The moral and political illiteracy in the Third Reich and the trauma of the memory of the Holocaust in post-war generation – Der Vorleser [The Reader] (1995) by Bernhard Schlink

Abstract

Internationally acclaimed via the film directed by Stephen Daldry (2008), the novel Der Vorleser [The Reader] (1995), by the German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink (*1944), raises a series of relevant, current issues, in an apparent "German Europe" (an expression used by Thomas Mann as opposed to a "European Germany") plunged in a major financial and political crisis. I am referring specifically to the issue of literacy stricto sensu, but also to the moral, political and social illiteracy, the trauma of the memory of the Holocaust in the German postwar generation and the various ways of dealing with such a past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), whose "long shadow" (making use of the phrase "der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit", by Aleida Assmann) is inexorably projected onto the present. These are, thus, the topics that this article aims at exploring, namely a reflection on the ways in which recent history continues to affect the various German generations since the 1930s, what will be the future outcome of a Europe born from the trauma of World War II and, finally, on the issue of the banality of evil.