Michael, a fifteen-year-old teenager, falls into the trap of an unequal relationship with Hannah, a thirty-year-old woman. Michael repeatedly reads passages from the Odyssey to Hannah after he has finished making love, and she later stipulates that he must read her books the next time before embarking on a relationship.
Hannah suddenly disappears from his life, and he suffers greatly from the consequences of this abandonment.

“If you were in my place, what would you do?”
As Michael recovers from the shock and continues his life studying law, one day he witnesses the trial of several female prison guards during the Nazi regime. They are accused of the murder of 300 Jewish women by setting the captive women on fire in the church. They ignored the women's pleas for help, leaving the doors locked and the keys in their pockets. Mercy never found its way into their hearts. In the midst of this trial, Michael raises his head when he hears the voice of Hannah, who was among the accused. The last strongholds of his teenage love crumble before him.

The novel reaches its peak moral crisis when Hannah confesses her role in keeping the prisoners in the church as it burns, and even denies the judge's accusation of her lack of humanity, asking him: "If you were in my place, what would you have done?"

The banality of evil

While it is easy for us to put Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, on trial, as he confessed to his crime and his psychological and intellectual motives for the murder of the old woman he described as a louse, we enter a moral and philosophical maze with The Reader.

Hanna did not question her moral responsibility and role in the Nazi genocide before the trial. The hard-core evil described by Zygmunt Bauman, which rests on a rigid moral foundation of hatred or malice, was not present in Hanna's story. She did not kill the women because she hated them, or because she harbored feelings of hostility toward them. She was simply following higher-ups' instructions without thinking, without having any personal opinion of what was happening. Just as one of the novel's characters describes Hanna's situation:

“The executioner is not subject to any order; he is doing his job. He does not hate the people he executes, nor does he take revenge on them. He does not kill them because they are an obstacle in his way, or because they threaten or attack him. They are so insignificant to him that he can kill them as easily as he can not kill them.”[i]
I remember the scene of German philosopher Hannah Arendt, cigarette in hand, giving her lecture on the banality of evil in the German film about her intellectual life in the 1960s, after attending the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She said:

“The greatest evils are evils committed by nobody, who have no motive, no convictions, who are not bad, who have no diabolical aims, who are committed by people who refuse to be people.”

Even if Arendt believed that the greatest massacres were committed by people like Eichmann who harbored no feelings of hostility or hatred toward the victim, this does not negate the charge of moral corruption. Hanna represents the female model of the Nazi Eichmann figure, having been involved in genocide driven by what Zygmunt Bauman called "the instinct for perfection."

She instinctively obeyed orders without questioning whether the orders that led her to leave women to burn in the church were moral or not. Evil lies in the daily details until it reaches the point of habit, and then we reach the stage of moral blindness, as Bauman called it.
These moral crises call for putting society on trial in the court of morality, and the only way to preserve morality is to disobey and to place moral commands above all other commands.

But didn't Hannah act in a state that viewed such actions as legal?
This question prompts us to address Paul Ricoeur's theory of "criminal responsibility," in which the individual bears responsibility for guilt, while in "political responsibility," the political system bears the burden of criminal acts. According to this division, it can be said that Hanna was merely an administrative employee in a criminal regime. She represented herself, not the Nazi regime as a whole, and the evil she committed reflects a superficial personality devoid of depth. Evil is not something fundamental to her psychological makeup. However, this does not negate her responsibility for her actions, as many others who stood against this regime lost their jobs, such as Michael's father, or were even killed.

Our hopes are shattered when we realize that the law in countries is not always linked to the values ​​of justice or humanity. Slavery was legal, and so was racial discrimination. What guarantees that laws are just?

Chomsky and Michel Foucault
This moral dilemma was addressed by thinkers Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault in a famous television debate in 1971, in which they discussed when disobeying the law is a moral act?

In it, Chomsky argued that laws may conflict with justice. Many pieces of legislation may be legal but devoid of justice. In Michael's conversation with the old man who drove him to the camp, who appears to have been a former Nazi soldier, we glimpse some of what the two earlier thinkers had argued in their debate.

Michael asks, “What is the law? What is on the books, or what actually exists and is followed by society?”

Or is it the law that must be applied and followed, whether it is in the books or not?

