I just saw this 2008 film, which won an Best Actress Oscar for Kate Winslet. It is an unusual film in that it combines two things that are not commonly connected: the issues of illiteracy and of German guilt over the Holocaust.
The film is about an intense affair in the summer of 1958 between a gifted high school student named Michael Berg and an older but still attractive working-class woman named Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet. Hanna is a lonely, somewhat bitter person—a type not unusual in post-war Germany. Later it turns out this woman was an SS guard at Auschwitz who participated in atrocities during WWII.
In The Reader the boy introduces Hanna to literature by reading to her. The boy is a conduit for this women to the world of literature—a world to which she has had little previous exposure.
This boy is a good position to be this conduit because he is lucky enough to be getting a good education within a classical system, which traditionally has had the goal of furthering the possibly counter-intuitive idea that books are the foundation of culture and that to understand what their contents mean is a necessary and perhaps sufficient aspect of becoming cultured.
The thing that Hanna most values in her affair with the boy is having books which she has not yet read, read to her.
When the boy reads to Hanna at the beginning of their affair, he lacks two important bits of information: first, that Hanna is illiterate, and second, that she is a former guard at Auschwitz—a job which one can assume is soul-destroying for both its victims and perpetrators.
Later, at her trial for war crimes, it becomes clear that an important, undisclosed factor in her choice of career path is influenced greatly by her illiteracy: she probably joined the SS in order to avoid having to read on the job. The film skillfully uses fact this not to excuse her behavior but to add an element of ambiguity to the moral choices she made. In the end, she is made a scapegoat for the institutionalized criminality involved in running extermination camps, which of course were designed to humiliate and eventually kill most of the people they processed.
In the movie, the Michael Berg character at Hanna’s trial is in a position to bring a crucial fact to the attention of the authorities: that Hanna was and is illiterate and couldn’t have been the one to write and organize the atrocity for which Hanna is being tried. She is guilty of a war crime certainly, but that she was probably not its ring-leader.
Berg decides to do nothing and his failure to act causes him pain. It is presented as him having the chance to step up to the plate but that he declined this opportunity. He let the moment pass and paid for his passivity for the greater part of his life. It is only much later, when he tries to connect to his estranged daughter that he begins to open up and start telling what he knows. The film implies that this opening up creates a new beginning for Berg.
In the context of the time, to defend a former SS guard, in a country which was eager to exploit scapegoats, would take significant courage. He lacked this courage at the time.
One message of the movie is that even if you are, in effect, helping a former Auschwitz guard, you should still behave morally. This lesson is one that Berg’s law professor tries unsuccessfully to teach his student.
The second takeaway is the profound life-altering choices and behaviors that illiteracy can make on people. People, if they are illiterate, usually view their illiteracy with shame. They blame themselves for being illiterate. Having two dyslexic children ourselves we have seen this dynamic first hand.
A failure to read is taken to be a general failure in personality, intelligence or motivation. It is presented as reason for feeling personal shame. Unfortunately, the idea that non-readers are either lazy, bad, or stupid is as prevalent today as it’s always been. It remains as one of society’s most enduring and destructive stereotypes and prejudices.
It seems that the reason most people are illiterate is either because they have not had the opportunity to learn, or that their brains are not structured in a way that their learning to read is natural. Luckily, reading is a skill that most children take to like ducks to water.
In the movie, it is not clarified why Hanna doesn’t read: is she from an impoverished background, or is she dyslexic? Probably, a little bit of both.
One of the most moving points of the movie is when Hanna and Michael go on a cycling holiday into the countryside and happen upon a church or abbey in which a children’s choir is practicing.
Hanna, who remember, is hiding two fundamental secrets—that she is former death camp guard who also happens to be illiterate—sits down on a pew and listens to the choral music wafting from above. The expression of astonishment on her face when she finds this performance moving is priceless.
Her look is one of disbelief that she wasn’t aware that such a thing existed—that children’s voices singing choral music can be an overwhelming sensory and aesthetic experience. She seems to silently ask her boy lover “Were you aware that such a thing existed?” He seems to reply: “Yes, I was aware it existed and I’m moved that you find it moving.”
This brings us to the underlying mystery of the 20th century—how a country, Germany, which has made so many fundamental contributions to world culture in literature, philosophy and even choral music—could descend into the utter darkness of a place like Auschwitz.
What The Reader encourages is the idea that this question is more nuanced and ambiguous than it first appears and that truth is ultimately stranger than fiction.
