The Reader: A true examination of good and evil or Holocaust chic?

Published on Thursday 18 December 2008 18:57

THERE was always going to be a problem with The Reader. The novel by Bernhard Schlink, published in 1995, was the first in German fiction to humanise a concentration camp guard. Schlink's brave, semi-autobiographical narrative was attacked from the outset – and with good reason – for its moral ambiguity.

Its hero is seduced in his teens in a small German town by a bus conductor whom he later, when a law student, recognises as a defendant in a 1960s Auschwitz trial. At the heart of the story lies the recognition, painful to us all, that love is blind and sex takes no account of history.

Now filmed by Stephen Daldry after a decade of dithering by the late Anthony Minghella (who was plainly disturbed by its material), the movie plays a dangerous game with our conscience. It casts Kate Winslet as Hanna, the former SS guard who initiates the narrator in the joys of sex in exchange for an immersion in an education she has somehow missed out on, no doubt due to her unpleasant duties during the war. The boy thinks it's a fair deal, and so do we.

However, Winslet gives an outstanding performance as her unmistakable self, heroine of Titanic, irresistible wife of Sam Mendes. We, the audience, cannot find it in our hearts to condemn Kate Winslet. Naked before the film is 15 minutes old, she lures us into a fatal web of sympathy and desire that, for the film's duration at least, earns Hanna's conundrum a credibility it does not deserve.

By picking so glamorous a heroine, Daldry proves Schlink's case that sexual attraction suppresses moral judgment. Point taken. This, however, is not any ordinary tale of a schoolboy being corrupted by an older woman with a dirty secret.

The dirty secret here is her part in the murder of six million people, a number too large for the emotions to grasp and therefore suspended for the benefit of the characters we see on screen, Hanna and her lover. By pushing mass murder into the backdrop of the story, Daldry and Winslet lay themselves open to the charge of trivialising the greatest crime in history – a charge articulated by one critic as creating a kind of "Holocaust chic".

The accusation is not without substance. There has been an unconscionable surge of Holocaust exploitation in recent years, in works that range from the artless musical Imagine This!, which has just closed in London after a three-week run, to the sophisticated William Styron novel, Meryl Streep movie and Nicholas Maw opera known as Sophie's Choice, in which one woman's agonised dilemma in a Nazi concentration camp is vainly supposed to illustrate the greater atrocity. There are even scenes in Stephen Spielberg's painfully faithful film Schindler's List, based on Thomas Keneally's documentary novel, when the visual appeal of girls in a shower overwhelms our horror at the ambient outrage and allows a part of the mind to believe that maybe the Holocaust wasn't so dreadful, after all.

Anyone who makes art about the death of millions must first ask what the work adds to the sum of human understanding, and whether it does not perhaps, in some unforeseen way, diminish or – God forbid – normalise the victims' fate. If there is no ready answer to both questions, the work can be dismissed as exploitation. The Reader is, its participants insist, an act of faith, a search for a compromised truth. After nine years Minghella and his production partner, Sidney Pollack, ceded the directing and writing in 2006 to the persistent Daldry and David Hare. The intended Hanna, Nicole Kidman, became pregnant and dropped out of the project. Then this year both Pollack and Minghella died and the project almost froze. But Schlink was on hand to urge the team on – he also has a cameo role – and with Winslet in Kidman's place, a mixed cast of British and German actors created the film in Germany without mishap.

A law professor – Schlink's fictional alter ego – who observes the trial proceedings with weary fatalism is played by Bruno Ganz in the film, who was also played the dying Adolf Hitler in Downfall. There was no shortage of relevance, nor of realism – former judges and lawyers at war crimes trials volunteered to play themselves.

The Reader is set in a country where no questions are asked. Germany in the 1950s was in the grip of an economic "miracle" that occluded the recent past. After the first Nuremburg trial of 21 major war criminals in 1946, and a few subsidiary trials that led to several dozen executions, the judicial process against Nazi offenders was suspended. There had been an outcry against the verdicts by German churches, and the US in particular did not want to lose the loyalty of the West German government in their stand-offs with the Soviet Union.

Then, in 1961, an Israeli team in Argentina kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of genocide. He was put on trial in Jerusalem – the parade of evidence by camp survivors detailed not just the gassing and cremation at Auschwitz, the biggest killing centre, but also the institutional cruelty that ran right through the Third Reich. Eichmann was hanged.

