Der Vorleser claims to be an attempt to deal with the problem of first- and second-generation German guilt, Donahue argues, but what it really accomplishes is the erasure of that guilt. And, intriguingly enough, that is precisely what, Donahue claims, occurs in Der Vorleser itself-a divergence of the declarative and performative registers. In other words, the declarative and performative registers of this book diverge. We have here, in other words, a monograph which claims that its very object of study is unworthy, but which does so at such length and with such insistence and vigour that the study’s reader is forced to conclude that perhaps, aer all, there might be something worthwhile in the aesthetic object under consideration. And yet, on the other hand, Donahue has written a book-length study of Der Vorleser and an even longer German-language translation of the same study (which contains an additional chapter), a study that is longer, in fact, than Der Vorleser itself. )-and Der Vorleser, for him, clearly falls into the latter category. ‘Our task’, Donahue proclaims, ‘is to differentiate works that function critically from those primarily in the service of evasion’ (p. Donahue clearly wants to champion a literature that sticks ‘in the craw of readers’, that unsettles and disturbs them, as Adorno argued that the greatest high culture should do. ‘Schlink’s hero’ Michael Berg, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Der Vorleser, is, Donahue argues, ‘so utterly “consumable ” (in this Adornian sense) that it is hard to imagine him sticking in the craw of readers’ (p. ) with its reflections on gaps, impossibilities, and irretrievable loss. Adorno, would like to uphold the value of high art in addressing the most difficult moral problems-what the author calls ‘the German high cultural tradition’ (p. One senses that William Collins Donahue, in line with eodor W. In fact it suggests that evasiveness is one of the main reasons for the novel’s international success. On the one hand it is a stinging critique of Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel Der Vorleser, since it in essence claims that the novel helps Germans and others to evade the hard ethical and political questions posed by the Holocaust. ere is something deeply paradoxical about this book. Holocaust Lite: Bernhard Schlinks ‘NS-Romane’ und ihre Verfilmungen. U B I W Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and their Films. )-not, that is, as a nostalgic harking back but as a utopian harking forward to that yet-to-be-realized hope of which the extinct GDR continues to provide a powerful reminder even in its remarkably vigorous aerlife. Reviews Ostalgie to be understood ‘as a desire for the promise but not the reality of the GDR’ (p. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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