As millions know, and others will quickly guess (click on "The Obvious" on your mental apparatus), young Michael is lured into an enviable arrangement whereby he is initiated by a woman who, in return for erotic instruction, requires him simply to read selections of the world's classics to her. These include not only Homer's Odyssey but also Cicero's orations "against Cataline (sic)". Does it matter that Schlink misspells Catiline? Only if you are drawn to the petty suspicion that he is truffling his novelette with classy references, the better to establish his cultural credentials and to prove that Hanna, who has a job as a tram conductress, is impressively gluttonous for improvement. Born in 1922, she is a working-class girl, and no fool, but she has, for some never disclosed reason, missed the educational benefits of Germany's famous school system and so remained illiterate, poor thing.
To Michael's dismay, she disappears abruptly from his young life. The reason, we later discover, is that she has been offered promotion, as a consequence of her excellence as a conductress, to an office job. Ashamed to confess inability to deal with paperwork, she prefers to vanish.
Years pass and then, by chance, Michael learns that his innocent, carnally generous boyhood mistress has been arraigned as a war criminal. Some insistent victims, who "by rights" - the narrator's ipsissima verba, as Catiline might say - "ought to be dead", have laid charges against her and other SS ladies who, all those aeons ago, were guards at Auschwitz and on the death marches which followed the Russian advance towards the camps. Michael attends the trial as a now legally qualified observer.
The back story which emerges is that Hanna was working during the war on the assembly line at a Siemens factory, where - as later when she works on the trams - she was so diligent that she was offered promotion to foreman. Fearing that accepting such an appointment would lead to the shame of being revealed as illiterate, the poor girl preferred to join the SS. In apparently unexpected and by then inescapable consequence, her duties included selecting female victims for the gas chambers, but only - we are promised - after doing whatever she could to keep them in her personal custody for as long as possible, during which time she fed and had sex with a favoured few, so that they could have something nice to remember while they were being choked to death.
