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Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel Der Vorleser has emerged as one of most popular recent German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung texts: texts that attempt to to terms or - as deeply problematic German expression suggests -master Nazi past. It has also become one of most controversial. Initially praised for its ostensible moral subtlety and its exploration of varieties and degrees of guilt among Tater- and second-generation Germans, Schlink's novel has drawn increasing criticism for its portrayal of second-generation narrator Michael Berg and former concentration camp guard Hanna Schmitz as victims - indeed, for what might be seen as exculpatory gestures in face of Nazi atrocities (Donahue 75-77). One reason for novel's overwhelmingly positive reception in mainstream media and its later rejection by more serious academic criticism might be its style: Der Vorleser is, at least on surface, an easy read. Indeed, it seems too easy a read: in its smoothly accessible realist prose, stereotypical scenarios, and power to seduce readers into passively accepting values and viewpoints of hypnotic narrator Berg, Der Vorleser appears to constitute a classic example of what Roland Barthes has called the text.2 Yet there is more here than immediately meets eye, as might be expected from a novel that so overtly announces its thematics of reading, writing, and illiteracy. And, to employ Barthes's terms again, text's self-reflexivity challenges us to make what at first appears readerly about this consumption- and consumer-friendly work - writerly. Thus viewed, Schlink's novel reveals itself to be a web of heterogeneous tropes, overdetermined signifying fragments, and contradictory impulses that move in multiple directions, belong to different universes of meaning, and articulate competing structures of fear and desire at once. More specifically, novel's prose serves as a vehicle for problematics of repression, trauma, and postmodernism, none of which can be considered here apart from questions of gender. In following, I will explore this heretofore unanalyzed, yet crucial aspect of Schlink's text: intersection of its post-Holocaust problematics with its figurai networks and rhetorical strategies, its postmodern affinities, and its strikingly gendered modes of signification. I shall consider ways in which novel functions as a signifying system at a level interwoven with, but also distinct from, level of its narrator; marks of trauma in its figurai inventory; modalities of postmodernism with which it resonates (citationality, self-reflexivity problematization of truth, concern with transparency of representation and with pervasiveness of mediated images); and cultural imaginary of gender codes, ideologies, and investments it reproduces at level of strategy and structure (its noir plot and conceit of as a force of abjection and falseness, among others) .31 will take as my focus, and as link between spheres I investigate, novel's allegorical mapping of Germany's by fascism-and of fascism itself - onto figure of a deceptive, dangerous woman. Here, Michael's seduction by Hanna takes form of male abjection in face of overwhelming female sexuality and feminine power to erode male subject position: perversely, dangers of fascism are figured as a woman in same terms that fascist discourse itself employs to figure dangers posed by women or the feminine. This gendering of fascist duplicity is striking not only for what it says about male anxieties or misogynistic conflation of with falsehood. Rather, in its unfolding across an entire array of stereotypical citations and polysemie rhetorical gestures, it has profound implications for task of writing about Holocaust (with its compelling need for veracity), for postmodern narration and thought (with their rejection of absolute access to truth and awareness of their own mediation), and for problematic ways in which these constellations come together in Schlink's text. …
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