The romance abruptly ends when Hanna disappears one day in order to veil her secret, illiteracy.

Michael encounters Hanna by surprise eight years later while he is a law student. She is facing prosecution for a war crime while she did while she was evacuating prisoners from Auschwitz in 1944. Michael and his peers evaluate the guilt of their elders, and Hanna still conceals her great secret. The trial concludes, and Michael provides tapes of his readings for Hanna while she is imprisoned. He later faces the daughter of a Holocaust survivor regarding Hanna's crime. The film concludes with an older Michael revealing his affair to his grown daughter.

In Commentary Magazine, "The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination", Cynthia Ozick rejects Schlink's apparent motivation for Hanna. She argues Germany had the most literate population in Europe, yet the "plot turns on...an anomalous case of illiteracy, which the novel recognizes as freakish". Schlink, says Ozick, mitigates Hanna's guilt because she could not read an advertisement for jobs at the Siemens factory and chose to be an SS guard instead. She otherwise would have been a factory girl instead of a war criminal, said Ozick. In fact, the book explains that she was already working at Siemens and that she took the SS guard job rather than being promoted to foreman at the factory. The implication is that being a foreman hinges on some reading.

In "Innocence is Lost in Postwar Germany," Manohla Dargis says the film asks us to pity Hanna and that the film is about making the audience feel good about a historic catastrophe.

These reviewers should look at the subtle clues Schlink offers. When characters, such as Michael and Hanna, read literature, their choices, if it is a good novel or film, direct the reader/viewer to themes in those novels which are also relevant to the first characters.

Michael reads Lady Chatterly's Lover to Hanna in the film, though not in the book. As to the distinction between mind and body in the novel, Richard Hoggart argues, in the introduction to the Penguin edition of 1961, that "Body without mind is brutish; mind without body...is a running away from our double being."

Hanna lives a physical life that is empty and disheartening. She is very good at her job, as it is based on repetitive physical acts. She is all mechanics. Sex for her is similarly mechanical. In war time she excelled in being a guard for the same reasons, and her life at Auschwitz was all brutality. Hanna knows that "body without mind is brutish," so she enlists Michael to read to her. If she were a heroine who changed in a full way, whereby she could join humanity again, she would integrate body and mind. Schlink perhaps means no such sympathy for her - her crimes are too great. We may take note that the crimes of letting 300 people burn, and assorted every day barbarism at the camp are physical crimes.

After having taught herself to read, Hanna should thereafter have a full human experience of mind-body balance. The fact that she decides to take desperate measures (I won't spoil the plot that much) indicates that she may realize that she cannot live by mind alone. She is now literate, but a sexual relationship with an older, wiser Michael is impossible. Now that she is stigmatized in her country, she will probably find no lover. She will also find no job higher than menial labor.

Schlink could be saying that education does not alone make one moral. The Germans who committed these crimes, says Ozick, were highly literate. One needs to be educated and aware of the consequences of bodily actions, as most Germans of the 1930's and 1940's denied.

Michael, his law professor (Bruno Ganz), and peers are all highly intellectual and literate, yet they are also aware of the physical crimes of their elder's generation and in their own time. Michael's moral education in these scenes is set in 1966, a time when many more physical crimes were being waged in the world. The student demonstrations -usually physical acts-going on off camera/in background are about that necessary mind/body integration: education + righteous physical action = just and whole human beings.

Another book Michael reads to Hanna in the film, though not in the book is Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain said this about his novel:[it is] "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision, and conscience suffers defeat."

Hanna could learn much from Huck. Huck was illiterate and, in some ways, brutish. The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson try to "Sivilize" him, but Huck doesn't take to it. He shows humanity to Jim, though he knows it is against his conscience. He has been sold a bill of goods by the corrupt culture around him, just as Hanna and Germans had been by Hitler, Goebbels, etc. Huck's good heart allows him to be humane and try to free Jim. Hanna could have allowed the 300 to escape the burning church, but she did not due to her brutish sense of duty, a non-intellectual act of following orders. Germans might have listened to their hearts rather than the sense of conscience the Nazis imbued upon them. The Cartesian duality between conscience and heart is another split on which right and wrong action impinges.

