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the critic as proof of the fact that "victim politics still have not managed
to entirely corrupt the reading public."
It
would appear that the historian's touch was needed in order to ruin
the literary experience of the amateur critic. "This is a book," writes
Omer Banov,
in which the real victims of the period are faceless; although the
author does not deny their torments, they remain abstract beings
incapable of arousing any emotion whatsoever in the readers. The
victims whom we meet belong to Germany's second generation,
and at their side are the innocent murderers, the illiterate, who had
no choice: wretched figures trapped in the inescapable destiny of
history; it is the torments of these figures which arouse in us iden–
tification and anguish.
The Reader,
as Bartov points out with a considerable degree of justifi–
cation,
deals with Germany as victim, Germany as a victim of its history
...of such massive and thorough murder that even those who per–
form it become its victims ... las doesl the second generation. This
is the German destiny. It is indeed possible that Hanna (in her
period in jail after the trial) might read the memoirs of Primo Levi,
Jean Emery, Tadeusz Borowski; but Michael suffers his own tor–
ments. Try as he may, he is unable to understand the anguish of
those who were tortured by Hanna and her co ll eagues. He can feel
their torments only to the extent that he relates their fate to his,
since after all, from his point of view he is the only victim with
whom he is capable of identifying.
It is, of course, quite impossible to determine the nature of the great
interest which the book aroused in Israel; and the claim that it sold fif–
teen thousand copies is still open to interpretation. But it may be rele–
vant to link this commercial success to another best-seller, also a
controversial work, and also to some extent related, albeit indirectly,
to
the issue of the second generation-Daniel Jonah Go ldhagen's book
Hitler's Willing Executioners
(1996).
While Schlink's book addresses
the experience and identity of the German second generation, of the vic–
tim and the murderer, they are not at the center of Goldhagen's book,
though undoubtedly closely related
to
its reception.
This book is one of the few academic books about the Holocaust
which quickly became a bestseller. Goldhagen, the son of a Holocaust
