Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 62

58 Popular Culture Review Shortly after their affair begins, Michael goes away with Hanna on a four-day biking trip through south-central Germany. Their travel is full of color and passion, and Hanna allows Michael to dominate in selecting the path, the inns, and the restaurants. It is during this trip that the first defined clues of Hanna’s illiteracy surface. On one occasion, Hanna overreacts when Michael leaves a note that he is going out for breakfast. When he returns, Hanna explodes with shuddering, violence, physical tears, and animal sounds—a passion that hides her inability to read. Interestingly, it is during this interlude that they read German romantic author Joseph von Eichendorff s Memoirs o f a Good-for-Nothing, a nineteenth-century picaresque account of a young man who leaves home after a fight with his father over the girl he loves: She liked the disguises, the mix-ups, the complications and pursuits which the hero gets mixed up in in Italy. At the same time, she held it against him that he’s a good-for-nothing who doesn’t achieve anything, can’t do anything, and doesn’t want to besides. She was tom in all directions; hours after I stopped reading, she was still coming up with questions. (57) Over the summer, as the pull of his classmates and adolescent activities entices Michael to leave Hanna’s world, their affair wanes. Michael has sacrificed the company and camaraderie of his schoolmates for his affair with Hanna. But the reading of literature continues to offer them a sanctuary; together they experience Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel new to them both. But this time, Hanna does not actively engage herself in the novel’s world, as she had with other works that Michael read to her. Instead, she reacted to the reading as an outsider, absorbed in the milieu that the author created. The sanctuary offered by this world became more “open.” As Michael is pulled by friends and activities at the local swimming pool, the pool mirrors the depth of the differences between the two of them—education, age, socioeconomic status: “we did not have a world we shared” (77). By the end of the summer, Hanna disappears, cementing the denial, disavowal, and betrayal that Michael began when the pull of his peer group overtook the passion of the relationship he had with Hanna. During the second part of the novel, Michael is a young law student who describes his ennui as an envelope, completely “effortless”: ...“I had no difficulty with anything. Everything was easy: nothing weighed heavily. Perhaps that is why my bundle of memories is so small” (88). But it is during this time, after losing Hanna, that he spends shapeless afternoons, unable to open books without asking “if they were suitable for reading aloud” (87). During his legal studies, he serendipitously becomes involved as an observer in a Nazi war crimes trial. Hanna and four other female SS guards are accused of preventing many young female Jewish prisoners from escaping a bombed, burning church near Cracow in 1944. Testimony from concentration