The Odyssey is yet another great book Michael reads to Hanna. Aside from another idea from the epic found in the book, it deals with abuse of men . Circe turns Odysseus's crew into pigs, and Kalypso makes him her sexual slave. In that spirit, Hanna does not treat Michael as a mature woman should treat a lover. There has been little critique of the fact that she commits yet another crime by abusing- and statutory rape is abuse- a minor. Hanna is unskilled in the act of reading, but Michael is yet unskilled in the art of love or physical act of love-making. This is a sick relationship based on a kind of power each has over the other. One reviewer called it Nazi Porn, but it is not that. The movie, "Night Porter", is that and execrable for being so. This is a relationship that should arouse repugnance in us.

We must look at other works Michael reads to Hanna from the book, though not in the film.

The Slovak National Theater describes Friedrich Schiller's Intrigues and Love, another work Michael reads to Hanna, as about "love that wants to possess the other, love that seeks to manipulate the other." This is the kind of love Hanna has for Michael, and the Nazis had for Germany.

Emilia Galotti is the tale of a Machiavellian prince who uses power and violence to possess Emilia. It is also about righteous government needing to crush violent and bad government. Heine deals with the loss, suffering, and agony of love, and antagonism of lovers. Mörike deals with a betraying lover. Fontane's Effi Briest is about the consequences of an illicit affair. Frisch wrote about a man on trial for murdering a call girl in Bluebeard. Schnitzler's plays pair sex and death. These examples are all about unhealthy sexual and love relationships, as was that between Michael and Hanna. It is not one-sided either; Michael admits to learning from Hanna to take possession of her in their love-making.

Some of the other readings deal with the crimes of the Nazis. In The German Lesson, by Siegfried Lenz, Siggi Jepsen is in lock-up and asked to write a lesson on the joys of duty. He writes about his father's wartime crimes. Lenz said, "I was trying to find out where the joys of duty could lead a people." Ingeborg Bachmann's poem, "Early Noon", deals with German atrocity, resulting shame, and the need for hope. "Every Day" and "To a General" are anti-war and anti-authority. "Message" has the line, "Our godhead, history, has ordered for us a grave from which there is no resurrection." Uwe Johnson's book, Third Book About Achim has a hero who was a Hitler Youth and whose grandfather was a Nazi. Max Frisch wrote on anti-Semitism and general bigotry in Andorra. It is interesting that his book, Stiller, deals with the problems of lying about one's identity and past, as does Hanna in The Reader, regarding her illiteracy.

In Chekhov's stories, "Protagonists are disillusioned by events that force them to reevaluate their personal philosophies and understanding of the world, and this disillusionment usually happens near the end of stories" (Sparknotes). It seems by this reference we may posit that Hanna undergoes a realization about her past behavior.

Hanna's last act hinges upon her education in moralism she attains from the above writers. Her values of earlier days, based on the idea that literature is heroic and thrilling give way to a maturity about life's meaning. She would not be reading Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel in prison if she had no perception of the crimes of wartime. It is also not sufficient to say she makes her final decision and action based on the slim chances at meaningful work or finding someone to love her. It is not firm enough to say Michael is the only one who has a path to discovery. Though we justifiably revile the monster, Hanna, we might consider that evil doers sometimes come to realize their evil.

According to Manohla Dargis, Michael is a victim and a survivor. It comes out in the trial that Hanna forced young women at Auschwitz to read to her, and then dispensed them to the gas chambers (to cover her secret). Michael would have been designated to the same fate had he been at the camp. The act of reading, after he learned this, is something he might re-evaluate. The fact that he does not is a shortcoming of the book/film. Again, intellect without a moral responsibility for bodily acts brings peril.