Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader: Performing Past Upon Present

Panel Organizer: Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw
University of Southern Indiana
Department of English, 8600 University Blvd.
Evansville, IN 47712
hoeness@usi.edu

Haunted by History: The Fiction of Bernard Schlink

Schlink's crime trilogy, published before his international literary success, and his short story collection Flights of Love, published after The Reader, reveal the author’s preoccupation with Germany’s recent past. Guilt, betrayal, and the desire to forget continue to haunt present-day relationships and constitute mainstays of Schlink’s thematic repertoire. Schlink’s early novels couch the recovery of the past in the popular frame of the detective story. The private eye Selb, a former Nazi lawyer, solves cases that inevitably confront him with his own and his country’s past, such as concentration camp survivors, Nazi bank accounts, and poison gas factories. One of the characters arrives at the conclusion that historians and detectives, proceeding by different methods, find hidden truths. Selb’s desire to correct past mistakes, however, often leads to misjudgments and failures.

Flights of Love continues this investigation of the past in eight brief love stories. Whether in a painting, the relationship between a young German man and an American Jewish girl, or Germany’s partition after WWII and subsequent reunification, the past continues to overshadow the present. Schlink’s stark narratives create characters who, driven by love and desire, cannot express their repressed emotions, just as their nation’s psyche cannot shed its memories.

Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw
University of Southern Indiana
hoeness@usi.edu

Past as Prologue: Examining Values Using Bernard Schlink’s The Reader

Probing the strong connection between history and values, Bernard Schlink’s The Reader serves as an ideal bridge to join two chapters of the text Searching for Great Ideas, edited by Thomas Klein, Bruce Edwards, and Thomas Wymer, “Confronting History: The Question of Moral Decline” and “The Uses of History: How We Learn from the Past.” The Reader provides a heuristic for two separate writing assignments (handouts will be available) given to students enrolled in a “living learning community” interest block which combines a U.S. history class with an honors section of freshman English. The study of Schlink’s novel prods students to explore Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and to examine the roles that past events play in the formation of their value systems. While exploring the role of history, students will engage in a service learning component.

Marty Smith
University of Southern Indiana
msmith@usi.edu

When Know Means No: Sex, Text, and Power in Bernard Schlink’s The Reader

Schlink’s popular novel presents a post-war Germany in which a fifteen-year-old protagonist finds himself in a sexual relationship with an illiterate, middle-aged woman, a former concentration camp guard who becomes for him both subject and object of a “text,” undecipherable and thereby plaguing. The novel invites critical examination of sexuality and language as modalities of power. Using a heuristic of psychological concepts, and excerpts from Foucault’s interpretative analysis as well as Borges’ fiction to complement Schlink’s ideas, this paper identifies methods used by second-year rhetoric and composition students to explore relationships of gender, power and language. Handouts will be provided.

Leisa Belleau
University of Southern Indiana
lbelleau@usi.edu