Shamed by the Eichmann revelations, in 1963 the Germans put on trial in Frankfurt 22 lower-middle male functionaries from Auschwitz, most of them guards; six received life sentences. Few of the 3,500 female concentration camp guards employed by the Reich were ever brought to justice. The German trials ended in 1977.

The Reader takes an isolated instance and predicates it against the German pretence of not knowing. As a movie, it aims to escape the charge of trivialisation by adopting an altogether serious, even professorial tone, which detaches the viewer from the emotional engagement demanded by Schindler's List.

David Hare's cautious script is delivered by the actors in faultless EFL – "English as a Foreign Language". "Why don't you start by being honest with me?" must go down as one of the least appropriate lines ever uttered in the face of human horror. The two Jewish witnesses at Hanna's trial arouse less sympathy than their oppressor, and Ralph Fiennes, as her lover grown old, looks aimlessly prosperous, untouched by experience. On many of these counts, the film is trivial as charged.

Its chief redeeming factor lies in the substance of Schlink's novel. Schlink, a Berlin law professor, broke the silence. He dared to write about the former Nazis who faded back into German society as contributors in the making of a united Europe. What, he demands, should they have done with the men who ran the trains to Auschwitz?

The return of war criminals, a theme explored in my own forthcoming novel, The Game of Opposites, is not just a German problem. It affects all of us, often in the least expected places.

Schlink suggests that it is not up to you or me to confront a local perpetrator. We get on with our lives and let the justice mechanism take care of those it can find. What The Reader does is help us decide where to draw the line, and when to draw the curtains.

Schlink the lawyer has much to say about guilt and responsibility, both individual and collective. His guard believed that superior orders relieved her of responsibility; her redemption comes through the acceptance of guilt. This is a seditious and irrational argument, the idea of exculpation by emotion. It has led the book to be condemned in some German publications as "cultural pornography".

More disturbing still is the theme of illiteracy, which Schlink employs as a metaphor for German amnesia: saw no evil, heard no evil, smelt no evil. Hanna makes her lover, and before him her camp victims, read to her aloud from works by Homer, Goethe and Chekhov.

The metaphor implies that reading books is a barrier against evil and learning to read an expiation of ignorance. But one has only to scan the catalogue of Hitler's private library to realise that the greatest murderer of all time was also among the best-read men. Books and movies are not necessarily a part of human enlightenment. It is the idea behind the word that makes it valid, or vacant.

Schlink has been accused by the American writer Cynthia Ozick, among others, of excusing the inexcusable. I disagree. Like Ozick, I was left extremely uncomfortable by reading and re-reading the book and I was shaken again by seeing the movie, but The Reader cannot be ignored. It challenges core definitions of good and evil.

It does not trivialise the Holocaust by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it glamorise the Nazi era. On the contrary, it requires you to start thinking for yourself, which is by far the best thing any of us can do when confronted by the forces of inhumanity in our lives.

The lesson of the Holocaust is that ignorance is no excuse. The Reader brings us face to face with how little we know about the people around us.

&149 The Reader by Bernhard Schlink is out now (Orion, 7.99); Stephen Daldry's film of The Reader goes on general release in the UK on 2 January.

BACKGROUND: The Holocaust on film

HOLOCAUST (1978)

Meryl Streep played an Aryan German in this grim family saga.It effectively shows the horror of Nazism by following each member of a Polish family through their struggle to survive in Germany during the 1930s. A parallel strand sees a family friend join the SS to save his career, detached from the reality of genocide.

THE PIANIST (2002)

Based on the autobiography of Jewish-Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose story resonated with its Jewish director, Roman Polanski. The film is based on the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a pianist from Warsaw. Being sent to a Nazi camp, he is freed by a Jewish policeman and goes into hiding but is seen and recognised by a German army captain. In return for playing for the soldiers, he gets food and shelter for the remainder of the war. Szpilman survived, played again for his Warsaw audiences and continued to live in the ravaged Polish city until his death in 2000.

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS (2008)

Mark Herman's moving adaptation of John Boyne's novel shows us the short life of an innocent doomed by his father's collusion with evil. Bruno, eight, is the son of a Nazi commander who becomes intrigued by a neighbouring 'farm' whose inhabitants all wear striped pyjamas. The 'farm' is a concentration camp, and the boy, Shmuel, whom he befriends through the electrified fence, is a Jewish prisoner. When Bruno digs under the fence to don a stolen pair of 'striped pyjamas' and help Shmuel find his missing father inside the compound, he becomes a statistic of the routine mass murders ordered there by his own father on a daily basis.