Hanna Schmitz

Hanna Schmitz is at once Michael Berg’s older lover, a former SS guard, a defendant in a war-crimes trial, and a woman whose lifelong illiteracy governs much of what she can risk revealing about herself. The novel does not let that vulnerability cancel her culpability: it explains her evasions and her conduct at trial while insisting that she committed crimes and must answer for them. Her late acquisition of literacy opens a route toward knowledge, but not an easy reconciliation with the past or with Michael.

Identity and Background

Hanna gives Michael her first name after he asks for it; she laughs, and the exchange begins a relationship whose familiarity does not remove the distance between them. When Michael later sees her in court, he recognizes her only as she is called, then identifies her by her bearing and physical presence. She is forty-three, born on October 21, 1922, near Hermannstadt. She worked at Siemens in Berlin before joining the SS in autumn 1943.

The prosecution’s questions about her decision expose a consequential choice. Siemens had offered her a foreman’s job, but she applied for SS guard work when women were being recruited at factories. Her lawyer objects to the court’s framing of the decision, and the judge drops the question of why she joined. The impression nevertheless remains that she acted voluntarily, not under pressure. Her account of how she entered the SS is direct; it does not make the choice less hers.

Illiteracy and the Shape of Her Choices

Michael’s recognition that Hanna can neither read nor write reorganizes the meaning of episodes he had previously been unable to understand. She had relied on other people to read to her. On their bicycle trip, Michael therefore did the reading and writing; later, when she found his note at a hotel, she feared that he would assume she could read it and discover her secret. At work, she avoided promotion by the streetcar company because training as a driver would have exposed her difficulty, just as she had refused promotion at Siemens before becoming a guard.

At trial, the same limitation leaves her unable to read the indictment or a survivor’s manuscript and to grasp the opportunities for a strategic defense. Michael considers telling the judge that her illiteracy has compromised her defense and made her appear more singularly defiant than she is. Yet he understands that a disclosure might reduce her sentence only by exposing what she has spent her life concealing. Hanna is not willing to exchange her self-image for fewer years in prison; Michael does not tell the court.

The discovery offers an explanation, not an acquittal. Michael rejects the suspicion that Hanna sent vulnerable prisoners to Auschwitz because they had read to her or might expose her illiteracy. He concludes instead that she chose some prisoners to read to her in order to make their last month more bearable before their inevitable deportation. He also interprets her trial conduct not as a calculated decision to accept criminal exposure rather than harmless exposure as illiterate, but as a struggle for her own sense of truth and justice. That struggle is limited and compromised by her concealment, yet, in his account, real.

Trial, Responsibility, and the Limits of Explanation

Hanna’s conduct in court is marked by a blunt insistence on distinguishing what she believes is true from what she believes is false. When she thinks an accusation is unjust, she contradicts it; when she cannot deny a claim, she admits it. She acknowledges taking part in the camp selections when the other defendants deny involvement, prompting the judge to question her further. But she has little sense of how courtroom procedure turns statements into a case for guilt or innocence. Her public defender is inexperienced, and she withholds trust from him without choosing another lawyer she trusts more.

Her insistence can damage her defense. She misunderstands the implications of the court record concerning the church keys and asks why the court is trying to pin something on her; the presiding judge takes this as an accusation of unfairness. Later she gives up trying to participate on her own terms, speaking only when directly questioned and answering briefly, sometimes while remaining seated. Michael, a law student and spectator turned participant in his own mind, sees that her defense has been impaired. He also recognizes that correcting the court would violate the boundary Hanna has chosen to protect. Her illiteracy explains the conditions of her apparent candor and strategic failure; it does not undo her participation in the crimes.

Prison, Reading, and Contact with Michael

After his marriage to Gertrud ends, Michael reads aloud to Hanna on cassette. He records the Odyssey first, then stories by Schnitzler and Chekhov, and eventually sends her the tapes with a cassette player. He waits until he has recorded the whole Odyssey before mailing anything, then delays again while choosing further works and finding out where she is imprisoned. The first package arrives in the eighth year of her sentence; he continues sending recordings until the eighteenth, the year her plea for clemency is granted. On the tapes he gives the titles and authors, reads the texts, and says nothing personal about himself or asks after her.

