Michael Berg and Gertrud’s marriage

Michael Berg and Gertrud’s marriage is a consequential but sparsely narrated part of Michael’s adult life: it gives them a daughter, Julia, and a shared domestic period, then ends in separation and divorce. Its significance lies partly in what follows. Michael describes turning toward legal history as an escape from professional and personal demands, and, after the marriage ends, recording books for Hanna, whose memory continues to occupy him. The marriage is neither a simple counterweight to his earlier relationship with Hanna nor a story of recovery; its aftermath exposes the distance between outward responsibility and inward attachment.

Beginning a Shared Life

After his state examination, Michael has to choose a legal profession. He delays that choice while Gertrud, who begins work in the judiciary, takes on the difficulties of starting her career. They are happy that he can remain at home and care for Julia. When Gertrud has settled into her work and Julia reaches kindergarten, Michael can no longer defer deciding what to do.

Their arrangement shows a shared family life organized around work and childcare, but the account gives little direct access to the couple’s private affections or disagreements at this stage. The concrete details are practical: Gertrud works in the judiciary, Michael stays home with their daughter, and the transition to kindergarten changes the circumstances that had allowed him to postpone his own professional choice.

Michael’s Retreat into Legal History

Michael finds the legal roles he has encountered at Hanna’s trial unappealing. He regards prosecution and defense as grotesque simplifications, and judging as an even greater one. His experience in a local-government office has left him unwilling to imagine himself as an administrator: its rooms, corridors, and employees seemed gray, sterile, and dreary. A professor of legal history offers him a research position, giving him a way to postpone choosing a conventional legal career.

Gertrud calls the decision an evasion from life’s challenges and responsibilities. Michael acknowledges that she is right, and says he is relieved to escape. He tells himself that the research position is temporary, but the first retreat leads to another: he leaves the university for a research institution, where he finds a niche that lets him pursue legal history without needing or disturbing anyone. The narrator’s later account makes this choice more than a career detail. His professional withdrawal runs alongside the marriage’s eventual breakdown, though the text does not present the job change as its sole cause.

Michael’s work also complicates the idea that retreat means leaving the present behind. As a legal historian he studies law in the Third Reich, a subject in which past and present meet. He describes historical work as building bridges between them, and argues that concentrating on the present and future while ignoring the past is itself a form of escape. His research therefore offers both refuge and confrontation: it provides a secluded niche, yet repeatedly brings him back to the history and responsibility he would rather master at a distance.

Separation and the Afterlife of the Marriage

After Michael and Gertrud separate, he has many nights when sleep comes only in short stretches. He reads aloud because reading silently makes his eyes close, while reading aloud keeps him awake. His thoughts circle around his marriage, his daughter, and his life, but Hanna predominates. He begins recording the readings for her, starting with the Odyssey and then adding stories by Schnitzler and Chekhov before sending the first package to the prison where she is serving her sentence.

The sequence places the end of the marriage beside Michael’s return to Hanna through recorded literature. The tapes do not establish that the marriage ended because of his attachment to Hanna, but they show that after separation his emotional life remains strongly oriented toward her memory. The reading project begins amid sleeplessness and confused recollection, making it both a concrete act directed toward Hanna and a way Michael gives form to thoughts that otherwise circle around his failed domestic life.

Years later, Michael describes himself as divorced from Gertrud for many years. He says Julia is at boarding school and hopes she will move in with him for the final years of school. This later account gives the marriage’s consequences a continuing, ordinary presence: the couple’s relationship has ended, but their daughter remains central to Michael’s hopes and plans. The text does not describe Gertrud’s later life or explain the circumstances of the divorce.

Memory, Responsibility, and the Marriage’s Meaning

In the years after Hanna’s death, Michael is tormented by questions about whether he denied or betrayed her, whether he owed her something, and whether he was responsible for her death. He also feels rage at Hanna and at what she had done to him. Eventually the rage fades and the questions cease to matter to him in the same way; he regards the course his life took as the fact that remains, regardless of what either of them did or failed to do. The marriage belongs to this retrospective accounting, but it is not offered as a solution to his conflict over Hanna.

Michael’s narration also refuses a clean division between past and present. His work in legal history has taught him to see them as connected, while the end of his marriage and his later reflections on it show how personal history persists without yielding a single definitive explanation. He eventually writes the story of himself and Hanna, after trying first to write in order to be free of it and then to recover memories that seemed to be slipping away. The account that returns to him is not simply happy or sad; he calls it true. Against that broader narrative, his marriage to Gertrud appears as a real but incompletely explained chapter: a life of family and shared responsibilities that ends, leaving Michael to continue as a father, a historian, and a man still reckoning with an earlier attachment.