The Storyteller

Josef Weber (formerly Franz Hartmann) is a nonagenarian and a well-loved resident of Westerbrook. Sage meets him at her grief therapy group and forms a tentative friendship with him until he reveals that he is a former Nazi. His character embodies the complexity of morality and nature of choice in The Storyteller.

Josef grew up a sensitive and academically gifted boy who wanted no part in the mass extermination of Jews but was coerced into a job at Auschwitz. He meets Minka after she is deported to Auschwitz and is drawn in by her Ania story, which he sees as an allegory for his life. In order to keep reading her story he employs her in his office and saves her life twice over. Minka assesses him as not evil by nature but too weak to take a stand against the system which compels him to cruelty.

As an old man, Josef is haunted by his actions during the Holocaust. His guilt makes him wish to end his own life, but all of his attempts to do so fail, leading him to believe that he is cursed to be tortured by guilt forever. Josef wants someone to help him die and finally set him free, and he selects Sage because she is the granddaughter of the woman whose life he saved at Auschwitz. Josef has always believed that the ending of the Ania story would reflect the course of his own life—if Aleks’ story ended with forgiveness, his own might as well. In order to convince Sage to help him die, Josef assumes the identity of his homicidal brother Reiner.

By asking Sage to kill him, Josef forces her to confront her beliefs on forgiveness and right and wrong. Josef is ultimately freed from his torment by Sage’s poisoned crown roll, but she refuses to forgive him, so he dies with only half of his wish fulfilled. He also never learns the answer to his dying question of whether the Ania story ends with absolution or condemnation. His death leaves behind the lingering question of whether someone who was complicit in an atrocity like the Holocaust can ever be forgiven, even if they were only following orders to save their own life. Josef is the novel’s most morally complex character, challenging both Sage and the readers’ preconceived notions of right and wrong.

Reiner Hartmann is the identity Josef assumes when telling his story to Sage. In reality, Reiner is Josef’s late brother, who was indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth as a boy and grew into the cruel Schutzhaftlagerführer of Auschwitz. In a novel full of morally complex characters, Reiner is the closest to pure evil. Although he is initially disturbed by killing people, Reiner grows desensitized to murder and eventually finds a perverse satisfaction in cruelty. At Auschwitz, he is a cruel leader, ordering savage punishments for prisoners over minor offenses. After being caught in the act of theft by Minka and Darija, Reiner kills Darija. Minka later uses this action to confirm his identity to Leo.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, Reiner goes on the run with Josef. In the midst of their trek, he chokes to death on a sour cherry. Josef, who has always been sickened by his brother’s cruelty, lets Reiner die.

To convince Sage to help him die, Josef passes all of Reiner’s cruelties off as his own. The reader gets to know Reiner’s life story intimately despite his character being dead before the novel’s main timeline begins.

Leo Stein is a “Nazi Hunter” who works at the Justice Department prosecuting war crimes. Leo is a practicing Jew and feels a great responsibility to hunt down the remaining perpetrators of the Holocaust and bring them to justice. Compared to Sage, his views on good and evil are black and white. As Sage works through the question of whether Josef can be forgiven, Leo falls firmly on the side of retribution and vengeance. He believes that evil actions deserve to be punished and that murder can never be forgiven, a belief guided by his Jewish faith. Leo is incapable of seeing Josef as anything but a monster and entertains none of Sage’s sympathy for Josef’s suffering. Because he never finds out about the identity lie, his perception of Josef as an irredeemable villain remains static throughout the novel.

Despite their clashing views on certain topics, Leo falls for Sage and the two begin a relationship. He sees beyond her scar and trauma to the good person she is inside. He represents the opposite of Adam, a man who builds Sage up rather than tearing her down and shows her that she is deserving of love and acceptance. Leo helps Sage connect to a wider community and step out of her isolation.

Although Leo wants to see Josef punished, he is adamant that this punishment should happen through the legal process. At the end of the novel, he is unaware that Sage poisoned Josef. Because of his belief that murder is unforgivable, it’s highly likely that he would not want her in his life anymore if he were to find out what she’s done. It’s ironic that Leo, the first person to try to see the real Sage, is once again deceived by her after she has opened up to him so much.