The Theme of German Guilt in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader

In the novel The Reader, Michele explores the issue of German guilt for the Holocaust and how that guilt affects subsequent generations who ask who is responsible, who participate in the guilt even though they were not there, and who in effect inherit the guilt from their parents. This is true for the protagonist, who inherits this collective guilt even though his parents were not Nazis and did not participate themselves. Michael Berg is the young man who wrestles with issues of guilt and moral meaning, and he does so in a way that suggests that we can never answer these questions fully and that the interconnections among people and among elements in their lives make it difficult to give clear and certain answers. At some level, Michael simply has to accept that certain things just are, and this includes his own uncertainty.

This gives him guilt in two ways. On the one hand, he feels guilty for loving someone who could commit such horrible crimes, and on the other, he feels he has failed her in some way and could have provided comfort or helped her cope with her own guilt and fear. This story is told as a memory, and so the older man is wrestling with all the guilt and meaning his experience has created in him: "Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time?" (37). He remembers specific moments and agonizes over their meaning. His sense of having failed Hanna is bound with his memory of when he saw her watching him at the pool: "Sometimes I tried to tell myself that it wasn 't her I had seen . . . But I knew it was her. She stood and looked--and it was too late" (83).
This emotional illiteracy could be for many reasons. For Michele, it may have been the lack of adulthood that was experienced in his life and for Hannah, it may have been because of the pain and suffering she