Michael begins reading aloud to Hanna

Michael begins reading aloud to Hanna as a small request that changes the structure of their meetings. What starts with school texts becomes a repeated ritual of attention and intimacy, and later testimony reveals a grim parallel in Hanna’s wartime treatment of young prisoners: she had vulnerable girls brought to her in the evenings to read aloud. The act connects private desire with a pattern that, in the concentration camp, offered temporary protection within a system that still ended in deportation.

The Request and Its First Readings

After Michael and Hanna resume meeting, she asks what he is learning at school. He tells her about Homer, Cicero, and Hemingway’s story of an old man fighting the fish and the sea. Curious about the sounds of Greek and Latin, she listens as he reads from the Odyssey and Cicero’s speeches against Catiline. Her follow-up question turns the exchange toward German literature: she wants to know whether he is also studying texts in his own language.

Michael has recently been catching up on schoolwork missed during his hepatitis. He has read Emilia Galotti and Intrigue and Love and owes an essay on them, but the work has left him tired and forgetful. When Hanna tells him to read one of the plays to her, he offers to bring it so she can read it herself. She answers that she would rather listen to his voice. The request is therefore not simply for access to a story; it makes Michael’s reading, and the sound of his voice, the point of the encounter.

Reading Becomes a Threshold

The following day, Michael arrives intending to kiss Hanna, but she pulls back and tells him that he must read first. Her insistence makes the sequence explicit: he reads Emilia Galotti to her for half an hour before she takes him into the shower and then to bed. The delay alters the physical rhythm of their meeting. Michael’s initial desire recedes while he concentrates on performing the play aloud; it returns under the shower. Reading is neither incidental conversation nor a separate school task. It becomes the threshold through which their sexual intimacy is entered.

The routine settles into a recurring order: reading, showering together, making love, and lying beside one another afterward. Hanna listens closely, responding with laughter, contemptuous sniffs, and anger or enthusiasm as the play unfolds. She judges both Emilia and Luise to be silly, and her impatience when she urges Michael to continue carries her hope that the characters’ foolishness will soon be over. Her reactions confirm that she is following the action, while Michael’s performance gives the play distinct voices and keeps the encounter active rather than merely preparatory.

Repetition, Time, and Intimacy

Michael remembers the weeks before the school year ends less as separate meetings than as one extended encounter. Their afternoons follow a regular pattern, and the time together lengthens: at first Hanna makes him return home in time for dinner, but eventually an hour and a half no longer satisfies them, and he invents excuses to miss the meal. As the days grow longer, he reads for longer so that they can remain together in the twilight.

The remembered scene of Hanna asleep against Michael gives the ritual a quiet afterlife beyond its erotic sequence. The saw in the yard falls silent; a blackbird sings; the kitchen’s colors fade into shades of gray. Michael describes himself as completely happy. In retrospect, that happiness belongs to a sharply bounded private world, organized by repetition and protected from the larger histories that will later become impossible to ignore. The growing duration of the readings brings the pair closer, but it also gives the same act a significance the young Michael does not yet understand.

The Wartime Echo in the Trial

During Hanna’s trial, a surviving daughter describes a related practice in the camp. Hanna, she testifies, chose favorites, usually young girls who were weak and delicate. She took them under her wing, arranged better barracks, spared them work, and fed them better; in the evenings, she had them brought to her. The prisoners were not allowed to say what happened during those visits, and the other women assumed that Hanna was sexually exploiting the girls. They also observed that the girls eventually went on the transports.

The witness then corrects that earlier assumption: the girls read aloud to Hanna, evening after evening. This disclosure transforms the meaning of Michael’s private ritual without making the circumstances equivalent. In his adolescent relationship with Hanna, reading precedes a shower and consensual intimacy as he understands it; in the camp, reading is part of the favors granted to selected prisoners, whose improved treatment does not remove them from the machinery of transport. The testimony also refuses an easy account of the protection. The daughter admits that she may have forgotten the reading because she thought it was better than the girls being worked to death, then asks herself whether it really was better.

Significance of the Repeated Act

Reading aloud links Michael and Hanna across radically different settings, but the resemblance is unsettling rather than redemptive. In both, Hanna listens while another person reads to her; in both, the act organizes a private evening and creates a special relation. Yet the camp testimony places that intimacy inside a hierarchy of power and coercion, where temporary shelter exists alongside the girls’ eventual deportation. The repetition exposes a form of care that cannot be separated from the violence surrounding it.

The trial also returns the act to Michael as a question of recognition. Hanna turns and looks directly at him after the daughter’s testimony. Her exhausted, tense face offers no request or assurance; it simply presents itself, and Michael understands that Hanna knew he was there. He silently imagines an explanation for her choices—that she selected the weak girls because they could not endure the building-site labor, would otherwise have been sent on the next transport, and deserved a more bearable final month. But he does not make that defense aloud. The reading ritual thus becomes more than a memory of intimacy: it is the point at which Michael’s personal history with Hanna meets testimony about her actions, while the gap between understanding a motive and excusing a crime remains unresolved.