Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy 59 Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy Gary L. Baker Denison University Abstract: This article addresses deficiencies of affect and emotion in a novel that has been referred to by critics as a love story. The argument connects Schlink’s main characters, Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, to the phenomenon of German impassivity after the Second World War. Hannah Arendt and the Mitscherlichs observe this perplexing dearth of emotion after the devastation of war and warn of the effect it could have on Germany’s new democracy; in short, Germans were not in an emotional condition to support democratic institutions. This article shows that, what Schlink demonstrates in a fictitious relationship initially based on the lust for reading and physical contact, and maintained in separation throughout the tumultuous years of the student movement, is a depiction of that impassivity. The article demonstrates that Schlink depicts in Der Vorleser inadequate emotional development as an impediment to Germany’s emerging democratic society. Keywords: emotion, society, relationship, democracy, trial In his 1995 novel Der Vorleser, Bernhard Schlink proposes a vital connection between emotional health and its necessity for an enduring democratic society. He does so in the context of the failed emotional relationship between his main characters Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, as well as through an extended representation of emotional impairment in Michael Berg’s father. Schlink depicts the unlikely encounter of a teenage boy with a former female concentration camp guard who is illiterate and more than twice his age. Much of the discussion about this book has centered on the novelty of this relationship. This essay argues that this key relationship possesses a more social, political dimension than has thus far been understood. Specifically, Schlink deploys it to 60 Gary L. Baker demonstrate the potential of emotional regression to inhibit the development of a truly democratic society. Despite the marketing and reading of Schlink’s novel as a love story (Hall 465; Mahlendorf 458), there is a surprising lack of emotion in the novel. The pervasiveness in the novel of terms such as “Betäubung” (97, 99, 114, 155, and 160) or the repeated short sentence “ich fühlte nichts” (91, 96, and 155) throws into doubt the presence of emotion in the form of real love or compassion. 1 There is no depiction of a truly loving relationship beyond some moments of nurturing in the first third of the book. Instead, as Katharina Hall observes, the emphasis is rather on the function of power and the idea that the thirty-six-year-old Hanna Schmitz dominates the naive and submissive fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (459-60). This bond ultimately takes on the characteristics of a reciprocally beneficial exchange rather than an open, honest, and mutually loving relationship. Helmut Schmitz also speaks of a “Machtverhältnis” (303) in which Hanna plays the dominant role. Indeed, he describes it as a “Verhältnis der Objektmanipulation, in dem ein unbewegliches Subjekt totale Unterwerfung fordert” (303), accentuating the force with which Hanna Schmitz takes the young man into her life. Years later Michael encounters Hanna again, this time in a courtroom as a defendant being tried for her role as a concentration camp guard and her role as a guard on a subsequent death march toward the end of the war. Here Michael realizes his lack of emotional participation in the scene. However, his stark and unfitting emotionlessness seems to have no transitivity. It is not clear to which particular constituency it is directed, nor do we know which person evokes this disturbing lack of feeling; as William Donahue asks, “To whom and in what degree does it apply? ” (56). At a key moment in the trial, Hanna falsely admits the authorship of an incriminatory report, presumably to hide her illiteracy, and thus in the course of the proceedings she in a sense receives the promotion she always avoided, this time to become the lead perpetrator of the six guards in the courtroom, and ironically, as with the other promotions, it happens because she is assumed to be literate. At the conclusion of the trial, she receives a life sentence, the harshest sentence handed down. Michael Berg has a problem emotionally committing to anybody, yet years after Hanna’s disappearance from Michael’s teenage life and her reappearance in his law student days, he commits to Hanna longer-term. While Hanna is serving her prison term, Michael takes up their reading sessions via cassette tape, but with no other kind of communication with her. Michael’s generosity in this regard may be based on the guilt that he feels for becoming involved with a concentration camp guard in the first place; or it may derive from compassion for a victim of circumstance and for a recipient of a presumably undeserved life sentence. Whatever the case, there is a notable lack of feeling in the novel Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy 61 where one would expect compassion, empathy, or sympathy for the first victims of the Holocaust, or even