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Abstract
Along with the distinctions of being chosen by Ophra's Book Club and made into a sexually explicit movie with an Academy Award-winning performance by Kate Winslet, Berhard Schlink's novel Der Vorleser (The Reader) has received a great deal of attention from literary critics. Scherr argues that, in melding the figures of Michael's fictional father, Schlink's own father, the Rev Dr Edmund Schlink, and German Existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, the author imbues them with an undeserved aura of innocence, as Michael does to the character of Hanna. And, since The Reader as a work of historical fiction tends toward "Holocaust denial" or at least "Holocaust exoneration" for the mass of Germans future generations of readers, less well-educated, erudite and creative than Heidegger and Schlink, could similarly trivialize mass murder.