Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz

Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz’s relationship is at once a formative adolescent attachment and a lasting source of moral and emotional conflict. Michael is fifteen when their intimacy begins; Hanna is an adult, more than thirty by his uncertain estimate. He experiences the relationship as happiness and love, but its abrupt end leaves him with unanswered questions, and their later reunion at her trial forces him to reckon with the woman he loved as a convicted former SS guard. The narrative does not let either attachment or condemnation cancel the other.

Meeting and the Beginning of Intimacy

Michael first approaches Hanna’s apartment carrying flowers, uncertain of her name and reluctant to ring the bells. A man leaving the building directs him to Frau Schmitz on the third floor. Michael’s first account of their attraction is bodily and difficult for him to explain: Hanna is older than the girls he notices, and he later understands that her manner and movement, not simply her appearance, held his attention.

Their relationship begins after Hanna helps Michael bathe. He is conscious of his uncertainty and fear, but describes becoming more at ease as they spend time together. The next night he recognizes his attachment as love: he lies awake yearning for her and wants to be with her rather than seek relief alone. His account makes clear how powerfully he experiences the intimacy, while the age difference remains fundamental: he is a fifteen-year-old, and Hanna is an adult.

A Repeated Private Life

For several days Hanna works early shifts, and Michael cuts his last class to wait for her outside her apartment. They meet at noon, shower, and part shortly before half past one, when he runs back to school for lunch. Their routine gives the affair a practical schedule, fitted into Michael’s school day and Hanna’s working hours.

Their meetings also establish an unequal pattern of initiative. Hanna directs much of their intimacy and teaches Michael to act with more assurance; at first, he is content to be guided. He later says that he gradually learned to take a more active role, though he never felt he had mastered it completely. His recollection records both his growing confidence and the fact that the relationship’s terms are initially shaped by Hanna.

The affair expands Michael’s sense of himself beyond the apartment. He imagines travelling with Hanna during the Easter vacation and sharing a room as if they were mother and son. He says that being seen with her would have made him proud, although he would once have resisted appearing in public with his own mother. In retrospect, he contrasts his adolescent view of a woman in her thirties with the adult perspective from which he now sees a fifteen-year-old as a child. He credits Hanna with giving him confidence: success at school brings teachers’ respect, and he becomes more comfortable in his body and with girls his own age.

Separation, Silence, and Betrayal

Michael remembers the weeks of the affair as both intensely full and blurred together. He worked hard to catch up at school after his illness, while his meetings with Hanna followed a recurring pattern. Looking back, he asks why the memory of a happy period becomes painful when later knowledge changes what that happiness seems to mean. The relationship’s remembered joy is not erased, but neither can it remain separate from what he learns afterward.

The end arrives without a conversation. Michael comes to Hanna’s apartment at the usual time and finds her gone. The room appears unchanged, and he can hear the clock, but she does not answer the bell. He discovers that she has not reported for work at the streetcar company and tries to trace the building’s owner. Much later, he recognizes that he had wrongly thought his own behavior had driven her away: she had left to avoid being found out by her employer. That correction changes his explanation of the separation, but not his belief that he betrayed her in another way.

Michael describes that betrayal as disavowal rather than exposure. As he makes friends, he does not tell them about Hanna. At first he tells himself that he is not close enough to them; later he says he cannot find the right occasion or words, until speaking about her seems too late. He understands that this silence withheld something he should have acknowledged. In his account, concealing the relationship helped strip away its foundations even though it involved no public revelation of Hanna’s secrets.

Reunion at the Trial and the Meaning of Her Secret

Michael sees Hanna again in a courtroom, attending a trial about crimes in the camps as part of a university seminar. The meeting transforms his private history into a question of legal and moral judgment. He learns that Hanna joined the SS after Siemens had offered her a job as a foreman; the evidence at trial presents her decision as voluntary. His earlier love cannot make that history disappear.

Michael eventually understands that Hanna could neither read nor write. He connects that fact to incidents from their past: she had let him do the reading and writing on a bicycle trip, feared the discovery of a note in a hotel, and avoided advancement in jobs where her inability to read would have been exposed. He also considers how illiteracy affected her conduct at trial, where she could not properly examine the indictment or a manuscript and had little grasp of legal strategy. Yet the revelation does not become a complete explanation or an acquittal. Michael explicitly rejects the claim that Hanna selected prisoners for deportation to silence people who might have discovered her secret. He concludes instead that she chose vulnerable prisoners as readers in an effort to make their last month more bearable before their inevitable deportation.

The gap between that motive and the consequences of Hanna’s actions is central to Michael’s effort to understand her. He sees her as struggling to conceal what she could not do, and he recognizes that shame may help explain her evasions without making her crimes just. Her trial conduct also reflects a strong insistence on what she considers truth and justice: she contradicts what she believes false and admits what she cannot deny, but fails to understand how the courtroom turns testimony into judgments of guilt and innocence. Michael’s interpretation remains sharply divided between her particular limitations and her responsibility as a former guard.

Love, Responsibility, and the Unresolved Bond

Michael considers telling the judge that Hanna is illiterate, which might explain her apparent conduct at trial and reduce the severity of her punishment. He also understands that disclosure would expose the secret she has protected and trade on her self-image without her consent. He ultimately does not visit Hanna, but he does go to the presiding judge. He later admits that his decision was not simply an impartial effort to secure justice: he could not leave Hanna as she was, or as she wished to be, and wanted to affect her at least indirectly.

The relationship remains bound up with Michael’s sense of responsibility. He says that he loved Hanna and chose her, even though he did not know what she had done when he first chose her. He cannot make that love innocent merely by distinguishing his adolescent knowledge from her crimes. At the same time, he resists treating love as proof that he shares her guilt in a simple or legally defined way. His reflections connect his personal shame to the postwar generation’s wider difficulty in confronting the crimes of the older generation, but the comparison offers him no comfort: the pain is more immediate because the person he must condemn is also the person he loved.

Years later, in conversation with his daughter, Michael says that he had a relationship with Hanna when he was fifteen and confirms that they slept together. He also tells his daughter that he sent Hanna tapes and that she learned to read and write in prison. The later disclosure makes the relationship part of his family history, though it does not resolve its meaning. In the novel, the bond persists not as a romance restored or redeemed, but as an unresolved conjunction of adolescent attachment, secrecy, shame, and moral judgment.