When they were caught, Nazi war criminals usually justified their crimes by claiming that they were merely following orders. Hanna Schmitz, one of the central characters in Stephen Daldry’s film, The Reader, which opens in Toronto on Dec. 12, justifies an act of brutality during the Holocaust on similar grounds.
Kate Winslet in The Reader
Schmitz, a German concentration camp guard portrayed by Kate Winslet, is honest enough to admit at a postwar trial that she sent Jews to their deaths during the initial selection process. But as more pointed questions are directed at her by a presiding judge, she refuses to take responsibility for her role in a horrific incident in which 300 Jews were burned alive.
The victims, having been herded into a church, died when Allied aircraft bombed the building, thereby condemning the Jews to death by fire. Fearing that they would escape, she kept the door locked, fulfilling her warped sense of duty. This scene, a pivotal one, occurs about halfway through The Reader, which is based on a 1995 novel by German author Bernhard Schlink. The book, like the film itself, turns on such themes as guilt, responsibility and silence.
Unfolding in flashbacks and fastforwards, and set in post-war Germany and pre-war Poland, it begins in Berlin in 1995 as Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), a German lawyer, gazes out the widow. As a streetcar rumbles by, viewers are taken back to a provincial town in West Germany, circa 1958. Berg, then 15, is heading home on a cold, rainy day. When he becomes ill, Schmitz, a 36-year-old tram conductor, gives him a lending hand.
They meet again and again, and in each instance, they have sex. In exchange, he reads famous novels to her, raising the question why she cannot read these books herself.
In each of their encounters she has full control of the situation, effortlessly manipulating Berg to suit her needs. They remain emotionally distant despite their physical closeness. At one point, however, Berg blurts out, “I can’t live without you.”
In time, Berg’s readings from the classics become something of a substitute for sexual foreplay. Their relationship is fleeting, lasting only a summer.
Fastforwarding to 1966, The Reader finds Berg at the Heidelberg University law school. As a class assignment, he and his fellow students attend a war crimes trial. By chance, Schmitz is one of the six defendants, and Berg is transfixed.
He listens intently as she explains why she joined the SS in 1943. “I heard there were jobs,” she says blandly. “They were looking for guards.” Schmitz was dispatched to Auschwitz, where she made life and death decisions. At her trial, she is sentenced to life imprisonment, but if she had shared a tightly guarded secret with a judge, she might have been acquitted. As Schmitz, Winslet is nothing less than marvellous, cool and remote one moment and sensual and sweet the next.
The larger question posed by Schlink and repeated in the film is whether justice has been done. One of Berg’s idealistic colleagues delivers the verdict, and it is a harsh one. The trial is a “diversion,” he claims. Six defendants have paid for their crimes, yet thousands of other war criminals have been exonerated by the state.
After Schmitz is imprisoned, Berg, played with distinction by Fiennes, resurrects his relations with Schmitz, sending her audio cassettes of novels he has recorded. By matching sounds with words, she becomes literate, perhaps even heroic. Does a convicted war criminal deserve this kind of treatment? This surely will be the subject of debate.
When Schmitz’s sentence is commuted, Berg is asked to take responsibility for her welfare, since she has no friends or job prospects. Should he help a war criminal who was once his lover?
On the eve of her release, Berg asks Schmitz whether she has learned anything in prison. Being simplistic, she states the obvious: she learned how to read. As for her Nazi past, it is buried. “The dead are still dead,” she adds laconically in a reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
On balance, The Reader is a thoughtful foray into the nature of evil and complicity, but its somewhat sympathetic portrayal of Schmitz may jangle some nerves.