outrage, disgust, indignation for the events that point to Hanna’s culpability and shame as a perpetrator. Another, very different Hannah, Hannah Arendt, in her first return trip to Germany after having been forced into exile in 1933, observed in an article published in 1950 that the Germans possessed “a general lack of emotion” and displayed a “heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality,” which for Arendt was a “conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened” (Arendt, “Aftermath” 342). Seventeen years later Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich come to similar conclusions in their seminal book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern , where they also observe a general lack of emotion regarding the devastating crimes and losses of the Second World War. The Mitscherlichs recognize the role of politics and economics in these trends and base their observations on thousands of interviews with patients who had lived through the war years. Here too, where they would have expected affect-filled responses to the past, they find impassivity. As has often been noted, they observe a successful mass staving-off of a debilitating melancholy that allowed for the vibrant energy and focus that was necessary for the West German “economic miracle.” The Mitscherlichs speak in unmistakable terms of “Sperrung gegen eine Gefühlsbeteiligung” for what occurred in the past (14) and note the general lack of “Schuld, Scham und Trauer” (30) on a collective level. The association of the novel with the Mitscherlichs’ theories furthermore invites the consideration of the concept of “cool conduct” discussed by Helmut Lethen. Taking the Weimar Republic as his historical focus, Lethen discusses the dominance of “cool conduct” in the time leading up to the Nazi years. With an emphasis on male socialization, he writes of the propensity to subdue feelings, noting that the “truly human qualities—which, arguably, necessarily involve personal vulnerability—atrophy inside an armored ego” (46). Lethen defines the “cool persona” (44) as a kind of “armoring” that “results from a civilizing process that links the idea of autonomy to the disciplining and ‘cooling’ of the affects” (47). These characteristics correspond to the many occurrences in the novel of words such as “Distanz” (98, 160) and “Betäubung” in relation to the main characters, Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz, as well as to Michael Berg’s father. Despite the predominance of cool conduct and emotionlessness in Hanna’s persona, her need for stories gives rise to moments where she reveals human emotion and demonstrates that she is potentially capable of warming to the human condition. The young Michael Berg tells us: “Sie war eine aufmerksame Zuhörerin. Ihr Lachen, ihr verächtliches Schnauben und ihre empörten oder beifälligen Ausrufe ließen keinen Zweifel, daß sie der Handlung gespannt 62 Gary L. Baker folgte […]” (43). She listens “mit gespannter Anteilnahme” (56) on another occasion. The act of reading to Hanna brings out in her observable emotional participation in the lives and worlds of other, albeit fictitious, people. Granted, there is a certain selfish ritual to it: as the narrator explains, “Vorlesen, duschen, lieben und noch ein bißchen beieinanderliegen—das wurde das Ritual unserer Treffen” (43). The meetings possess an iterative nature; we know that, for the boy, these sessions become an exciting routine. Both also find advantage in the other’s favorite moment in their sessions together. In the intimate encounters of this couple, Schlink creates twin desires in sex and reading. Michael satisfies his adolescent sex drive, and Hanna gains a kind of participation in the lives of others. These emotive reactions and signs of participation emerge as Michael reads from canonical works in the school curriculum, such as Emilia Galotti and Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts . In these works, the conflict between middle class and nobility as regards virtue and morality plays a central role. There are also conflicting ambiguities in relationships within families, in particular between fathers and their children. More generally, intimate human relations display competing desires and the suspense that accompanies them. There is enough information or context to get involved in characters’ motivations and decision-making processes; with clear plot points the reader recognizes their dilemmas and can follow their struggles. In other words, relationships between characters are couched in a level of detail so as to allow for empathy with them. Jochen Schulte-Sasse explains narrative empathy thus: “Der Begriff ‘Einfühlung’ impliziert, daß im Rezipienten, sofern sein ‘Einfühlungsvermögen’ nur weit genug entwickelt ist, durch das Kunstwerk ästhetische Wahrnehmungen freigesetzt werden, die ein unmittelbares ‘Verstehen’ ermöglichen […]” (28). In the context of Der Vorleser , Stuart Taberner observes in his introduction, “Empathy, it is implied, is a ‘skill’ learnt via exposure to books” (25). In order to show this empathy in the film version, Hanna is depicted crying as Michael finishes reading a death scene that ends with the words “He pressed her hands to his