Michael Berg is a German who has grown up very aware of what was perpetrated by the Nazis during the Third Reich, and like many young men his age feels anger and shame which he directs mostly at his parents' and grandparents' generation for sitting by and enabling it to happen. Michael begins the novel by telling the reader that as a fifteen-year-old boy he became involved with a woman in her mid-thirties, and that he has remained infatuated with her memory ever since. Going home from school one afternoon, he began to feel nauseous and vomited violently all over himself; a woman sees him and brings him into her apartment to clean him up before he goes home. He has hepatitis and is sick for some time, but when he is feeling better his mother dispatches him to the woman's apartment so that he can thank her properly. The woman is busy with errands but Michael finds himself strangely attracted to her and runs out of the apartment like a child.
When Michael returns, he helps her by bringing coal up to the apartment but is so covered in dirt from it that she runs him a bath. Seeing each other naked they are drawn inexplicably to each other. From that day Michael goes to her every day. She shares with him only the bare facts of her life; her name is Hanna, she is a conductor on the street car and she lives alone. She also loves Michael to read aloud to her which he does every day. Hungry to spend more time together, Michael tells his parents he is taking a short trip with a friend during the summer vacation, but he is actually going on a trip with Hanna. He maps out their route, prepares their bicycles and makes all the plans. They both greatly enjoy the trip and it seems to increase their addiction to each other even more.
In the Fall, Michael goes back to school, where he makes more friends and is moderately attracted to a classmate called Sophie. He enjoys her company and enjoys being with his friends at the local swimming pool where the kids congregate. One afternoon he looks up and sees Hanna on the other side of the pool. She doesn't wave and when he looks again she has gone. Michael feels guilty for not having gone over to speak to her and so he goes to her apartment but finds that she has upped and left without saying a word.
The next time Michael sees Hanna, he is a law student and she is on trial for Nazi war crimes. During the war she was an SS guard at Auschwitz and along with three other women guarded Jewish prisoners on a "death march" through a village that was long deserted. The church was empty, as were the cleric's living quarters. The guards took the cleric's house for themselves and locked the prisoners in the church, but the church caught on fire and nobody could escape. None of the guards unlocked the doors. Only two people - a mother and her daughter - survived. The daughter wrote a book about their experiences which enabled authorities to identify Hanna and the other guards and bring them to justice. Michael is a law student whose class is studying the trial so he is present in court every day. He realizes that Hanna cannot read and joined the SS to avoid the promotion in her job that would reveal her illiteracy. Hanna comes over as remorseless and brutal in court. She is sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Michael continues to send her cassettes of him reading aloud and she responds back after a year or two with scratchy penmanship - he realizes she has learned to read and write in prison.
Almost eighteen years later, the prison warden contacts Michael and asks him to help Hanna acclimate to the outside world when she is released; however when he goes to pick her up he learns that she hung herself the evening before. She has left instructions that her money should be bequeathed to the surviving daughter from the burning church. Michael takes the money to her but she wants only the tea canisters it was kept in. He decides to donate the money to a Jewish literacy program in her name.
