Analysis Of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink was published in 1995 as a text about an inter-generational love affair. This is what the text would appear to be if the cultural, social and historical context was not known. Based in Germany, the reader must be aware of the atrocities of the country before reading, as this text deals closely with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Without previous knowledge about this abomination in history, the book would read as an abusive love affair between a fifteen year old boy and a thirty-six year old woman. The text would abandon all potency, strength and relevance without being connected to history, notably adapting the second tenet of new historicism. With the application of new historicism, this book becomes something more than a text to be enjoyed. It reveals emotions that have been kept silent for years. Balkaya says that “new historicism is based on the analysis of cultural, historical, social, political, economic and moral interaction of the periods in which the literary works were written” and therefore, one would look at the narrative of the everyday experience within The Reader to take a new historicist approach (7068). Greenblatt once stated that it is less important to look at obvious matters in history and that it should be “less noticeable ones” or “marginals” that should be dealt with (Balkaya 7069). The historical moment in The Reader is obvious, as the Holocaust is a subject area that many are familiar and learned in. However, The