lips. She was dead. Past all help, or need of it” (Daldry). This is Nell Trent’s death in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop . In Schlink’s novel, Hanna cries only in the scene in which, seemingly reverting back to her more violent occupation as a camp guard, she strikes Michael with her belt causing his mouth to bleed. It is a curious moment because it couples brutality with an unexpected display of humanity and tenderness. Yet, her fundamental ability to emote as she relates to the pain (or joy) of another is clear to see in both the book and the film. At first, Michael reads to Hanna whatever literature he has in his school bag. Later, for the cassette tape readings, Michael seems to intuit her lack of emotion (and his? ) and thus chooses literature that he believes will trigger what Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy 63 Suzanne Keen calls “emotional contagion” (5-6), a response that characterized the emotional intensity of their earlier reading sessions: “Ich erinnere mich auch nicht, mir jemals die Frage gestellt zu haben, ob ich über Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann und Lenz hinausgehen und experimentelle Literatur, Literatur, in der ich die Geschichte nicht erkenne und keine der Personen mag, vorlesen sollte” (176). His concern about an emotional connection to a text is perhaps warranted if he is thinking of texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albert Camus, or Bertolt Brecht with his famous denial of an emotional connection to characters. Oddly, however, even the book about the camps and the fatal night in the burning church, the memoire by and about a victim who had stood in his physical presence in the courtroom, but also a book in which the perpetrators’ crimes are clearly detailed, leaves Michael cold. In his judgment of this text, he says, “das Buch selbst [schafft] Distanz. Es lädt nicht zur Identifikation ein und macht niemanden sympatisch, weder Mutter noch Tochter, noch die, mit denen beide in verschiedenen Lagern und schließlich in Auschwitz und bei Krakau das Schicksal geteilt haben” (114). He goes on to say that the camp personnel in the book do not gain “Gesicht und Gestalt […] [so] daß man sich zu ihnen verhalten, sie besser oder schlechter finden könnte” (114). Because Michael cannot put himself in the place of Hanna’s wartime victims, he, like Hanna, is not able to relate to the suffering and injustices outlined in this book. Importantly, Hanna is being read to in court—the trial itself functions as a kind of Vorleser—yet she does not participate in the performance of this text as she had with those read by Michael in the intimacy of her apartment. Back then, during the reading sessions with the teenage Michael, she displayed empathy and participated emotionally in the lives of fictitious characters, but now she exhibits no emotion for the persons who appear in the stories of the survivor in the courtroom. This book of nonfiction seems to take its place with the socalled experimental literature, about which Michael dismissingly asserts: “das brauchten weder Hanna noch ich” (176). In the trial the surviving Jewish daughter reveals that Hanna chose concentration camp inmates, typically the weaker and more vulnerable, to hold them under her protection for a short while as readers until they were sent away to their deaths. Those first meetings between Hanna and Michael would presumably not have taken place if Michael had not read to Hanna, which raises the question whether she, perhaps initially drawn to his weakness as a sick boy, assesses him as a potential reader from the start. It remains an open question for Michael in the book (153), but the film too suggests a connection when Michael states that they (he and Hanna) “have been together for four weeks now,” the same time span granted to his “predecessors” (the girl inmates who read to Hanna). 64 Gary L. Baker He notes at this point that “the thought” of being without her “kills him” (Daldry). From his safe seat in the courtroom, Michael desperately, if only silently, urges Hanna to declare this practice of arranging for young readers a sort of noble action: “Sag, daß du ihnen den letzten Monat erträglich machen wolltest” (113). This, however, would require a level of reflection, and a sense of empathy that we otherwise do not see in Hanna. If we take the words that the narrator uses to describe Hanna during their encounters in the first third of the book, we find “grob” (6), “schwerfällig” (17), “müde” (24, 61), “abweisend” (37), “unberührt und unbeteiligt” (49), “launisch und herrisch” (76), “unwirsch” (76), and later he recalls nightmares, in which “die harte, herrische, grausame Hanna” appears (142). These adjectives do not signal an empathic character. Later, too, we see evidence of Lethen’s “cool conduct.” During the trial Michael characterizes his own feelings as “innerlich nicht beteiligt” (97) and Hanna sits in the courtroom “wie gefroren” (96). For these two people there is a barrier against any sense of pain or remorse vis-à-vis Holocaust victims. This “coolness” continues in the protagonist’s post-trial phase of university study that is supposed to be fun and full of student camaraderie. On a ski