The Reader

Upon roommate requests, we decided to see another Oscar film. Just to be sure, our lives do not only concern movie-watching. We do do a bit of other stuff once in a while.

My dad once said most Oscar films are not very entertaining, and he would be right. They often show their ambitions way too early and spend way too much on publicity and campaigning. The film has to be "good" in some sense, and they usually are, but they often risk being boring as well. Though I find it very amusing that Kate Winslet did win an Oscar for this Holocaust-related movie after she joked on Extras that the only way to win an Oscar is to do a Holocaust movie, and she had been snipped in the past precisely because her movies had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

I think I'm just not in the right mood for depressing movies recently because ... well, real life has been bad enough. I just don't want to see more downsides of human nature, and there are a lot of them. In The Reader, no one is moral. Everyone is so guilt-ridden and self-righteous and you find it hard to sympathize with anyone.

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I assume you know the basic premise of the story. An adolescent boy in post-WWII Berlin, Michael, has a summer affair with an older woman, Hannah. She always wants him to read to her. One day, she simply disappears out of his life Later, when he's a law student, he sits in the court where she is being tried as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of concentration camp prisoners under her care as a guard. He recalls all the little details from when they were together and concludes she is illiterate, but in the court all the other guards try to push all responsibilities onto her by saying she was in charge and she filed the report for everything. Ashamed of her illiteracy, she admitted guilt rather than providing a writing sample. Michael wants to help her by proving her illiteracy after talking about it over with her, but chickens out on the way to the prison because he feels she's guilty after all. She got life sentence while the other guards got 4 years in prison.

Michael, feeling guilty for not having helped her, sends her tapes of him reading books. She learns how to write from those tapes. 20 years later, she is to be released early. The prison calls up Michael because Hannah doesn't have any other contacts. Michael comes to talk with her and believes she is possibly not repentant for her actions and therefore becomes cool toward her. She hangs herself in her cell after he leaves. Her will leaves her savings to Michael, to be given to one of the concentration camp victims' daughter, who was at the camp herself.

Character Dissection (because I feel like it right):

Michael: emotionally damaged by Hannah's abandonment (he was really in love with her), he becomes distant in all his relationships, with his parents (didn't even go to his dad's funeral), with the random girl in law school (whom he sleeps with but doesn't marry, contrary to what roommates and I thought initially), with his eventual wife (they got a divorce), with his daughter (he's never around, and when he is, he never tells her anything about himself). His guilt does not allow him to a fulfilled life, and he basically lives unhappily ever after. His assumption of Hannah's lack of repentance may be a direct cause of her suicide, since he's the only person who still has contact with her out of the entire world.

Hannah: simpleton, can be tender at times but also temperamental. Follows order strictly, seems to have (or used to have) very little moral judgment on her own. But rather than that, I would like to think that she understood what was going on but chose not to think about it because it was too difficult and she couldn't handle it. Her guilt slowly builds up as she spends more time in prison and learns to read, and Michael's attitude finally pushes her over the edge.


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The thing is, I believe all human beings would do what Hannah did if in her situation. We are all selfish, and so few (or none) of us would stand up for other people if the costs of doing so are high enough, like they were in the war. Of course it is easy to try other people for these kinds of acts after the war, when you are sitting on the judge's bench or in the audience. But the roles can be so easily switched, and it could be you sitting there trying to explain why you watched as other people died. I'm not saying human evil is inevitable (at least not in the magnitude like in WWII) and excusable, but perhaps we should be less ready to point fingers toward others.