SOURCE: Hoffman, Eva. “The Uses of Illiteracy.” New Republic 218, no. 12 (23 March 1998): 33-6.

In the following review, Hoffman praises Schlink's narrative in The Reader, but cites shortcomings in Schlink's study of Hanna's subjective states and the novel's suggestion that literacy engenders moral cultivation.

Several years ago I was asked to participate in a public discussion with a German author who had written a memoir about the anguish and the guilt of growing up as a daughter of a minor Nazi functionary. I spent some time wondering whether I could work up the requisite sympathy for her plight; and I came to the conclusion that sympathy was warranted. As I read more memoirs and studies on this subject, I began to think that the difficulties faced by the “second generation” in Germany were in their way as painful as the problems often experienced by children of Holocaust survivors. For the...