Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities. Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian, likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy," 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."
Michael's relationship with Hanna, partly erotic and partly maternal, stands for the ambivalent relationship of present-day Germany and its Nazi past: the past is "mother" of Michael's generation, and he eventually finds out, like other Germans of his generation, that his "parents" were guilty. "The paralyzing shame, the psychic numbing, the moral failures of the 'lucky late-born' are the novel's central focus," writes Suzanne Ruta in The New York Times. Only through his relationship with Hanna can Michael get well; Franklin interprets that to mean that "postwar Germany is sick, and it can begin to heal only through its encounter with the Nazi past." Richard Bernstein of the New York Times also notes that "In some sense, perhaps, Hanna can be seen to stand in for the larger German quandary of remembrance and atonement," but prefers not to read the novel as an allegory.
That said, the novel is about Michael, not Hanna; the original German title, Der Vorleser, specifically indicates one who reads aloud, as Michael does for Hanna.
The Reader abounds with references to representations of the Holocaust, both external and internal to Michael's narrative, some real and some invented by Schlink. Of the latter, the most important is the book by the death-march survivor that constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna. It is summarized at some length and even briefly quoted, although its title is never given. Michael must read it in English since its German translation has not yet been published: "(It was) an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy." On a second reading in later life, he says, "it is the book that creates distance." For Michael, written media alone cannot convey a full impression of the Holocaust: the victims are not sympathetic, and the oppressors are too faceless to be judged. He cannot muster up the empathy to "make the experience part of his internal life," according to Froma Zeitlin. Hanna, however, has the opposite experience upon reading books by Holocaust survivors. She tells Michael:
I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.
When she asks the judge at her trial, "What would you have done?" about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, her question indicates that she does not know that she could have acted differently, and her statement that there was "no alternative" claims a lack of moral responsibility. As a result of her shame at being illiterate, she has not only let the bulk of the crime be pinned on her, she has let those with a greater share of responsibility escape full accountability. Franklin writes that this is the moral center of the novel—that Hanna, as Michael puts it, chooses exposure as a criminal over exposure as an illiterate—and in Franklin's view the novel cannot recover from the weakness of this position. Franklin regards it not only as implausible, but the implication that Hanna chose the job and acted as she did because of her illiteracy appears intended to exonerate her. Her Nazism was accidental, and Franklin writes that Schlink offers no guidance about how to punish a brutality of convenience, rather than of ideology.
Michael is aware that all his attempts to visualize what Hanna might have been like back then, what happened, are colored by what he has read and seen in movies. He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as she chose him later on, only to send that girl to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months. Did she do it to make the last months of the condemned more bearable, or to keep her secret safe? Michael's inability to both condemn and understand springs from this. He asks himself and the reader:
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?
