He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust she watches him bathe and seduces him. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family. Jewish woman, who wrote about surviving the death march from Auschwitz.A psychoanalyst tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. By the time Michael is narrating the story, his father is dead. He is emotionally stiff and does not easily express his emotions to Michael or his three siblings, which exacerbates the difficulties Hanna creates for Michael. He is very formal and requires his children to make appointments to see him. During the Nazi era he lost his job for giving a lecture on Spinoza and had to support himself and his family by writing hiking guidebooks. Michael's father, a philosophy professor who specializes in Kant and Hegel.When he begins his friendship with her, he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and on whom he probably has a crush.She takes a dominant position in their relationship. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz. Like many of his generation, he struggles to come to terms with his country's recent history. Michael Berg, a German man who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life notably, when he is a researcher in legal history, divorced with one daughter, Julia.It was adapted by David Hare into the 2008 film of the same name directed by Stephen Daldry the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Kate Winslet winning for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz. It has been translated into 45 different languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. It won the German Hans Fallada Prize in 1998, and became the first German book to top The New York Times bestselling books list. It sold 500,000 copies in Germany and was listed 14th of the 100 favorite books of German readers in a television poll in 2007. Der Spiegel wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades. Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past, The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Bertolt Brecht called the Nachgeborenen, those who came after. The Reader ( German: Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997.
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