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Popular Culture Review
Shortly after their affair begins, Michael goes away with Hanna on a
four-day biking trip through south-central Germany. Their travel is full of color
and passion, and Hanna allows Michael to dominate in selecting the path, the
inns, and the restaurants. It is during this trip that the first defined clues of
Hanna’s illiteracy surface. On one occasion, Hanna overreacts when Michael
leaves a note that he is going out for breakfast. When he returns, Hanna
explodes with shuddering, violence, physical tears, and animal sounds—a
passion that hides her inability to read. Interestingly, it is during this interlude
that they read German romantic author Joseph von Eichendorff s Memoirs o f a
Good-for-Nothing, a nineteenth-century picaresque account of a young man who
leaves home after a fight with his father over the girl he loves:
She liked the disguises, the mix-ups, the complications and pursuits
which the hero gets mixed up in in Italy. At the same time, she held it
against him that he’s a good-for-nothing who doesn’t achieve anything,
can’t do anything, and doesn’t want to besides. She was tom in all
directions; hours after I stopped reading, she was still coming up with
questions. (57)
Over the summer, as the pull of his classmates and adolescent activities
entices Michael to leave Hanna’s world, their affair wanes. Michael has
sacrificed the company and camaraderie of his schoolmates for his affair with
Hanna. But the reading of literature continues to offer them a sanctuary; together
they experience Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel new to them both. But this
time, Hanna does not actively engage herself in the novel’s world, as she had
with other works that Michael read to her. Instead, she reacted to the reading as
an outsider, absorbed in the milieu that the author created. The sanctuary offered
by this world became more “open.” As Michael is pulled by friends and
activities at the local swimming pool, the pool mirrors the depth of the
differences between the two of them—education, age, socioeconomic status:
“we did not have a world we shared” (77). By the end of the summer, Hanna
disappears, cementing the denial, disavowal, and betrayal that Michael began
when the pull of his peer group overtook the passion of the relationship he had
with Hanna.
During the second part of the novel, Michael is a young law student
who describes his ennui as an envelope, completely “effortless”: ...“I had no
difficulty with anything. Everything was easy: nothing weighed heavily. Perhaps
that is why my bundle of memories is so small” (88). But it is during this time,
after losing Hanna, that he spends shapeless afternoons, unable to open books
without asking “if they were suitable for reading aloud” (87).
During his legal studies, he serendipitously becomes involved as an
observer in a Nazi war crimes trial. Hanna and four other female SS guards are
accused of preventing many young female Jewish prisoners from escaping a
bombed, burning church near Cracow in 1944. Testimony from concentration