Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films by William Collins Donahue (review)

Since its initial publication in 1995 and subsequent translation into almost forty languages, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader has become one of the most popular works of Holocaust fiction ever. Especially after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club and an Academy Award nominated film adaptation extended the tale’s reach even further, The Reader’s popularity has almost come to rival that of canonical nonfiction works such as Elie Wiesel’s Night or The Diary of Anne Frank. Particularly in American university classrooms, this internationally successful book is now a frequent point of entry into Holocaust Studies. With Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films, William Collins Donahue has written an important and thorough work of scholarship that sorts through what one book jacket blurb aptly dubs the “Schlink phenomenon.” Through close analysis of Schlink’s The Reader, his other, less-well-known “Nazi novels,” and their cinematic adaptations, this monograph produces valuable insights about the moral ambiguity that Schlink’s novels problematically depict and that readers and film audiences around the world have so warmly embraced.

At it most basic level, Holocaust as Fiction examines the debates surrounding Schlink’s Nazi-themed works and how they contribute to a normalization of Holocaust memory. Along with The Reader, these novels also include the Selb trilogy of mystery novels (Selbs Justiz [1987], Selbs Betrug [1992], and Selbs Mord [2001]) that appeared during the years of intense and often heated Holocaust memorial discourse in the years after German reunification. Although Donahue begins by analyzing the Selb trilogy in Chapter 1, Holocaust as Fiction is most invested in The Reader, and understandably so, as Schlink’s international reputation rests primarily on this book.

Donahue’s main argument is this: with questions of morality and responsibility, Schlink tries to have his proverbial cake and eat it, too, and he enables his readers to do the same. His Nazi novels “give rise not to a rich Kafka-like penumbra of semiotic meanings (and rich deferral of signification) but instead a bimodal interpretive structure.” Donahue calls this sowohl-als-auch structure Schlink’s “Aphrodite strategy.” This coinage alludes to famous paintings such as Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486) in which Venus (Aphrodite), perched atop a shell, unsuccessfully attempts to preserve her modesty by shielding her breasts and genitals from viewers’ voyeuristic gazes (11–12). She attracts the gaze even as she ostensibly rebuffs it, just as The Reader’s teenage protagonist Michael Berg is sexually attracted to the former SS-guard Hanna Schmitz yet repulsed by her crimes. Donahue reads Schlink’s novels as enacting the Aphrodite strategy with questions of guilt, complicity, and responsibility. The Reader introduces enough moral ambiguities that, as soon as one critic labels it as apologizing for Hanna’s crimes and, implicitly, those of an entire generation of low- and mid-level perpetrators, many of them socially disadvantaged and in Schmitz’s case, illiterate, another critic can jump in and point to scenes that condemn Germans. Donahue argues that by focusing so heavily on moral ambiguity, Schlink lets readers ignore many instances that quite simply lacked such complexity. This Aphrodite strategy has become a way to deal with “Holocaust exhaustion.” Inconclusive pseudo-intellectual statements and reductive rhetorical questions (“it’s complicated” or “what would you have done?”) allow readers to feel like they have discharged their responsibility to engage the genocide’s moral inscrutability. At the same time, this ambiguity implicitly mitigates perpetrator guilt. Ultimately, such instances of moral uncertainty or inscrutability effectively foreclose critical discussion in favor of reductive platitudes that become substitutes for undertaking the difficult and unpleasant work of moral inquiry into genocide.

To advance this subtle and convincing argument, Donahue begins chronologically with the Selb trilogy (and the films based on it) and shows how it “serves as a kind of x-ray...