The Reader: Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

After the trial, Michael spends most of his summer and winter semester studying at the library or at home, avoiding or brushing off acquaintances. His feeling of numbness remains, and he moves away from home to rent a room. Despite Michael’s aloofness, his classmates invite him on a ski trip and he accepts. Though he is not a skilled skier, he purposefully risks falls by attempting to ski more difficult slopes. Because he doesn’t feel cold, he neglects to protect himself from the weather and has to be brought to a hospital for a fever.

When Michael returns from the hospital, the numbness disappears and “all the questions and fears, accusations and self-accusations, all the horror and pain that had erupted during the trial and been immediately deadened were back.” The narrator believes that his numbness had to overwhelm him physically in order to let go of him psychologically. By the time Michael finishes his studies and begins clerking with a judge, the student movements in Germany have begun. Though he is aware of the students’ calls for university reforms, protests against the Vietnam War, and most importantly, their struggle to deal with Germany’s Nazi past, Michael does not take part because he still feels disconnected from the other students.

The narrator then proposes that the struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past “was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took.” Though every generation seeks to free itself in some way from their parents, the previous generation’s expectations were especially “nullified” by their moral failures during the Nazi regime. The narrator notes that this issue even affected children with morally unobjectionable parents: “For them, coming to grips with the Nazi past was not merely the form taken by a generational conflict, it was the issue itself.”

For Michael’s generation, collective guilt was “a lived reality.” The fact that after the war, Jewish graves were still being vandalized with swastikas and that former Nazis were still involved in government and universities contributed to the students’ collective guilt. The narrator reflects that “pointing at the guilty parties” for these acts helped to alleviate, if not the students’ shame, at least their suffering of shame.

However, Michael feels that he has no one else to blame, especially not his mother and father, whom he is now embarrassed to have condemned during his concentration camps seminar. Michael realizes that the only culpable person that he knows personally is Hanna, and that he must “point at” her. But if he points at her, he must also point at himself, as he had chosen her and loved her. Michael tries to rationalize his love by comparing it to the innocence of filial love, but then decides that love for one’s parents is the only love that can be excused.

Yet Michael then assigns guilt even to filial love, pointing to the supposed incompatibility of feeling guilt with his fellow students’ “parad[ing] [of] one’s self-righteousness.” The narrator wonders if the students’ “dissociation” from their parents is “mere rhetoric” hiding their own complicity for loving their parents. Though Michael does not receive comfort from the thought that his pain for loving Hanna was “a German fate”, albeit one more difficult to avoid than others, he reflects that “it would have been good for [him] back then” to have been more integrated into his generation.