Christian Ethics and the Movies
The Holocaust and Moral Apathy The Reader(2008)
Kate Winslet won the 2008 Best Actress Award at the Oscars, the Golden Globe, and the Screen Actors Guild for her breathtaking portrayal of Hanna Schmidt, the former Nazi prison guard at the center of The Reader. The Reader explores the issue of German guilt over the Holocaust, particularly, the wide gulf between the older and younger generations of the German people.
The Reader is a faithful adaptation of a 1995 German novel by Bernhard Schlink. Many viewers never get past the way the movie focuses more on the sexual entanglements between Hanna in her midlife and her 15-year old lover in Act I, than on the philosophical context for telling this complex story as a whole. The Reader, the novel, is Schlink’s powerful literary effort to condemn the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and simultaneously, to attempt to understand them. As Schlink said, it is easier to condemn than to understand, for conscience demands that condemnation must be total.
The novel, now translated into thirty-seven languages, is representative of a major movement called the Post-Holocaust West German Literary effort by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals to break the silence about German guilt.[2] The Reader is on the required reading lists in many German Holocaust studies. As a tragedy, it approaches Shakespearean depths.
The Story. The movie is structured as a three-act drama covering about forty years. It is told from the perspective of the protagonist, Michael Berg. In the opening act, set in Berlin in 1958, Michael as a young schoolboy is suffering from a serious illness. When he becomes nauseated on his way home from school one day, he encounters Hanna Schmidt, a thirty-something bus conductor. She takes care of him that day. Shortly thereafter, when Michael returns to her apartment with some flowers as a thank-you, she immediately takes him into her bed. Their instant sexual relationship continues through the summer while he is recovering his health. Hanna ends it suddenly, in fact cruelly, when one day she just moves out and leaves no forwarding address.
Since this is Michael’s first experience, he falls in love with her, although she never shows any real affection for him. She is always detached, even in intercourse. Their most intimate moments occur when Hanna asks Michael to read aloud to her from Homer’s The Odyssey, his homework, each visit. (The Reader, means “oral reader” in German.)
Act II takes place nine years later. Michael, now a law student enrolled in a legal philosophy seminar, attends a German war criminal trial. He is surprised to see that his former lover is one of the defendants. Hanna and a group of other women are on trial for murder. They had once been employed as prison guards by the German SS during WWII. As part of their job, they each named ten prisoners per month for Auschwitz. They also participated in a Death March, which resulted in the loss of over 300 Jews in a fire.
As Michael listens to the judge read these indictments against the women [continuing the Reader motif], it becomes clear that a key part of the case against Hanna is based on a handwritten document that she allegedly wrote. In a flash of insight, Michael realizes that Hanna is actually illiterate, but too ashamed to tell the judge. [A contra-motif, non-reading as a basis for social shame.] Logically, one of the other defendants must have written the incriminating document, not Hanna. Withholding this defense results in short prison terms for all the other women, but a life sentence for Hanna as their leader, in consequence of that shame.
Michael struggles over whether to come forward to offer his inside information. Should he confess that he knew Hanna Schmidt personally, especially to reveal that they had been lovers when he was a minor? Only by doing so could he help her defense against the most serious charges. He decides to remain silent, ostensibly to protect Hanna’s sense of dignity by not exposing her inability to read and write to the world. But the sub-text is, Michael, too, is ashamed to acknowledge his own responsibility.
Finally, Act III takes place in the mid-1990s. Hanna is now up for parole after serving over thirty years behind bars. She has been a model prisoner; in fact, she taught herself to read. Michael, now a lawyer [played by a deadpan Ralph Fiennes], is asked to help facilitate Hanna’s re-entry into society, since he is the only person to ever correspond with her. At some point during those prison years, Michael started recording some books on tape for Hanna to listen to [continuing the title motif], although he never felt a desire to visit her. As an adult, Michael had married and later divorced a fellow law student. It is clear that, because of Hanna’s treatment of him, he is unable to maintain a committed relationship with women, though he has never forgotten Hanna, his first love.
