The Reader

Schlink never names the city, but its river, old bridge and hillside castle are unmistakably his own Heidelberg, on the Neckar in the Rhine-Neckar region. A fifteen-year-old and an older woman meet here; a generation later the story reaches out to a war-crimes court near Frankfurt and a former camp in the Alsace hills.

Michael Berg

The Neckar and the Old Bridge, Altstadt

Part One

The novel's home ground is a river town with a steep old quarter and a bridge across the water. The narrator is a schoolboy here when a sudden illness in the street begins the affair that shapes his life, and the Neckar and its old bridge fix the setting as Heidelberg without the book ever saying so.

Part One

explicit Schlink leaves the city unnamed, but the river, the arched old bridge and the castle on the hill above the old town are drawn from his own Heidelberg, so this marks the Karl-Theodor-Brücke over the Neckar.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Michael Berg

Hanna's flat, Bahnhofstrasse

Part One

The older woman lives in a plain flat up a worn staircase in an old building near the railway. It becomes the room where the boy reads aloud to her, book after book, before each meeting. The story ties it to the Bahnhofstrasse; the building itself is not identified.

Part One

inferred The city is never named and no exact address is given; the book places the tram conductor's flat in an old building on the Bahnhofstrasse, so this marks that street in Heidelberg's Bergheim quarter as a representative point.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Michael Berg

Michael's gymnasium

Part One

The narrator is a gymnasium pupil skipping classes and slipping out to meet the older woman, then hiding the affair from schoolfriends on a swimming afternoon. The book keeps the school unnamed; a grammar school in the old town fits the walk between his lessons, the river and her flat.

Part One

inferred The narrator's grammar school is never named, and the city is left unnamed but is modelled on Heidelberg; this marks the Kurfuerst-Friedrich-Gymnasium in the old town as a plausible stand-in for the boy's school.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