetrators who were no more than subjects of the Third Reich, some critics have been harsh in their response to Schlink’s approach. For Cynthia Ozick for instance, ignorance as in Hanna’s illiteracy does not exonerate the perpetrators. In her condemnation of the cultural artefact of The Reader, Ozick explained that: “Germany before World War II was known to have the most educated population in Europe, with the highest standards of literacy...the grotesquely atypical turns out to be, in this work by a member of the shamed and remorseful second generation, a means of exculpation.” (Smith, March 30, 1999) Although Ozick’s comments are harsh, they are nonetheless fair with respect to Schlink’s representation of cultural identity in Germany. It is the history created by the Second World War Nazi regime that necessitated the current constructs in German cultural identity. When the enormity of the horrors of the Nazi crimes finally came to light, post war Germans found themselves looking at political figures, family members, administrators, judges and professors in an entirely new light. It was difficult to reconcile these respected role models with the atrocities that they were either accused of or entangled in. Conclusion The Reader poignantly depicts the difficulty of breaking free of a cultural identity and moving forward. It is impossible to separate the good from the bad. In The Reader, Berg falls in love with Hanna and later finds out that she was a war criminal. In the process he tries to reconcile the woman he had come to love with the war criminal and doing so he is able to minimize her culpability on the grounds that she was illiterate. In much the same way, Germans in 1960s Germany found themselves coming to terms with similar sets of facts in respect of those that they had come to love and respect. Prior to that knowledge, they knew of the horrors of the past but had been permitted to distance themselves from it and the shame that tainted German culture. When the details came to light during the trials, Germans could no longer turn a blind eye. However, their options were limited since they had already forged relations and moved forward with the very persons who had contributed either directly or indirectly to the war crimes. In trying to reconcile these opposing factions of their loved and respected role models with the war crimes, the Germans adapted a cultural trend which in part attempted to excuse the perpetrators by making them victims to some extent. By doing so they share the guilt and as a result accept the shame that carries over with it. Bibliography Bartov, Omer. (2000) “Germany as Victim.” New German Critique. Vol. 80, 29-40 Niven, Bill. (April, 2003) “Bernhard Schling’s Der Vorleser and the Problem of Shame.” The Modern Language Review Vol. 98(2) 381-396 Schlink, Bernhard. (1997) The Reader. New York: Vintage International. Smith, Dinitia. (March, 1999) “Seeking Guild, Finding Fame: German’s Novel of Nazi Era Becomes a US Best Seller.” New York Times. Available online at: http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:z76R-wEFtQ4J:query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html%3Fres%3D9503EED81130F933A05750C0A96F958260%26sec%3D%26spon%3D%26pagewanted%3Dall+Germany+as+victim+in+Bernhard+Schlink%27s+The+Reader&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=20&gl=us Retrieved July 30, 2008 Swales, Martin. (2003) “Sex, Shame and Guild: Reflections on Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Journal of European Studies Vol. 33 (1) 7-22 Read More