The Reader

Let’s say you have an astounding, soul-etching affair with someone you admire—a lot. You have nothing bad to say about him or her, except that suddenly, without warning, that person is gone.

Now let’s say that, years later, you find out that this person has allegedly done horrible—really horrible—things to other people. Does it un-etch this person from your soul? Change the good things you remember about the affair?

Who is the “real” person? The one you knew? Or the one to whom these other deeds have been ascribed? Can humanity and evil co-exist in the same person? What does it say about you if you feel compassion for someone who has committed an atrocity?

These questions (and more) are at the heart of The Reader, which tells the story of Michael, a 15-year-old innocent who accidentally encounters Hanna, a thirty-something trolley-worker with a healthy libido and no problem with younger men.

(SPOILER ALERT: I found it hard to talk about this movie, beyond this graph, without giving away some details….if you want to go in blind, don’t read further. If you like knowing the details….read on…)

Through Michael, we see Hanna as a gruff, tender, and sometimes bossy and dictatorial lover. Their most intimate moments are when Michael reads to her. That’s because the key to Hanna’s soul is the beauty of words and music. The affair comes to an end—leaving Michael heartbroken.

Fast forward seven or eight years to the mid-sixties. Michael is now a law student, and like many of his generation, he’s trying to make sense of his country’s behavior during the Holocaust. He’s attending a Holocaust trial for a class taught by a camp survivor. And there, lo and behold, is Hanna—on trial. It seems she was a guard in one of the camps, and that one of her jobs was to select ten women, periodically, for execution. Testimony reveals that she tended to single out the ones she’d made pets of—those who read to her.

One of the key moments in this movie is a speech given by one of Michael’s fellow students, which indicts all the older generation of Germans. He says they all knew what was happening to Germany’s Jews, even if they didn’t actively take part, and that they are all guilty.

What interests me is the notion that individual Germans behaved the way they did for different reasons. And that even people with a discernible soul were capable of it.

The temptation is to say that the people who were capable of atrocities were just evil. That let’s a lot of us who don’t perceive ourselves as evil off the hook—we’d never do that. And perhaps it makes the world feel safer—how many Hitler-like monsters can there be? It divides the world into us and them, which is the way we tend to like it. It makes a neat kind of sense.

This story doesn’t buy that explanation. Evil behavior and, tenderness can live side-by-side. It’s a much harder truth to live with. We watch Michael struggle with that—pitying Hanna, repulsed by her, wanting her to pay for her crimes, embarrassed by his pity and the enduring mark his first lover has left on him.

I don’t think, as some have said, that this take makes light of the guilt of those who participated, one way or another. I think it just makes it harder to separate ourselves from them. At the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. , there used to be (may still be—it's been awhile) an exhibit celebrating non-Jews who put their lives on the line to help Jews escape. My reaction: God, I hope I would have been one of them. But would I? It’s kind of a chilling question.