- Ah, you want to understand why people are capable of committing such terrible things? What do you want to understand? That people kill out of passion, love, hate, honor, or revenge—is that what you want to understand?

“But the people who were killed in the camps did nothing to the people who killed them. Is that what you mean? Do you mean that there was no reason for hatred or war?”[ii]

Where does the human side of the criminal lie in committing a crime, no matter how great?
Hannah's commitment to ritual bathing in her relationship with Michael was so integral to her relationship that her house was filled with the scent of cleaning products. We can say that Hannah's commitment to cleanliness and bathing reflects a hidden desire for spiritual purification, similar to the physical purification she undertook.

Michael says:

“In the past I especially loved its scent. It always smelled fresh, the scent of a fresh bath and fresh clothes…”[iii]

Hannah felt responsible in one way or another for Michael. He was always in her eyes “the boy” or “the lad” as she liked to call him. She was the one who led this relationship and charted its course, and she did not hesitate to use force and violence if she felt her dignity was hurt. However, she felt indescribably ashamed in front of Michael because of her illiteracy. That was her secret for which she paid dearly later. Hannah describes her condition by saying: “I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway. No one knew who I was, what made me do this or that. And you know when no one understands you, no one asks you for an explanation. Not even the court could hold me accountable, but the dead can… They were in prison with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial, I could still kick them out when they wanted to come.”

There is nothing late.
Hannah later realized the ugliness of her crime and tried to atone for it by becoming illiterate. She learned to read and write in prison, devoted herself to reading so-called victim literature, as well as the biographies of the perpetrators. After her death, she donated her money to Holocaust survivors.

Is there really a relationship between illiteracy and morality?
Michael expresses his position on illiteracy by saying:

“Illiteracy is dependency, and by finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hannah moved from dependency to independence, a step toward liberation.”

But what about the hundreds of scientists, engineers, and graduates who were involved in genocide? Didn't their knowledge provide them with a high moral sense? Does reading literature make us more moral, and does it enhance our sensitivity and empathy for others?

It seems that the author of the novel is biased towards the saying that emphasizes the moral role of literature. Here, when I learned to read, I devoted myself to reading literature, literature with all the human values ​​it carries within it, from spirit and emotion, to exploring the depths of the human self.

Literature is the essence of a writer's vision of life and existence. It is an expression of the individuality and uniqueness of the ego, something Hannah lacked when she worked in the Nazi concentration camps, using a mechanical style devoid of reason and emotion. Indeed, Hannah became capable of forming her own literary critical opinion, as she said: "Goethe's poems are like miniatures in a beautiful frame..."

The novel's German title refers to a reader reading aloud. This act implies participation and the presence of a recipient listening to another. Michael says of the audio recordings of books he sent to Hannah while she was in prison: "Reading aloud was my way of speaking to her and with her." The title carries within it a call to combat illiteracy and spread the culture of reading. The novel's ending reinforces this interpretation, as Hannah's money, after her death, is allocated to support Jewish organizations that combat illiteracy.

“The past never dies, it's not even a past that's gone.”

A question looms about the significance of exploiting the relationship of a thirty-year-old woman with a teenager?
Hannah's character identifies with Germany's Nazi past, as she belongs to the generation of her parents who lived through that dark historical period, while Michael represents the second post-war generation.

It seems that the author deliberately invoked the past to judge it through the character of Hannah, in what has become known in Germany as "Father Literature," a genre that questions parents about their role in the war. The novel is an attempt by the second generation to reconcile with their parents' generation during the Nazi massacres.

Robert Eaglestone says:
“The contemporary novel does not seek to be a reflection of the normal changes that occur in our understanding of the past, but rather aims to question the ways in which we belong to the past and to question our human experience of the past itself.”

The reader's novel is filled with the questions of the second generation who felt the horror of what happened. The difference between the past and the present is precisely what makes it so amazing and, at times, incomprehensible.

“How could those who committed Nazi crimes, witnessed them happening, turned a blind eye to them when they happened, or tolerated or even accepted the criminals among them after 1945, have anything to say to their children? But on the other hand, the Nazi past was an issue even for the children, who could not or did not want to accuse their parents of anything. For them, grappling with the Nazi past was not just a form of generational conflict, but the issue itself.”