trip soon after the trial, Michael skies without a coat or sweater because he claims not to be cold, which eventually lays him up in the hospital with a fever. His statement, “Mir war nie kalt” (159), is evidence that Michael’s inner temperature corresponds to the wintry chill of the outside temperature: both he and Hanna display independently their emotional frigidity in the public sphere. One hides her handicap, and the other hides his relationship with the camp guard at the center of the trial. It becomes obvious that Hanna’s emotional state has a clear parallel in Michael Berg, as he uses similar words to describe their respective relationship to the past. He says of Hanna: “Das alles erzählte sie als sei es nicht ihr Leben, sondern das Leben eines anderen, den sie nicht gut kennt und der sie nichts angeht” (40). Regarding his own condition, he comments: “Die Betäubung wirkte nicht nur im Gerichtssaal und nicht nur so, daß ich Hanna erleben konnte, als sei es ein anderer, der sie geliebt und begehrt hatte, jemand, den ich gut kannte, der aber nicht ich war” (97). This is where the Mitscherlichs’ theories prove to be most pertinent. In their interpretations of Der Vorleser , scholars such as Helmut Schmitz, Joseph Metz, and others have effectively employed the Mitscherlichs’ diagnosis of West German society. Schmitz speaks in terms of the “Unfähigkeit der zweiten Generation, sich in die Opferperspektive einzufühlen” (307) while Metz comments that “[b]oth Michael und Mitscherlichs’ perpetrators experience profound libidinal investment in an overpowering Nazi ‘love object’” (304). To distance oneself from one’s past is to situate it such that one can choose or not choose to acknowledge it. As the Mitscherlichs express it, the person “dere- Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy 65 alizes”—their verbs are “derealisieren” and “entwirklichen” (37)—an undesirable past, to make it a sort of personal or even personalized fiction, which obstructs self-reflection and thus occludes feelings of empathy for the victims of tragic, violent events. In discussing the Mitscherlichs’ 1967 essay, scholars often overlook the fact that the authors address the political and economic implications of the lack of emotion where the German past is concerned. For the Mitscherlichs, the impassivity toward the past that they detect in West German society represents a threat to Germany’s nascent democracy. Their conclusion derives both from their experience during the Nazi years in the university clinic at Heidelberg and from abundant evidence given in thousands of post-war interviews (46). The Mitscherlichs’ analysis is supported by a myriad of studies and publications from the 1940s that attempt to address the German turn from humanity to a predilection for emotional codes of stoicism and general lack of compassion where identifying a national value system is concerned. The titles help us grasp the tenor of these studies, which include Dorothy Thompson’s Listen, Hans (1942), Emil Ludwig’s How To Treat the Germans (1943), Richard Brickner’s Is Germany Incurable? (1943), Louis Nizer’s What to do With Germany (1944), David Abrahamsen’s Men, Mind, and Power (1945), Leo Margolin’s Paper Bullets: A Brief History of Psychological Warfare in World War II (1946), David Rodnick’s Postwar Germans: An Anthropologist’s Account (1948), Bertram Schaffner’s Father Land: A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family (1948), and the proceedings of the “Roundtable on Germany After the War” published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1945). Different as these studies are in their approach to the subject, they assert similar arguments. The Germans’ distinguishing cultural characteristics, these studies found, centered on aggressiveness. Germans, they claimed, placed value on extreme discipline and dogged dutifulness and obedience to authority; they demonstrated compulsions of status seeking and placed high value on industriousness and orderliness, but little value on relaxation. They furthermore determined that a defining factor of German society was acute paranoia involving feelings of persecution, victimization, and social hypersensitivity. They observed a society that aggressively suppressed individual feelings and desires in lieu of the collective, and then produced as a result individuals who could shift between obsequiousness and bullying, depending on where they stood in society’s hierarchy or the social context of the moment. In short, they observed a society of sycophants. These studies attempted to determine how Germans got along with the state and interacted with their fellow citizens. The broad conclusion of these studies is that the Germans of the 1930s and 40s were the perfect people for a totalitarian society. 