At the warden’s invitation, on the eve of Hanna’s parole date, Michael visits her in prison to see her and tell her personally that he has arranged for a little apartment for her, and a job. He sees how drastically Hanna has aged in prison. He makes it clear to her that he wants nothing further to do with her once she is released. This is not acceptable to Hanna. Though she does not complain to Michael, that night, she hangs herself.
Ethical Implications. Hanna Schmidt is emotionally and morally numb, both to her personal relationship with Michael, and her wartime job as a cog in the Nazi Holocaust apparatus. Her only driving motivation seems to have been to keep her illiteracy a secret; nothing else seems to penetrate her moral consciousness.
American audiences, in particular, comment often on the fact that what Hanna did in bed with Michael as a fifteen-year old boy was, in fact, sexual predation. It was a crime then, as it is a crime now. Just to film the bedroom scenes between Winslet and David Kross, the adolescent actor who played the young Michael Berg, the producers waited until the day after Kross turned eighteen just to forestall any possible child porn charges. Inside the narrative world of Hanna Schmidt, she seems not to have realized that what she was doing just to have a sex life with the young Michael was very wrong on a number of levels. Certainly, she exhibited no shame on that account.
Beyond her sexual behavior, there is also the matter of her culpability for acting criminally in her capacity as a prison guard. Even when the judge read the charges against her, she seemed not to understand why it was wrong for her to take part in the murder of hundreds of Jews. She asked the judge, “It was my job. What should I have done? Should I have not taken that job?”
In part, the argument that killing Jews was justified as a job requirement echoes the discredited “We were only following orders” excuse. In the larger cultural context, it also reflects the limited choices anyone like Hanna had as an unskilled woman just entering the job market in wartime Germany – working for Siemens was a paycheck. She was not a decision maker, merely a turnkey staffer. Her plight differs only in degree from that of many people who work in some capacity within industries that engage in ethically objectionable trade. Given the dominance of interlocking, multinational corporations today, Most of us are connected with some such company by direct or indirect pocketbook ties. Should we, like Hanna, be held accountable?
As a literary metaphor, Hanna and Michael represent the gap that exists to this day between the younger and the older German generations. Some of the WWII generation were actually complicit in the Holocaust, and all Germans of about that age, presumably were aware, or should have been aware of its horrors. The deep psychological guilt of the nation has devolved upon succeeding generations who say, we had nothing to do with the Holocaust ourselves, and we cannot understand how you could have done so.
Hanna’s illiteracy is symbolic of the older generation not acknowledging, let alone taking responsibility for, their guilt. Michael’s naïve boyhood involvement with her represents a misplaced trust, which she could never reciprocate on any level beyond the physical. The story of his conflicted feelings of nostalgia and yet his lifelong estrangement from her is intended as a microcosm of the complex larger issues of the German people as a whole. There are no easy answers in this movie.
As Christians, we are confronted with the same dilemmas over the church’s ethical and moral response to perennial conflicts between the demands for justice and for a redeeming forgiveness. Neither the book nor the movie indicts Christianity as being causally related to German guilt for the Nazis and the Holocaust, but the question remains: where is the church in this picture? The Pope has been criticized for his silence, and therefore his tacit approval, of the Nazis during WWII.
Throughout history, social and ethical ills that were produced by past practices of colonialism, imperialism, the Crusades, the Mid-East conflict, etc., are characterized by lingering cultural shame. People would prefer not to talk about them, and just “move on.” Yet ongoing guilt over slavery, genocides, environmental degradation, refugees, poverty, and other dire victimage, does not evaporate so easily. The Reader is not a pleasant entertainment to watch. It brings up some unpleasant but unavoidable issues in dealing with the Holocaust that we would really rather just forget and hope it goes away.
