The Reader

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, released in 2008, is the film adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel of the same title. The film follows the post-war German law student Michael Berg, played by Ralph Fiennes as an adult and David Kross as the teenager he had been, who as a fifteen-year-old in 1958 had a six-month affair with the older woman Hanna Schmitz. He encounters her again as a defendant at the Frankfurt war crimes trial of 1966, where she is on trial for her actions as an SS guard at Auschwitz and at a satellite camp during the death marches of January 1945. Kate Winslet’s performance as Hanna Schmitz won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

The novel and its reception

Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser was published in German in 1995 and in English (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) as The Reader in 1997. Schlink, a German law professor and former judge, had been a child at the end of the war (born 1944) and was writing as a member of the second generation of post-war Germans dealing with the inherited culpability of their parents. The novel was widely admired and widely criticised. It was the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list; it received an Oprah Winfrey book club selection in 1999 that drove sales to several million copies; and it was attacked by some Holocaust scholars for what they regarded as its sentimental treatment of an SS guard.

The principal critical line, made most forcefully by Cynthia Ozick in Commentary in 1999, was that the novel made its central perpetrator sympathetic by giving her a hidden disability (illiteracy) that explained, although it did not excuse, her actions; that the disability functioned to redirect the reader’s moral attention from her crimes to her shame; and that the novel was thereby part of a wider German cultural project of repositioning German perpetrators as victims of their own historical situation. Schlink’s defence, made repeatedly in essays and interviews, was that the novel was about the impossibility of reconciliation between the second generation and the first, and that the difficulty of judging a parent or a lover who had committed such crimes was itself the subject; the book’s central question was whether to understand a perpetrator was thereby to forgive her, and the book’s answer, on Schlink’s account, was no.

The film’s choices

The film, with a screenplay by David Hare, follows the novel closely. The major shift in emphasis is the increased prominence of the courtroom scenes; the film spends more time on the 1966 trial than the novel does, and Hanna’s behaviour at the trial (in particular her willingness to sign a false confession to a more serious charge rather than reveal her illiteracy) is the dramatic centre of the middle section. Winslet’s performance is the film’s principal achievement; her Hanna is a woman of limited articulacy, limited intellectual range, and substantial moral incapacity, who is nevertheless rendered with enough internal life that the film’s question (what does it mean to have loved this person) becomes pressable on the viewer.

The Auschwitz material in the film is handled in courtroom testimony and in a single visit to the Auschwitz site by the adult Michael Berg, rather than through any direct dramatisation of the camp itself. The film does not show Hanna in the camps; the audience encounters her only as a young woman after the war, as a defendant at the trial, and as an old woman in prison. The structural decision (to keep the camps off-screen) was taken to avoid the reductionist visual treatment that Lanzmann and others had criticised in Schindler’s List; the result is a film that asks its audience to imagine what is not shown.

The critical reception

The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (won by Winslet), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography. Critical reception was divided along similar lines to the novel’s. Some reviewers praised the performance and the difficulty of the moral question the film posed; others repeated the criticism that the film made its perpetrator sympathetic in ways that risked softening the case against the regime more broadly. The historian Mark Mazower argued in a critical review that the film’s choice to make Hanna’s illiteracy the engine of the plot diverted attention from the actual political and moral structures of complicity in the German wartime population.

The film and the novel together remain among the most-debated single works of post-war German Holocaust culture. They are taught in literature and history courses both in Germany and in the English-speaking world; the questions they raise (how the second generation lives with the first, what it costs to know what was done, whether knowing is the same as understanding) are not settled and are unlikely to be.

See also

Sources

  • Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser, Diogenes Verlag, 1995 (English translation: The Reader, Pantheon, 1997)
  • Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past, House of Anansi Press, 2010 (Schlink’s essays on the moral and legal questions raised by the post-war German confrontation with its history)
  • Cynthia Ozick, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination”, Commentary, March 1999
  • Bill Niven (ed), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
  • Stephen Daldry (dir), David Hare (screenplay), The Reader, The Weinstein Company, 2008
  • Mary L. Mills, “The Reader: Examining the Film and the Book”, in Film & History, vol 39 no 1, 2009
  • USHMM, “The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org