2 66 Gary L. Baker When the narrator of Der Vorleser speaks of “das deutsche Schicksal” (163), metonymically represented in his relationship with Hanna (and his father), we see that the national fate also lies in not being capable of shedding these anti-democratic propensities that marked German social interactions. The concern of the Mitscherlichs and the studies mentioned here is that democratic institutions would not flourish in Germany without democratically inclined feelings to nurture them. The studies mentioned above represent, then, a discussion of the cultural substratum that lies beneath the generational interactions of Der Vorleser and reflects in its characters the massive deficiency in persons who could, emotionally and psychologically, sustain a democratic society in the first decades of the Federal Republic of Germany. If Hanna Schmitz, as Donahue points out, has “become the ‘Jane Doe’ of the second-tier perpetrators” (55), this means too that she may reflect the emotional and psychological composition of this larger group, and more broadly, of Germans in her generation. The connection between what we might call sound emotional development and the requirements of a democratic society comes more clearly into view when Schlink states in one of his Cambridge lectures, “I understand the desire for a world where those who commit monstrous crimes are always monsters” (“Stories” 127). Hannah Arendt already established in her Eichmann book the puzzling yet disturbing reality that monsters are not necessary to commit monstrous crimes (54). As we have established, in Schlink’s novel, the act of reading, or being read to, provides evidence that Hanna is not a monster. Her capacity to involve herself with the problems of others through reading indicates as much. But these other people remain entirely fictional. One can say, further, that Michael Berg is the product of his emotional role models, namely of Hanna and his father: “Mein Vater war verschlossen, konnte weder uns Kindern seine Gefühle mitteilen noch etwas mit den Gefühlen anfangen, […]” (134). Together, both the first and second generations possess an emotional armor, which they donned in the past, and which seems to leave them cold in the present. For the Mitscherlichs this propensity was the single most daunting factor in the establishment of a true democratic society in the Federal Republic of Germany, something they refer to as a debilitating condition, a genuine mental health issue: “Wegen der Fortdauer dieser autistischen Haltung ist es einer großen Zahl, wenn nicht der Mehrheit der Bewohner unseres Staates nicht gelungen, sich in unserer demokratischen Gesellschaft mit mehr als ihrem Wirtschaftssystem zu identifizieren” (41). Schlink demonstrates through depictions of father and son, Hanna and Michael, the concern that both the first and second generations may not be emotionally equipped to support the democracy in which they live. Hanna Schmitz is capable of sending concentration camp inmates to their death or keeping them locked in a burning church because of the chaos their release Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser: A Problem for Democracy 67 would cause. However, she cannot bear to return to West German society as a productive, literate citizen after she has gained her freedom. She evades her new status by committing suicide. Michael can neither commit to a long-standing relationship nor be a decent father. Moreover, he decides not to become a trial lawyer because he feels himself to be emotionally unsuited for the task; he too cannot work with others within a democratic society as a key practitioner upholding its laws (171-72). Schlink makes a direct connection between emotional and psychological health and a thriving democracy when he states that “a generation that does not acquire openness, trust, and individuality in the family will founder in its attempts to achieve such qualities in society. These are not just relational qualities but skills upon which democracy depends” (“Mastering the Past” 54). Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz—as I have argued—are fictitious renderings of this very warning. Notes 1 Page numbers refer to Schlink, Der Vorleser. Whenever the context makes clear that reference is being made to the novel—as is here the case—I will omit reiterating that fact in the parenthetical citation. 2 For a more detailed discussion of these works see Baker. Works Cited Abrahamsen, David. Men, Mind and Power . New York: Columbia UP , 1945. Arendt, Hannah. “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. Report from Germany.” Commentary 10 (1950): 342-53. ---. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Penguin, 1977. Baker, Gary L. “German National Character and the Relaxing American.” Germanic Review 80.2 (2005): 124-42. Brickner, Richard. Is Germany Incurable? Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943. Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction. Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. “Germany After the War.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 15 (1945): 381-441. Hall, Katharina. “The Author, the Novel, The Reader and the Perils of ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’: A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and Der Vorleser .” German Life and Letters 59.3 (2006): 446-67. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel . New York: Oxford UP , 2007� Lethen, Helmut. Cool Conduct. The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany . Trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Ludwig, Emil. How to Treat the Germans . New York: Willard Publishing, 1943.