12.02.2009
Justice and shame
Jim Moody reviews The reader (dir: Stephen Daldry, 2008), on general release
David Hare’s screenplay for The reader shines in the way that we have come to expect from him.1 He has masterfully adapted it from constitutional court judge Bernard Schlink’s partly autobiographical novel Der Vorleser. Only a bourgeois liberal in fear of her/his soul being tainted by looking at the human beings who were party to Hitler’s regime could object to the way in which this question is dealt with here.
Adolf Hitler’s early years have this decade been the subject, among others, of the Hungarian-Canadian-UK film Max, a major US exhibition,2 and attempts by writers to locate Hitler’s megalomania within the frustration of his artistic yearnings.3 However, outside the corpus of apologia, the persons who made up the corps of the Nazi regime have been relegated to strutting bit players in much of the post-war fictionalised depictions. Honourable exceptions such as Das Boot notwithstanding, most accounts have left unexplored the personalities and motivations of the unreflecting and even enthusiastic implementers of Nazism up to and including the mass murder of Jews, Romanies and Slavs from the early 1940s. Less than honourable have been the frequent attempts to portray ruling class ‘decent Germans’ as good democrats trapped inside the regime, as in the current Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie.
There is a shamefulness pervading the characterisations of the two leads in The reader that derives from unusual sources, and which gets us thinking about the individuals as human beings. Our story starts out in a fairly bleak late 1950s West Germany. Reserved, 30-something tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) helps adolescent Michael Berg (David Kross), who has been taken ill at the street entrance to her meagre, one-room apartment. Months later, after he has recovered from the bout of scarlet fever, Michael calls round to thank her. And then he continues to come round, until one day they fall into each other’s arms. After school each day, abandoning his friends, he rushes to her. Their relationship continues through the summer vacation; he even comes to her on his 16th birthday.
Michael is enthralled by the classics and reads to Hanna from The odyssey and other great works of literature. His reading to her follows their lovemaking, until Hanna announces a reversal and gets Michael to read to her before they romp in bed.
It all does end in tears, but not in any traditionally romantic manner. Hanna simply ups and leaves one day, without verbal or written explanation, leaving Michael to call at an empty love nest and subsequently mourn her loss.
Some years later, in the mid-60s, while Michael is being fast-tracked toward the judiciary by his law professor, Rohl (Bruno Ganz), he and a few classmates troop off to observe a war crimes trial. Its presiding judge (Burghart Klaußner) expresses perplexity over the defendants’ attitude in what is now the new, ‘anti-Nazi’ West Germany. Unstated, of course, is the documented fact that many judges and senior government, industrial and military figures in that new post-war Germany were often war criminals, excused prosecution first by the western Allied occupying powers (primarily USA and Britain) and later by ... themselves.
Particularly and personally shocking for Michael, however, is the fact that among the half dozen women on trial is Hanna. She and her co-accused are up on murder charges over women concentration camp inmates they were leading on one of the death marches towards the end of World War II. For Hanna had become fed up with wage-slavery on the Siemens production line in 1943 and so applied for a job with the SS. “They wanted camp guards,” she simply replies to the judge’s question as to why she joined.
Our and the court’s (possibly faux) shock as to why she and the other female guards did not let these prisoners out of a burning building that accidentally caught fire is also simple for her. “They were our responsibility,” so how could she possibly let them run off willy-nilly into the night. Hanna is at least frighteningly honest on these points, for what it is worth. But when it comes to deciding who of the defendants was their leader and who will bear the main responsibility for murder it is adjudged that it will be whoever wrote their joint statement. The judge demands an example of Hanna’s handwriting, at which she baulks and suddenly declares that she wrote the statement. Her previous honesty, for which her co-defendants disavow her and obtain lesser sentences, gives way.
Now is when Michael is tested and found wanting. His post-war law training leads him to believe that these mere Nazi pawns must be severely punished. Yet he realises an awful truth: Hanna could not have written the statement. Why? Because he always used to read to her (not her to him), she never even read a menu, and one of the surviving camp inmates testified that she had ‘favourites’ among the prisoners whom she got to read to her. Ergo, Hanna is illiterate. Michael’s imbibing of the post-war ‘We were good Germans, punish these (junior) monsters’ consensus is at variance with this knowledge about Hanna; he fails to act and pass this information to the court, betraying his love for her and ultimately his own conscience and morality.
Hanna accepts her life sentence (the other defendants get four years each) as her due, covering her shame for her crime and her illiteracy. To a degree, we are left wondering which shame is greater to her. She learns painfully to read, but, although she corresponds with an adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) years later, he cannot help her avoid tragedy. She dies at her own hand on the day of her release 20 years into her sentence. His shameful lapse as a young adult is not expunged nor can it now be atoned for.
However shameful Hanna feels about those women in her custody whom she allowed to burn to death, she was punished for their murder unjustly compared to the other female guards precisely because of the overwhelming shame of being illiterate. Michael’s own shame about having had an affair with an SS guard is compounded and quite possibly overtaken by the ideology of a thoroughly bourgeois anti-Nazi ‘justice’ that has been inculcated in him. This invades his being into adulthood, sitting as he does on the bench in judgement of others. ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ must haunt him.
In The reader we are shown a glimpse of a form of justice under which mostly low-rung war criminals were punished while the mighty not only went free, but colonised the heights of the economy and politics, including such figures as the West German president at the time of this trial, Heinrich Lübke.4
The individual in history has, of course, choices to make. Here we are given a taste of how some can be made, for good or bad. And how atomised individuals are left not only with the consequences of their choices, but that conscience’s dictates shall be abandoned at one’s peril.
Notes
1. See Mike Belbin’s article, ‘Playing the public and the personal’ (Weekly Worker January 29).
2. Prelude to a nightmare: art, politics and Hitler’s early years in Vienna 1906-1913 Massachusetts 2002.
3. For example, see F Spotts Hitler and the power of aesthetics New York 2003.
4. See www.zeit.de/2007/30/Heinrich-Luebke (in German).