Guilt About the Past
The author of the best-selling Holocaust novel The Reader (1997) moves to nonfiction as he discusses Germans' guilt about their past in a series of six lectures he delivered at Oxford University in 2008. The academic jargon is sometimes heavy (“the norms considered in the course of my deliberations”), but readers can skip the minutiae of legal scholarship and get to the gripping moral issues of collective guilt. What about those who did nothing? And what about those who, afterward, did not renounce the perpetrators? What about the children and grandchildren today: Can there be forgiveness and reconciliation? Has the obsession with the Holocaust resulted in banality? Can there be retroactive justice? Schlink admits that he, too, feels guilty that he has gone along with things because he does not want to escalate the conflict and irritate the silent majority. And fans of The Reader will welcome his reply to the critics who say he should not have humanized his character, Hanna, the former camp guard who committed monstrous acts. His answer is that every book does not have to tell the full truth, as long as it doesn't pretend to be more than it is. He hates Life Is Beautiful but praises Shoah and Primo Levi. This is great for book-discussion groups, especially those engaged with The Reader. The issues of authenticity and literary truth are universal, and so is the haunting guilt. --Hazel Rochman