The Holocaust, quite rightly, remains the defining event in the lives of several generations of Europeans, especially, of course, among Germans. While many choose to remain silent about the degree of their own or their family’s participation in or resistance to the Nazi regime, ever more fictional dramatizations of that nation’s struggle with collective guilt roll off the presses. The scale, like the horror, of this murderous bureaucracy defies even the most powerful imaginations, and few of the imaginations that grapple with this issue in fictional form are adequate to the task. Equally disturbing, many critics are reluctant to point out such novels’ flaws or are simply blinded to them by the topic’s sensitive nature.

Two of the post-Holocaust novels recently translated for US readers have long been available in Europe, where they were anointed with the usual collections of superlatives. Grete Weil’s Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat was first published in Germany in 1963, while Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a relative newcomer, first appeared in Switzerland in 1995. Here their reception has been more tempered: generally positive with an occasional qualified reservation. Yet both fall far short of their aspirations. Instead of characters confronting moral issues of overwhelming complexity, we have two protagonists wallowing self-indulgently in their own suffering and, vicariously, in that of others.

Andreas, the once-promising but chronically blocked German poet in Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat, remains mired in the war. Now, years later, he cannot write anything because of a “wildly exaggerated desire to be true” that consists of a refusal to acknowledge any truth that does not begin with the deportation of the Jews. So Andreas spends his time laying blame upon his wife, a survivor of Auschwitz, his willfully ignorant parents, and mankind in general.

He himself spent the war years in relative safety. With the help of a doctor friend and a weak heart, Andreas managed to evade active military service and was stationed in Amsterdam to write propagandistic cultural dispatches for a major German newspaper. Every night, he heard the commotion of crowds of people scrambling into trolleys on the street below his window. At first, he thought he was hallucinating and consulted a “nerve” doctor, Max Rosenbusch. No, this Jewish psychiatrist assured him, he was not going crazy. Each night exactly four hundred Jews—no more, no less—were crammed into trolley cars on Beethovenstraat and taken “East” to an uncertain, but surely dangerous, future. Dr. Rosenbusch refused Andreas’s offer for help, but Andreas did rescue the doctor’s son, Daniel, during a later round-up along with Sabine Lisser, a photographer who lived in his building. For over a year they hid in his apartment. Sabine and Daniel could not have been more different. Daniel was an extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, and thoughtful seventeen-year-old. Sabine, a bit older, was brash, vulgar, annoying, and unappealing.

Gradually and platonically, Andreas fell in love with Daniel. Unable to bear his confinement, or Sabine’s endless, grating chatter, Daniel bleached his hair and joined the Resistance. He was caught when his cousin Susanne unintentionally led the Gestapo to a list of twenty-four Resistance fighters’ addresses. Susanne was sent to Auschwitz; Daniel, to Mauthausen. Only Susanne returned, looking like a “ragged, half-starved Arab boy.” Andreas first mistakes her for Daniel, then marries her although he can neither forgive her for “betraying” Daniel, nor, later, when she has regained her figure, for no longer looking like him.

Despite an occasional twinge of conscience, Andreas is unshakably self-aggrandizing and self-righteous. He feels that he is the true victim of the war. He cannot separate his personal loss, his artistic impotence, and his latent pedophilia—in his only postwar therapeutic session he recounts a voyeuristic encounter in Northern Africa with an adolescent brother and sister as if it were a reunion with Daniel—from historical tragedy.

Weil’s intention may have been to demonstrate that even some of those Germans who saved Jews from the Nazis did so for their own selfish ends. Born in Germany in 1906, Grete Weil spent the war years underground in Holland, so she is certainly aware of the ambivalence felt by many well-intentioned and courageous people. Yet her presentation of these moral complexities in Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat is too simplistic. Andreas comes off as a petulant, spoiled child rather than a thoughtful, responsible adult. The ethical quandaries he is meant to illustrate are muddled by his lack of moral imagination and self-pitying complaints about his lack of artistic success or emotional satisfaction. Andreas’s encounter with evil has left him incapable of feeling, and, it seems, equally incapable of thinking. Weil’s predilection for empty grandiosities exacerbates the novel’s weaknesses: “He smiled deceitfully, the suicidal smile of an immoralist who is defending the thesis that suicide is impermissible on moral ground.” Or, when Daniel bleaches his hair: “The idea of salvation through transfiguration foretold disaster.”

While Andreas is eagerly ascribing guilt to those around him, the protagonist of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader avidly seeks to appropriate as much of it as he can. As a fifteen-year-old student, Michael Berg was seduced by Hanna Schmitz, an emotionally reserved but sexually passionate thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor with a taste for uniforms. After more than a year of highly ritualized, almost daily trysts—Michael read to her, Hanna bathed him, then bed—she suddenly disappeared. Michael suffers from this abandonment for years, becoming aloof, arrogant, and disaffected. He does not see her again until he is in law school attending the trial of some female concentration camp guards of which Hanna is one.

The horror of Hanna’s hidden past sends Michael into an orgy of questioning:  

Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? … Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

And on, and on, for paragraphs. Michael’s questions, earnest, sophomoric, rhetorical, clichéd, are a constant bass-tone underscoring the denouement, and they are not limited to the particular. Should the spirit or the letter of the law be applied? he asks. If children love their parents, are they “irrevocably complicit” in their elders’ crimes? Are we responsible for those we love? What should his generation do with the knowledge of their parents’ past?

Still another host of questions crowds in upon him when he recognizes Hanna’s other, equally protected secret: she is illiterate. Although many of her idiosyncrasies are thus explained, her behavior continues to puzzle him: why does she not admit her illiteracy to the court, especially since it would show that some of the charges against her are impossible, and others highly mitigated? Should he inform the judge of her secret? Is one allowed to act in the best interest of others against their wishes?

Michael’s father had lectured on Spinoza (and thereby lost his university position during the war), so Michael consults him on this last question. He interprets his father’s abstract answer about the freedom and dignity of the individual as a dispensation from involving himself in Hanna’s defense. Hanna is sentenced to life imprisonment. After a failed marriage, Michael begins reading books for her into a tape recorder.

Years later, Hanna’s sentence is commuted, but Schlink spares himself the task of dramatizing her encounter with Michael by having her commit suicide the day before her release. Michael does visit her cell, however, where he learns that she taught herself to read by laboriously following his readings line by line in the appropriate books. Whereas he had stuck to the classics—Homer, Chekhov, etc.—she had immersed herself in the literature of the camps—Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry, Rudolf Hess’s autobiography, Hannah Arendt on Eichmann. For once, Michael does not ask the obvious question: what was her reaction to the victims’ accounts?

Lists of questions and occasional speculation do not constitute a serious examination of moral dilemmas, especially when the questions have been asked many times before. In addition, Michael Berg in The Reader, like Andreas in Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat, cannot rise above his disappointment in love, but considers his sorrow emblematic of his country’s fate. “How,” he asks, “could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate, and that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to manage than for others.” But he finds comfort and atonement in the fact that he is “guilty of having loved a criminal.” While these novels may enlarge our view of the human heart’s self-involvement, they hardly deepen our understanding of the Holocaust and its repercussions. In fact, we are left with the uncomfortable sense that the Holocaust has been used less than responsibly: as a prop to heighten these novels’ emotional tension and moral seriousness, rather than as an integral part of the whole.

Spinoza could have offered some relevant advice instead of merely serving as a narrative hook for Schlink. In his Ethics, he wrote, “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” More clarity and precision in the definition of these protagonists and the moral dilemmas in which they are meant to be trapped might not have helped Michael and Andreas, but certainly would have made for better novels.

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