The Complexity of Evil

Bernhard Schlink's book, The Reader, which appeared in Switzerland in 1995 and in America two years later, justifiably caused a good deal of controversy as it poses some ethical problems that are not easily resolved. While ostensibly a work of fiction, Schlink deals with very real issues that face second generation Germans whose older relatives could have been active participants in the Holocaust. The Reader concerns a fifteen-year-old boy who becomes ill on the street with early symptoms of hepatitis and is rescued by an older woman who cleans him up and walks him home. Some months later, when recovered, the boy brings the woman flowers as a gesture of thanks, and gradually befriends her until, in time, she initiates him into his first sexual relationship. The woman is portrayed as somewhat coarse and gruff but, in typical adolescent fashion, she is idealized by her young lover. The affair continues for some months and the woman insists that they only see each other in her apartment, where the boy visits her regularly. Then she disappears unexpectedly, without warning or farewell. Years pass without his hearing anything about her, but she remains in his memory as a romanticized first love. The boy grows into early manhood and begins to study law. He attends a trial as part of a seminar and to his understandable surprise discovers his former lover in the courtroom where she is among a group of defendants who were all guards at a concentration camp. There are numerous charges against them, the most serious being their allowing prisoners to be burned to death by refusing to let them escape from a locked building that was set on fire during an allied bombing.

The rest of the story will not be related here, as I wish to give away neither the particular twists of the plot nor the way the problem is resolved in this particular instance. Actually, the rest of the story may be of minor importance for our purposes. What is significant to the protagonist, and to the reader of