It outlined the advance made by Hanna "from dependence to independence", describing it as "a step towards liberation". Its forward, by Sir Claus Moser, chairman of the Basic Skills Agency, used an illustration of the devastating effects of illiteracy, taken not from research, case study or personal experience, but from The Reader.
In 1999 the Department for Education and Employment published a comprehensive study of illiteracy and innumeracy. In Britain, where it has sold 200,000, it has had a remarkable endorsement. The Reader has sold 500,000 copies in Germany, 750,000 in America (where in 1999 it was featured on Oprah Winfrey's book club), and 100,000 in France. You have to go back to Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel, Perfume, for a comparable German international best-seller, and to the likes of Nobel laureates Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll in the 60s for German novels that have prompted such detailed critical scrutiny. The theme certainly chimes, in terms of dramatically echoing the Third Reich's moral illiteracy, but the way the book has been enthusiastically taken up and used almost as documentary points to an impact that has far exceeded Schlink's immediate narrative ambitions. But I do not know how they do that, and I'm really uninterested in the epistemology of my writing." I'm sure the things I think about and worry about in other contexts play into the stories I write. I did a great deal of research into it, but I never had an objective beyond telling that story. Schlink says that writing about illiteracy "was there when I started to think about the book.
Michael, by now a law student observing the trial, realises that Hanna is a secret illiterate, a fact that has profoundly affected her actions in the past as well as fatally undermining her defence in court. The Reader opens in post-war Germany when a 15-year-old boy, Michael, embarks on an affair with a 36-year-old woman, Hanna, who disappears, then years later turns up in the dock as a former concentration camp guard accused of the mass murder of Jewish women locked in a burning church.
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