In the fourth year of this word-driven, wordless contact, Hanna sends a short note thanking him for the last story. The handwriting is laborious: she presses so hard that the letters mark the other side of the paper. The note makes visible the effort behind a change Michael had not witnessed directly. He had not thought about her eventual release and admits that the familiar arrangement of distance and connection suited him; his cassettes gave Hanna a place in his life without requiring him to give her a place in the rest of it.

When Michael visits her in prison, he finds an older Hanna holding a book but not reading it. She recognizes him with joy, then studies his face and becomes uncertain and hurt before greeting him warmly and taking his hand. He tells her he had been proud when she learned to read and admired the letters she wrote. He also knows that his admiration was slight beside the effort literacy demanded, especially since he had not answered her note, visited, or spoken to her during those years. Hanna’s achievement is genuine, but it cannot by itself repair the distance he maintained.

Knowledge of the Camps and the Dead

Once Hanna learns to read, she begins reading about concentration camps. She asks Michael for a general bibliography and later for books about women in the camps, both prisoners and guards; he consults the Institute for Contemporary History for a specialized list. In her cell, literature by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, and Jean Améry sits beside works about the camps, including Rudolf Hess’s autobiography and Hannah Arendt’s report on Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her new literacy becomes a means of approaching the history in which she was implicated, rather than merely a practical skill.

When Michael asks whether she thought about the trial’s subject before or during their relationship, Hanna says she had always felt that no one understood her. If no one understood her, she believed, no one could hold her to account—not even the court. The dead, she says, could: in prison they came to her every night, whereas before the trial she could still chase them away. Michael cannot answer. He recognizes that his way of keeping Hanna in a private niche had also been a way of keeping her, and the past she represented, at a distance.

Release, Death, and the Bequest

The prison warden writes to Michael because his correspondence is Hanna’s only contact with the outside world. The warden expects the parole board to grant her next appeal and anticipates her release after eighteen years. She is healthy and has shown skill in the prison sewing shop, but the warden worries that someone leaving prison after so long may feel lonely and helpless outside. Michael visits, yet the prospect of ordinary life together remains unclear; his contact with Hanna has been sustained through a carefully bounded routine, not a shared future.

The next morning, Hanna dies by suicide at daybreak, before the planned release. Her death leaves Michael to meet the warden and learn how Hanna spent her final years: respected by the other women, reserved but friendly, and often sought for advice. The warden describes a later retreat even from this relatively ordered life, as Hanna increasingly withdrew from its social routines. The anticipated transition back into the world never takes place.

Hanna leaves a practical instruction rather than a personal letter to Michael. Money in her lavender tea tin, together with 7,000 marks in the bank, is to be sent to the daughter who survived the church fire with her mother; the woman is to decide what to do with it. Hanna asks that Michael be told hello. The recipient refuses the money for herself and asks him instead to find an appropriate Jewish organization, with any payment made in Hanna Schmitz’s name; she keeps the tea tin. The bequest directs Hanna’s remaining resources toward a survivor, but its modest greeting does not resolve the silence between Hanna and Michael.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hanna’s story is structured by disclosures that change the meaning of what came before: Michael first learns her name, later recognizes her as a defendant, and only after the trial understands that she is illiterate. Each recognition explains part of her behavior while leaving the central moral problem intact. Her age, gender, limited literacy, work history, and status as a defendant shape her vulnerability within institutions; none makes her actions interchangeable with innocence. The distinction between explaining a person and excusing her is the pressure point of Michael’s account.

Reading links the private relationship to the public history of the camps. As a young man, Michael reads to Hanna in person; years later, he sends books into prison by recording them. When Hanna can finally read for herself, she turns toward testimony and historical writing about the camps. But this exchange remains asymmetrical: she receives his voice without receiving news of his life, while he can maintain contact without confronting the demands of a shared present. Her death ends that arrangement, leaving him with both her words about accountability and an unfinished obligation to the people harmed by her actions.