The World Upside Down
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camp survivors indicates that as a guard, Hanna selected “favorite” prisoners,
usually very frail and weak, to read aloud to her at night during their
imprisonment. She was also accused of writing the report about the prisoners’
experiences during the bombing, their deaths, and the guards’ refusal to free
them from the burning church. During the trial, Hanna admitted to writing the
report—but only after being asked for a sample of her handwriting. Clearly it
was more humiliating and shameful for Hanna to admit her illiteracy than to
acknowledge her innocence because she could not have written the report.
The trial fills Michael with a void—a nothingness—as he sees Hanna
after an eight-year absence. But his angst also reflects his generation’s need to
explore the war, the camps, and the genocide, almost with scholarly detachment,
to understand what happened. This sense of numbness, anesthesia, and
nothingness permeates his view of Hanna’s trial, causing Michael to become a
singular observer in an unending metaphysical hole.
The detachment, disengagement, and indifference Michael feels as he
hears these revelations reflect the alienation he experienced after Hanna left him
as an adolescent. There is no real sanctuary for Michael. Previously, his affairs,
education, and youthful hobbies gave him sanctuary—but they were
depersonalized, vacant experiences, not the spirit-filled, peaceful feeling of any
activity, such as reading, or any place as a sanctuary. This “general numbness”
permeates the law court as Michael’s generation, Germany’s “second
generation,” struggles with what to do with the knowledge of the Jewish
extermination.
Even though Hanna commits suicide at the end of The Reader (rather
than face the outside world after 18 years in prison), still there is some hope in
her learning to read and write while in prison and in her bequest of 7000 marks
(made by Michael to the fund against Jewish illiteracy). Did not learning to read
and write change for the worse her coping abilities to deal with this new German
society? Would her being able to read and write when young have allowed
Hanna to be a different, better person during the war?
In short, the popular culture about the Holocaust has become more
important during the years since it officially ended. As the last survivors of the
Holocaust are nearing the end of their lives, these p opular works help to keep
alive in popular understanding the horrors of that era. The scholarly and classic
studies do not generally convey the intensity, the ordinariness of life, death, and
rebirth, and people’s experiences in terms that have broad, mass appeal to
engage the interest and understanding of contemporary readers, as do popular
works. Novels, short stories, and hybrid novel-like accounts of the Holocaust
capture the public’s engagement—no matter what the genre and style—when
they deal with universal themes within and through the filter of contemporary
social mores. All three of these contemporary novels reflect the popular culture
about the Holocaust in terms that attract millions of readers. While these novels
address the art of reading literature to portray sacrifice, provide emotional
sanctuary, and generate redemption, they also reflect the popular sentiment of