The Viewer

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The Reader ( German: Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Bertolt Brecht called the Nachgeborenen, those who came after. Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past, The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades. [1] Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship. Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and on whom he probably has a crush. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends.

Dr Gary Crew, author of novels, short stories and picture books for older children and young adults, began his writing career in 1985, when he was a high school teacher. His books are challenging and intriguing, often based on non-fiction. As well as writing fiction, Gary is a Associate Professor in Creative Writing, Children's and Adult Literature, at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland and editor of the After Dark series. As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages. [12] Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." [15] While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work." [14] It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in Oprah's Book Club in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France, [12] and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 201ff.

The Viewer was a much more collaborative project than most picture book creation, where there is often – and strangely – little direct communication between author and illustrator, something I was familiar with as an illustrator of many short stories and book covers. Usually a text is written and then given to an illustrator to consider, a process overseen by an editor. Gary and I discussed concept, imagery and book design together from the outset, before any text was written, along with our mutual editor, Helen Chamberlin at Lothian Books, then an independent publisher based in Melbourne. As a law clerk, Michael marries his girlfriend Gertrud when she gets pregnant. Over the course of their marriage, Michael never tells her about Hanna but often compares Gertrud to Hanna in his mind. The marriage lasts only five years, and Michael’s guilt over making his daughter Julia suffer through their divorce pushes him to become more open about Hanna in his relationships. However, he doesn’t appear satisfied with the women’s reactions to his past with Hanna and he eventually stops talking about her. The mechanisms around the boy’s eye as he watches the disks is quite elaborately worked out visually, though did not read clearly in print in the original edition. In 2011 I redesigned the book, given it was still in print, and the text was edited to accompany reproductions of illustrations closer to my original intentions in 1997. It’s now clear that different sections rotate and telescope inwards as the boy’s pupil dilates, so that eventually his pupil becomes that of a new big mechanical eye.

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose? [22] Intertextuality [ edit ] Ominous words and violent imagery fuel this dystopia, which is equal parts science fiction and life-as-we-know-it. Crew and Tan (previously teamed for The Memorial Wroe writes that the book had sold 75,000 copies in the U.S. by 2002. Ruth Franklin (2010) writes that the figure is two million; see p. 201. As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS painted a complex picture. [38] It appeared only in 2007, 12 years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on The Reader have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany. The Viewer’ by Shaun Tan and Gary Crew was a truly dark and moody book that gripped the children as soon as they saw the cover. Unlike the previous books that I had been given, I did not read this myself before sharing it with the children which meant that it was a new experience for all of us.

Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities. [3] Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian, likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy," [12] and Ron Rosenbaum of Slate says that Hanna is "a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to 'read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens." [13]I could have reviewed this as a children's book. With an age recommendation of middle primary; an art style of detailed drawn; theme of inquisitiveness and history; the setting of a child space. But to me, this is a book this a book that is as valuable for adults. This is true to the style of both Gary Crew and Shaun Tan. Both of them create works that can be read by all. Where more details are seen as the reader gets older. If a teacher wanted to use it in a lesson with older students there is potential for a thought exercise about whether they would do what Tristan did. And the cost of inquisitiveness. Crew and Tan have worked together since The Viewer, publishing Memorial in 1999. Shaun Tan's art is as always sensational. It works perfectly with Crew's wording enhancing and adding to rather and just accompanying the story. The second half of the story is focused on the art. The art within the cells of the discs tells the history of the human race. The art in these cells is almost mindblowing in its detail and variety. The colouring is so beautiful, mostly realistic but some are slightly off but it is all perfect. But it's not all about the cells its all the details around them which I won't go into. Earlier in the book when the reader first meets Tristan the colouring is vastly different, it's bright and white spaces befitting the child focus. The junkyard is smartly done it's all orange scales. As with all Tan work there is an insane amount of detail that you will always find something new. Together they tell a story of exploration and history in a way only they can. It is just beautiful. But I will say I was always going to love this I have never read a Shaun Tan I wouldn't recommend to everyone.

Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter. He is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide, and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire. When Michael starts a new school year in the 11th grade, he makes new friends, including Sophie, on whom he has a crush. He begins to go to the swimming pool with his classmates, and becomes torn between spending time with his friends and spending time with Hanna. Whenever he has fights with Hanna he comes increasingly resentful of how she bullies him into surrendering, but he also always begs for forgiveness, as he is afraid of losing her. As he grows closer to his friends but neglects to tell them about Hanna, he begins to feel as if he is betraying her by denying her importance in his life. One day, while Michael is at the swimming pool, he sees Hanna from a distance. Unsure of what to do, he hesitates before getting up, but in that moment she is gone. look after being lifted. But perhaps it had set because of her early sufferings; I tried and failed Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it, [3] a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her." [4] His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism. [5] Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis: "the past which brands us and with which we must live." [6] For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation: a b Zeitlin, Froma (15 November 2003). "New Soundings in Holocaust Literature". In Postone, Moishe; Santner, Eric L. (eds.). Catastrophe and meaning: the Holocaust and the twentieth century. ISBN 9780226676104.Project work by a German class "The Reader by Bernhard Schlink - Summary, characterizations and interpretations", accessed March 31, 2015. Jewish woman, who wrote about surviving the death march from Auschwitz. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family.