Hanna Schmitz’s suicide occurs just as her eighteen-year imprisonment is about to end, turning anticipated release into an abrupt, unexplained death. The novel presents the event through Michael Berg’s account of the morning after he was expected to collect her: the warden’s questions, Hanna’s unprepared cell, and Michael’s final sight of her make the loss concrete while leaving its motives uncertain.

Release and Its Reversal

After years of correspondence conducted through Michael’s recorded readings and Hanna’s brief notes, the prison warden contacts him about Hanna’s impending release. Her next appeal for clemency is expected to succeed, and the warden anticipates that she will soon leave prison after eighteen years. The letter asks Michael to help arrange an apartment and work, visit her, and accompany her through the ordinary difficulties of returning to the city after so long away. It emphasizes that shopping, dealing with authorities, and going to a restaurant can be difficult after eighteen years in prison, and that doing these things with someone else helps.

The planned release therefore carries a practical as well as emotional burden. Hanna is described as healthy, able to manage for herself, and skilled in the prison sewing shop, but the warden warns that she may be lonely and helpless outside and that finding a job at her age could be difficult. The possibility of renewed independence is real, yet it depends on support and on confronting a world from which imprisonment has kept her apart. Her death the next morning cancels that transition before it can begin.

The Morning After

Michael reports that Hanna is dead when he arrives at the prison: she has hanged herself at daybreak. The warden asks whether the telephone conversation the previous night or their meeting the week before had given him reason to fear that Hanna might kill herself. He says that he noticed no warning signs and had no suspicions or fears that he ignored. His answer establishes the limits of his knowledge, not an explanation for her decision.

The warden also asks what relationship had connected them and whether something between them might have led to Hanna’s death on the night before he was due to collect her. Michael does not disclose what passed between them. The warden says that Hanna left nothing explaining why she intended to die, and she is angry both with Hanna and with Michael. The event is thus framed by two absences: Hanna’s missing explanation and Michael’s refusal or inability to give the warden an account of their private history.

Cell and Final Encounter

Before showing Michael Hanna’s body, the warden takes him through the prison and identifies places from Hanna’s life there: the sewing shop where she worked, the library, and the location of a sit-down strike she once held until cuts to library funding were reversed. Hanna’s cell remains as she lived in it because she did not pack. Its plain furnishings include a bed, closet, table, chair, sink, and toilet; on the shelf are books, an alarm clock, a stuffed bear, mugs, instant coffee, tea tins, and the cassette machine. The cassettes Michael made for her are arranged on lower shelves, though he observes that not all of them are there.

In the infirmary, Michael and the warden can barely fit between the wall and the stretcher. The warden draws back the sheet, and Michael looks at Hanna’s face. He first registers its rigidity in death; then, as he continues looking, he sees the living face within the dead one, and the young woman within the old. This recognition brings the past into the present at the moment when no conversation or reunion is possible. When the warden looks at him questioningly, Michael nods, and she covers Hanna’s face again.

Significance and Uncertainty

Hanna’s suicide makes release a reversal rather than a resolution. The prison had provided structure, work, access to books, and a limited connection to the outside; the warden’s letter recognizes that freedom after eighteen years would require help with basic encounters in the city. The story does not establish that these circumstances caused Hanna’s death, but it places her death at the threshold between institutional life and a return for which others were trying to prepare her.

The event also exposes the distance between connection and understanding. Michael’s tapes had carried books into Hanna’s cell for years, and her notes had shown that she learned to write and could respond to what she heard. Yet their contact remained carefully limited: he read without personal remarks or questions about her life. At the end, the warden asks for the history that might make the death intelligible, but Michael keeps it to himself. The unanswered cause is not resolved by the final sight of Hanna; instead, his recognition of her younger face underscores how memory can preserve intimacy without undoing silence or loss.