Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 63

The World Upside Down 59 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