The Reader: Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

While the court flies to Israel as “a combined judicial and touristic outing,” Michael plans to spend his two free weeks studying, but finds himself unable to concentrate. He imagines Hanna cruelly standing by a burning church, sending off her readers to Auschwitz, and screaming orders to prisoners, as well as the images of Hanna he has held onto from their affair: Hanna with her stockings, in front of the bathtub, riding her bike, laughing. He also imagines combinations of these images (such as a cruel Hanna listening to him read), which make him simultaneously ashamed, aroused, angry, and afraid.

Michael realizes that the images he had of the camps are undermining his memories. The narrator reflects on the scarcity of photographic evidence back then and on the plethora of books and movies that have embedded the Holocaust into collective memory in the present day. The narrator claims that “Back then, the imagination was almost static,” as the Holocaust seemed too horrible to imagine. The images from Allied photographs and survivor testimony were recycled so often they became clichés.