The Reader sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list.[28] Critic Rainer Moritz of Die Welt wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd."[29] Werner Fuld wrote in Focus that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them."[30] In 1998 The Reader was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.
As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages.[12] Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex."[15] While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work."[14] It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in Oprah's Book Club in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France,[12] and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.
Criticism
Schlink's approach toward Hanna's culpability in the Final Solution has been a frequent complaint about the book. Early on he was accused of revising or falsifying history. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators.[31] In the English-speaking world, Frederic Raphael wrote that no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil."[32] Ron Rosenbaum, criticizing the film adaptation of The Reader, wrote that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate", "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate… You'd have to be exceedingly stupid."[13] (This refers to the January 30, 1939 statement to the Reichstag,[33] later deliberately misdated to 1 September 1939[34])
Cynthia Ozick in Commentary Magazine called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur."[35] Ozick's reading of the novel was challenged by Richard H. Weisberg, who highlighted a passage in the novel where Hanna strikes Michael repeatedly with a leather strap drawing blood and splitting his lip. In Weisberg's view, Schlink has Hanna revert to concentration-camp mode, the split lip reminding us of the bloodletting of millions.[36] Jeffrey I. Roth replied that Ozick had misread the novel, confusing the perspective of the immature and impressionable narrator, Michael Berg, who loves Hanna and cannot condemn her entirely, with the point of view of the author, Bernhard Schlink, who writes of Hanna, "That woman was truly brutal." Roth found in Hanna an unsympathetic character who behaves brutally and never fully accepts her criminal responsibility, making Ozick's suggestion, that Schlink wants us to sympathize with Hanna and by extension her Nazi cohorts, implausible.[37]
As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS painted a complex picture.[38] It appeared only in 2007, 12 years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on The Reader have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany.
Schlink wrote that "in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book," but those of his own generation were more likely to criticize Michael (and his) inability to fully condemn Hanna. He added, "I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."[12]
