Reading aloud and tape recordings

Reading aloud and tape recordings are the central medium of Michael Berg’s long, one-sided connection with Hanna Schmitz in prison. They let him speak to her without writing or visiting, while their repeated, controlled format gives Hanna a way to learn to read and write. The tapes sustain intimacy across years, but also preserve the distance Michael chooses: he sends texts, not news of himself, and Hanna’s brief notes cannot make him answer.

The tapes begin as a private practice

After separating from Gertrud, Michael lies awake for much of the night, caught in memories and dreams about his marriage, his daughter, and his life. When he picks up a book, he finds that reading aloud keeps his eyes open. Hanna predominates in his unsettled thoughts, so he begins reading to her on tape. The recordings originate in insomnia and private recollection before they become a continuing form of communication.

Michael delays sending the first package. He does not want to send fragments, so he records all of the Odyssey; then, uncertain whether Hanna will find it interesting enough, he adds stories by Schnitzler and Chekhov. He also postpones contacting the court that convicted her to learn where she is serving her sentence. Only when he has gathered her prison address, a cassette player, and the tapes does he mail the package. The first bundle, arranged from Chekhov to Schnitzler to Homer, makes the act of sending as deliberate as the reading itself.

The practice lasts through much of Hanna’s imprisonment. Michael’s notebook records the books, and its first twelve titles appear to have been entered together. He knows that the first package went out in the eighth year of her sentence and the last in the eighteenth, the year her plea for clemency was granted. The recordings thus span a decade, beginning well after the conviction and continuing to the approach of her release.

A voice, a repertoire, and a private audience

Michael generally reads what he wants to read at the time. The Odyssey is initially harder to absorb aloud than silently, and reading takes longer; in return, the books remain especially vivid in his memory. He also records works he already knows and loves, including those of Keller and Fontane, Heine and Mörike. He is slow to risk reading poetry, but eventually enjoys it and learns many poems by heart. The tapes carry not a specially assembled curriculum but the changing shape of Michael’s own reading life.

The choices register a confidence in established bourgeois culture. Michael does not recall asking himself whether to move beyond Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann, and Lenz toward experimental literature whose stories or characters he might not recognize or like. He assumes that such writing experiments on the reader and that neither Hanna nor he needs that experience. The repertoire therefore joins them through shared listening while also revealing the limits Michael places on what they will encounter together.

When Michael begins writing, he reads his own work aloud to Hanna only after dictating and revising the typed version. The recording becomes a test: if reading it aloud does not feel right, he revises and records over the earlier version, though he dislikes doing so. He wants the reading to be a culmination. In his imagination, Hanna is the court before which he concentrates his creative and critical energies, and her listening precedes his sending the manuscript to a publisher. The prison audience has become an artistic tribunal, even though Hanna receives no account of the personal life that surrounds the work.

The discipline of one-way contact

Michael keeps the recordings rigorously impersonal. He never makes a personal remark, asks after Hanna, or tells her anything about himself. He announces the title and author, reads the text, pauses when it ends, closes the book, and presses Stop. The small ritual sets a clear boundary around what can pass from him to her: literary works arrive, but conversation does not.

There is no fixed timetable. During a year in America, Michael mails tapes from there; vacations and work sometimes delay the next one. He sends them at uneven intervals, sometimes every week or two, sometimes after three or four weeks. Even after Hanna can read for herself, he does not worry that the tapes have become unnecessary. He understands reading aloud as his way of speaking to her and being with her, not simply as a substitute for printed books.

In the fourth year of this word-driven but wordless contact, Hanna sends a note thanking him for the last story. The physical effort preserved in the paper makes her reply an important counterpoint to Michael’s polished voice and fixed procedure. It is lined notebook paper cut smooth, written in blue ballpoint with such pressure that the words and address leave marks through the sheet. Michael reads the note with joy: Hanna can write. Her first response does not break the pattern of mediated contact, but it shows that the listener has acquired a written voice of her own.

Listening becomes a path to literacy

Hanna learns to read by borrowing the books Michael records from the library and following the tapes word by word and sentence by sentence. The process makes the recording equipment part of her instruction: frequent stopping, switching on and off, rewinding, and fast-forwarding wear out the cassette player, which repeatedly has to be repaired. Since repairs require permission, the prison official learns what Hanna is doing. When she starts writing and asks for a writing manual, she no longer tries to conceal her effort; she is proud of succeeding and wants to share her happiness.

Michael’s voice and the printed page work together, but they are not interchangeable. The recordings give Hanna a sequence she can replay and match to borrowed books, while the physical tapes remain vulnerable to the mechanical strain of her method. She learns by controlling the playback—stopping, rewinding, and advancing until speech and print correspond. Literacy emerges through repeated acts of listening and comparing, not through a single revelation or a lesson delivered face to face.

Hanna’s first handwriting looks awkward, but its difficulty is not childish aimlessness: each letter has to be forced into form. Michael recognizes that learning to write represents more than a new skill. He has read about how illiteracy makes ordinary tasks—finding one’s way, locating an address, choosing a restaurant meal—dependent on familiar routines, and how much energy is spent hiding an inability to read. Hanna’s effort to learn marks a move from dependence toward independence. Yet the tapes do not remove the emotional cost of the arrangement: Michael celebrates her achievement without having answered her notes or made a personal visit.

Contact without an answer

After Hanna’s first note, more arrive, each only a few lines long. She thanks him, asks for more of a particular author or none at all, comments on books and prison, and records details of the outside world. Michael continues to read, but never writes back. His silence sits beside the regular, if irregularly timed, arrival of his voice: one channel of communication persists while the other is refused.

The tapes eventually stand for a closeness Michael both creates and limits. Years later, he acknowledges that he had granted Hanna a small but important niche in his life, one from which he gained something and to which he contributed, but not a place in his life itself. His continuing recordings can therefore be heard as companionship and evasion at once. They let him address Hanna without answering the demands of a relationship; their form is intimate, but its terms remain his to set.

When Hanna is nearing release, she tells him that being read to is nicer than reading alone and asks whether that is over now. Michael cannot imagine continuing by cassette or meeting to read aloud. He remembers being proud of her literacy, but recognizes that his admiration did not compensate for the writing, visits, and conversation he had withheld. The tapes have helped Hanna cross from illiteracy toward independence, yet they cannot carry the relationship into a shared life. Their enduring significance lies in that double movement: a voice transmitted across prison walls enables Hanna to read, while the man behind it remains, by choice, at a distance.