Answer to 2 Questions

1) Is Hanna afforded any absolution for her crimes? Does she achieve any sense of ‘atonement’?
Hanna Schmitz goes to court for her war crimes. The court judges her and decides to place her in jail with a 15 year life sentence. Hanna says that “the dead can understand” her and her crimes which suggests that the court cant punish her and condemn her for what she’s done because the court does not understand what she’s done but the dead, those whom she’s killed understand her crimes and thus can condemn and punish her. She says that the dead visit her at night which suggests that she suffers from nightmares that are linked to her crimes. This suggests that because she is suffering and that this is somewhat a punishment from the dead that she is achieving a small proportion of atonement. I think that it is only a small proportion because it is only a nightmare and it is only making Hanna understand what she’s done. These nightmares results to her committing suicide. Although this shows the gravity of the affects the nightmare had on her, I believe that this doesn’t allow her to achieve a sense of atonement because her suicide was a way to escape her small punishment, being the nightmare. Finally the survivor women can’t accept her atonement, she says that her “years in imprisonment were not merely the required atonement” this shows the anger in the women, for such light punishment given to Hanna which suggests that the dead would have given her a more harsher punishment.

2) Is Schlink guilty of the unforgivable act (especially unforgivable given his nationality) of making the unacceptable somehow acceptable and of deliberately using his skills as a writer to encourage readers to feel sympathy for Hanna?
Bernhard Schlink is a fourth-generation person, which means he is four generations away from the people directly involved in the war. He wrote “the reader” to express the lifestyle he had as a kid to find out that those he admired had been a war criminal or have done terrible things during war. Schlink made the unforgivable act of genocides, acceptable in the eyes of Michael. I believe that this isn’t guilty but rather sympathetic, because people like Schlink are not directly involved in the war and yet they have to suffer in a way that Michael got hurt from having a relationship with Hanna.
Schlink uses his skills as a writer to encourage readers to feel sympathetic for Hanna because he was a person who admired another person who was like Michael being in a relationship with Hanna and this was what Schlink wanted to express. The way Michael wanted Hanna to be forgiven, especially seen when Michael at an older age and after hearing that Hanna had committed suicide goes out to fulfill her will. Schlink wanted to show the readers how he wanted his admired people to be forgiven. I do not think that it is guilty because this is the intentions Schlink had as an author to express to the reader, and as a reader I could understand what Schlink has gone through if we relate him to Michael, and thus giving us sympathy for him just like we did for Michael. Schlink only used his writing skills to express how he wanted his admired people to be forgiven just like Hanna being forgiven.