Michael's cassette readings to Hanna

Michael's cassette readings to Hanna transform a private, wordless attachment into a long-running act of communication. Begun after his separation from Gertrud and continued through Hanna's imprisonment, the recordings carry books and eventually Michael's own writing, but never his personal news: he reads to Hanna without asking after her or speaking directly about himself. The tapes sustain a connection while preserving the silence that defines it.

Origin and First Package

After separating from Gertrud, Michael lies awake through nights when sleep comes only for a few hours. Reading aloud keeps his eyes open; in the confused thoughts circling his marriage, his daughter, and his life, Hanna predominates. He turns that private reading into an address, recording himself for her. The tapes begin not with a plan for correspondence but with an intimate association between wakefulness, remembered turmoil, and Hanna.

The first undertaking grows into a complete collection before Michael sends anything. He starts with the Odyssey, but does not want to send fragments, so he records the whole work. He then doubts whether Hanna will find it sufficiently interesting and adds stories by Schnitzler and Chekhov. He delays contacting the court that convicted her to learn where she is imprisoned. Only after he has her address at a prison near the city where she was tried and convicted, a cassette player, and tapes numbered from Chekhov to Schnitzler to Homer, does he finally mail the package. His hesitation shapes the communication before Hanna can answer: he prepares a substantial gift, then postpones the act of sending it.

Repertoire and Routine

Michael's reading is largely governed by his own taste and reading life. He records what he wants to read at a given moment, as well as familiar books he loves. Hanna hears Keller and Fontane, Heine and Mörike; Michael initially avoids poetry, then discovers pleasure in reading it and learns many of the poems by heart. The notebook he later finds records the titles he read to her over the years. Its first twelve entries appear to have been written together, likely after he realized that he needed notes to remember what he had already recorded; dates beside later titles are intermittent.

The repertoire also marks the limits of what Michael imagines they need. The titles, in his retrospective assessment, express confidence in bourgeois culture. He does not recall asking whether to go beyond Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann, and Lenz to experimental literature whose stories and characters he might not recognize or like. He assumes such writing would be experimenting with its reader, and that neither Hanna nor he needs it. The selections therefore communicate not only through what is read, but through Michael's unexamined sense of what belongs in their shared listening.

The arrangement lasts across years of imprisonment rather than following a fixed schedule. Michael remembers sending the first package in Hanna's eighth year of confinement and the last in her eighteenth; in that final year, her plea for clemency is granted. During a year in America he sends tapes from there. Vacations and especially busy periods slow him down, and the intervals vary from a week or two to three or four weeks. He never establishes a regular rhythm. Even after Hanna learns to read by herself, he continues: reading aloud remains his way of speaking to her, and with her.

The Recording as a Form of Address

The tapes offer literary speech while withholding ordinary personal exchange. Michael never makes a personal remark, asks after Hanna, or tells her anything about himself. Each recording follows a spare ritual: he announces the title and author, reads the text, waits briefly when it is finished, closes the book, and presses Stop. The stop button gives the contact a literal boundary. He delivers a voice, but does not use it to begin the conversation a letter might have opened.

The ritual does not mean that the readings have no effect on Michael himself. At first he finds that he can take in less of the Odyssey aloud than silently, and that reading aloud takes longer; in time, however, the books remain unusually vivid in his memory. He can still recall passages clearly. The recordings thus create a double practice: the words are sent toward Hanna, but their extended, vocal form also shapes what Michael absorbs and remembers.

When Michael begins writing, he adds his own pieces to the repertoire, but only after bringing them to what he considers completion. He dictates his handwritten text, revises the typed version, and waits until he feels it is finished before reading it aloud. Hearing it lets him test whether that feeling is right; if it is not, he can revise and record a new version over the old one, though he dislikes doing so. He wants the reading to be the culmination. In his imagination Hanna becomes the court before which he concentrates his energies, creativity, and critical imagination; only after that hearing does he send the manuscript to the publisher. She is at once the recipient of the recording and an imagined judge of work that will enter public life.

Reply, Distance, and Significance

In the fourth year of what Michael calls their word-driven, wordless contact, Hanna sends a note thanking him and saying that the last story was especially nice. The reply is brief, but it makes the one-way recordings part of an exchange. Later notes remain only a few lines long: Hanna thanks him, requests more or less of an author, comments on poems, stories, characters, or prison, and mentions what she notices from her window. Her observations bring small details—the flowering forsythia, summer storms, birds flying south—to Michael's attention. Her literary judgments can be sharply assured even though she knows nothing about the authors and often assumes they are contemporaries unless something makes that impossible.

Michael never writes back, but he keeps reading. He also keeps Hanna's notes, whose handwriting changes over time: at first she forces the letters into a consistent slant and correct height and width; once she manages that, her hand grows lighter and more confident, though it never becomes fluid. The exchange thus has two distinct forms. His voice arrives through prepared, reproducible readings, while her brief handwritten replies record a developing ability to shape words on the page.

The tapes' central tension is contained in their form. They allow Michael to address Hanna repeatedly, across distance and years, without entering the personal conversation that might expose his life or ask for hers. Their literary contents create a shared space, and Hanna's notes show that she listens, judges, and answers; nevertheless, Michael keeps the exchange bounded by the text and the moment he presses Stop. The recordings make closeness possible without resolving the silence between them.