Essay Questions

Why do you think Hanna was so ashamed of not being able to read, and was her shame enough of a reason to become a guard in the SS?

Hanna was deeply ashamed of her illiteracy, probably because she seems to value education so highly, and is therefore frustrated that the one thing she values, she does not have. Not being able to read probably also suggests a background from which she was anxious to escape. She is not a stupid woman and has the intelligence to understand the plots and meanings of the books that Michael is reading to her, and so is clearly capable of learning. She is not, however, capable of seeing what keeping her illiteracy hidden is doing to her life, as she misses out on several promotions during Michael's relationship with her, and it is anxiety of being promoted, and therefore revealed as illiterate, that prompts her to leave the Siemens factory and sign up as a guard. Wanting to keep your illiteracy a secret is not a good reason for becoming an SS guard, and becoming complicit in the torture and murder of prisoners, although it is unlikely that this is what she believed she would be doing when she signed up, probably believing she would be a prison guard in the accepted sense, guarding those who had transgressed and were in prison being punished for their actions.

Do you think Hanna seems to have remorse for her actions in the war?

Hanna is very defensive, and also wants the facts to be reported honestly and accurately. This is why she is brutally honest about what she did, and about what happened, and this can make her look heartless, and remorseless. She seems to lack the humanity to realize what she was a part of; to Hanna, she was ordered to fulfill a task, that of marching her "prisoners" as instructed, and this is what she did. She did not question it, or think about it afterwards. She did not make the connection with the fact that her part in the death march and the fire that burned all but two prisoners to death was in any way her fault, and her excuse for not unlocking the church door was that she would have been making it easier for the prisoners to escape, which she had expressly been told not to do. It's hard to see remorse in a woman who fell back on the popular Nazi excuse of "just following orders". It can be argued that she felt some remorse as the first books she read after learning how to read were all about the Holocaust, and the death camps, so it is possible that she had not realized the bigger picture of what had been going on and wanted to educate herself, and make herself stare her own evil in the face. Similarly, leaving her money to the survivor of the fire could be seen as remorse, but it could also be seen as an effort to appease her own need to feel better about what she did and to get some kind of public recognition of being remorseful. Overall, she does not seem to have any truly genuine remorse for her actions at all.

Does Michael make excuses for Hanna?

Michael does seem to search for excuses that explain some of Hanna's actions, but they are not so much excuses for her as for him; he feels very guilty that he loved a woman who was a death camp guard and a murderer, but by attributing a spark of humanity and kindness to her in her treatment of the prisoners he is also making it possible for himself to feel redeemed for loving her. For example, he tells himself that Hanna selected the weakest and sickest prisoners to read to her because she knew they were going to be killed and she wanted to make their last few days more bearable by giving them an easy, indoor job to do that required no manual labor. He also tells himself that she bequeathed her money to the survivor of the fire as an act of remorse, not as an act of appeasement for all of those who saw her as a monster.