The Reader: The Film

“What are you looking for? Forgiveness for her or to feel better about yourself? If you are looking for catharsis, go to the theatre or literature. Don’t go to the camps.”

After the heated debate on The Reader: A Novel, especially that Hanna Schmitz is unaware of what she was part of during the Holocaust owing to her illiteracy, I walked into the Castro Theater not with the expectation in making sense of whether it’s her literacy-aided enlightenment or perception of guilt that causes her fateful decision. Nor was I interested in the coiled eroticism that has inevitably built up the film’s gimmick. The affair, which turned into a love story, between a 36-years-old woman and a teenage boy does not sicken me, although how sweat-glistened and taut-bellied Kate Winslet deflowers a curious teenage boy does pique my interest.

Albeit fussily adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s slender novel, the director makes an alarmingly true point right at the opening scene, that the grown-up Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) has never been able to sustain long-term relationship with women after that quasi-traumatic experience with Hanna Schmitz. He bids an awkward goodbye to one-night stand who doesn’t eat the breakfast he prepares. This quick scene sets the stance on Michael Berg’s somber revelations, as the movie from this point rolls into flashbacks that slowly discloses his liaison with Hanna.

The flashbacks are fairly faithful to the novel. As a discreet affair ensues, characterized by shots of decorously writhing flesh, tears, smiles, shouts and literature: Michael reads aloud to Hanna, Chekov, Tolstoy, and D.H. Lawrence, etc—until one day Hanna empties her apartment and disappears without a vestige. Then the story fast-forwards to the 1960s, when Michael is attending law school which took him to attend a court case that prosecuted women of Nazi war crimes. During the proceedings he comes to realize her secret, her shame, which has nothing to do with her being a Nazi prison guard: she’s illiterate.

The film, although graced with beautiful cinematography, repeats the flaw of the novel. Instead of getting core of the truth about guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust, the film exposes the deep vein of self-pity that runs through the novel, flattening Schlink’s already unpersuasive bid at generational soul-seeking. I am captured by the tight scene by scene of because I realize Michael Berg himself is a victim, not because of the ignorance on Nazi’s responsibility for the genocide but because he has been victimized by Hanna himself. Hanna herself is a victim because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism. Overall the film is better than the novel, but, like the novel, the metaphor is elusive, the narrative unconvincing and the overall effect vague and unpersuasive. Kate Winslet is gorgeous though–she just steals the show. She embodied Hanna Schmitz in every emotion and detail, often managing to evoke your sympathy. I’m troubled by the fact that Hanna’s state of mind remains unexamined, leaving far too many things things unclear.

By the way, to quote the Guardian UK, “why is the film being made in English? And, disconcertingly, the books Michael reads from are English versions. Won’t this be odd when, as almost certainly it will be, the movie is dubbed into German?”

[187] The Reader – Bernhard Schlink

“Precisely because she was both close and removed in such an easy way, I didn’t want to visit her. I had the feeling she could only be what she was to me at actual distance. I was afraid that the small, light, safe world of notes and cassettes were too artificial and too vulnerable to withstand actual closeness.” [193]

There are novels evocative of events that change the course of human history through layered narratives and an abundance of symbols, like Beloved. There are also those written in very simple language, so simple that because it leaves no room for analysis, the meaning thus overlooked. The Reader is such a novel, one that is meant for re-readings.

Germany in 1958. Fifteen year old Michael Berg has hepatitis that has confined him home for months. One day in late fall a woman more than twice his age rescues him when he falls ill on his way home. Hanna Frau Schmitz seizes his arm and pulls the lad through the dark entryway into her apartment, where she bathes him and feeds him. In time the thirty-six year old conductor becomes his lover. Their relationship is as intense as it is sudden. She enthralls him with her passion, with a seductiveness that has nothing to do with her voluptuous body, but her evasiveness of her past puzzles him. Their relationship nonetheless becomes more intimate as Michael takes up reading to Hanna.

After Hanna disappears suddenly one day, Michael has never overcome his grief and blames himself for her disappearance, which leaves a profound influence on his future relationship with women. He can never love anyone whom it would hurt to lose. When he sees her again it is in the courtroom seven years later. She is arraigned for a hideous crime at a satellite camp near Auschwitz that she cannt be completely responsible for. But that she is not willing to earn victory, or at least fortify her defense, at the price of exposure as an illiterate has ensnared her, crippled her. It pains Michael that Hanna, now at 43, opts for the horrible exposure as a criminal over the harmless exposure as an illiterate.

“She was not persuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice. Because she always had to dissimulate somewhat, and could never be completely candid, it was a painful truth and a pitiful justice, but it was hers, and the struggle for it was her struggle.” [134]

The writing style of The Reader is dual. The part of the story that delves into the Nazi past, amplified by the trial of the six female guards who were indirectly responsible for the death of hundreds of female prisoners, who were burned ablaze in a locked church, is hardboiled writing reminiscent of a detective story. The liaison between Michael and Hanna assumes a more literary and poetic expression that is coiled in eroticism.

Bernhard Schlink employs the generational conflict between the lovers to establish a sense of distance to the actual Holocaust event. Equally unusual in modern Holocaust fiction is that the novel has as its main contact with the historical events a perpetrator instead of a victim. Hanna, once she attains literacy and understands the situation more fully than we can, cannot live with herself anymore. Her illiteracy, therefore, becomes a metaphor for modern understanding (or misunderstanding) of the Holocaust.That Michael feels a difficult identification with the victims and that he feels a misgiving of condemning and understanding her springs from the struggle to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis. A indisputable fact: People could have heard it from Hitler’s mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. 216 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]