Forgiveness might suture a wound, enabling healing and reconciliation, but its closure also ushers in, if not forgetting, an attenuation or weakening of the suffering of victims of unforgiveable crime and the silencing or appropriation of their voices.Ĭontra critics who argue that Schlink offers an exculpatory, because explanatory, portrayal of his Nazi protagonist and second-generation German narrator, I argue that The Reader exposes the potential for abuse that characterizes the rhetoric of “ordinary” forgiveness. It focuses on conceptions of forgiveness in particular, considering these through the lens of Jacques Derrida's essay “On Forgiveness”/“Le Siècle et le Pardon.” Derrida concedes his is a “mad” conception of forgiveness: “what there is to forgive must be, and must remain, unforgivable - such is the logical aporia.” He argues that losing sight of the impossible absolute (forgiveness that forgives the unforgivable) opens the rhetoric of “ordinary” forgiveness to personal and political abuse, to hypocrisy and calculation. This essay urges a reconsideration of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and the familiar, if far from transparent, moral terminology of his admirers and detractors alike. Through readings of nine American, German, and French literary texts, Erin McGlothlin demonstrates how an anxiety with signification is manifested in the very structure of second-generation literature, revealing the extent to which the literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, it investigates how second-generation writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization to express their troubled relationships to their parents' histories. This book expands the commonly-used definition of 'second-generation literature,' which refers to texts written from the perspective of the children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. Writers from what is known as the 'second generation' have produced texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience. Literary responses include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by survivors, but also, more recently, works by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. | Germany - Fiction.Among historical events of the 20th century, the Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing. World War, 1939-1945 - Atrocities - Fiction. As the past erupts into the present - both Michael's past with Hanna, and the past of Germany itself - Michael must accept that he will never be free of either of them. But then, suddenly and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret. Much about her behavior during the trial makes no sense. The woman he had loved so passionately is a criminal. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. Michael's life goes on, but he can't forget her. His questions about her family and her life go unanswered. But there is something slightly off-key about her. Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired. Later, the boy arrives at her home with a bunch of flowers to thank her. Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg becomes ill on the way home from school. The Reader is both a literary surprise and a moral challenge: a riveting, provocative, and deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a passionate, clandestine love affair with an older woman, and what happens to them both when the secrets in her past are revealed. The reader / Bernhard Schlink translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Book Bib ID
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