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The Reader
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For the film based on the book, see The Reader (2008 film). For other uses, see The Reader (disambiguation).
The Reader
The Reader cover.jpg
Author
Bernhard Schlink
Translator
Carol Brown Janeway
Cover artist
Kathleen DiGrado (design), Sean Kernan (photo)
Country
Germany
Language
German
Genre
Novel
Publisher
Vintage International
Publication date
1995
Pages
218 pp
ISBN
0-375-70797-2
OCLC
370051270
The Reader (Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Berthold Brecht called the Nachgeborenen, those who came after. Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past, The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades.[1]
Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards. Der Spiegel wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. It sold 500,000 copies in Germany and was listed 14th of the 100 favorite books of German readers in a television poll in 2007.[2] It won the German Hans Fallada Prize in 1998, and became the first German book to top The New York Times bestselling books list. It has been translated into 45 different languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. A 2008 film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry was nominated for five Academy Awards, Kate Winslet winning for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz.
Contents [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Characters
1.2 Part 1
1.3 Part 2
1.4 Part 3
2 Literary elements 2.1 Style
2.2 Metaphor
2.3 Intertextuality
3 Reception 3.1 Criticism
4 Film adaptation
5 Notes
6 Further reading
Synopsis[edit]
Characters[edit]
Michael Berg, a German who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life: when he is a researcher in legal history, divorced with one daughter, Julia. Like many of his generation, he struggles to come to terms with his country's recent history.
Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship.
Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and whom he probably has a crush on. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, is when he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends.
Michael's father, a philosophy professor who specializes in Kant and Hegel. During the Nazi era he lost his job for giving a lecture on Spinoza and had to support himself and his family by writing hiking guidebooks. He is very formal and requires his children to make appointments to see him. He is emotionally stiff and does not easily express his emotions to Michael or his three siblings, which exacerbates the difficulties Hanna creates for Michael. By the time Michael is narrating the story, his father is dead.
Michael's mother, seen briefly. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. A psychoanalyst he sees, tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life.
The daughter of Jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family.
Part 1[edit]
The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog. Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally, despite their physical closeness. Hanna is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of her taints all his other relationships with women.
Part 2[edit]
Six years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial. Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants, sending him on a roller coaster of complex emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire. At first she denies this, but then in panic admits it in order to not have to give a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes that Hanna has a secret she refuses to reveal at any cost—she is illiterate. This realization explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women, and also the panic she carried her entire life over being discovered. During the trial, it transpires that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael decides she wanted to make their last days bearable; or did she send them to their death so they would not reveal her secret? She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. After much deliberation, he chooses not to reveal her secret.
Part 3[edit]
Michael is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.
While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He reveals his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first and only time.
Literary elements[edit]
Style[edit]
Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it,[3] a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her."[4] His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism.[5] Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis: "the past which brands us and with which we must live."[6] For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation:
… [which] had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from their midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame … We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst … The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse.[7]
But while he would like it to be as simple as that, his experience with Hanna complicates matters:
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.[8]
Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical relationship enacts, in microcosm, the pas de deux of older and younger Germans in the postwar years: Michael concludes that "the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate."[9] This idea plays itself out in the scene where the student Michael hitchhikes to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site during the trial, to get what he hopes will be some sense of the place. The driver who picks him up is an older man who questions him closely about what he believes motivated those who carried out the killings, then offers an answer of his own:
An executioner is not under orders. He's doing his work, he doesn't hate the people he executes, he's not taking revenge on them, he's not killing them because they're in his way or threatening or attacking them. They're a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.[10]
After the man tells an anecdote about a photograph of Jews being shot in Russia, one that he supposedly saw, but which showed an unusual level of insight into what a Nazi officer might have been thinking, Michael suspects him of being that officer and confronts him. The man stops the car and asks him to leave.[11]
Metaphor[edit]
Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities.[3] Nicholas Wroe, in the Guardian, likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy,"[12] and Ron Rosenbaum of Slate says that Hanna is "a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to 'read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens."[13] Michael's relationship with Hanna, partly erotic and partly maternal, stands for the ambivalent relationship of present-day Germany and its Nazi past: the past is "mother" of Michael's generation, and he eventually finds out, like other Germans of his generation, that his "parents" were guilty. "The paralyzing shame, the psychic numbing, the moral failures of the 'lucky late-born' are the novel's central focus," writes Suzanne Ruta in the New York Times.[14] Only through his relationship with Hanna can Michael get well; Franklin interprets that to mean that "postwar Germany is sick, and it can begin to heal only through its encounter with the Nazi past."[3] Richard Bernstein of the New York Times also notes that "In some sense, perhaps, Hanna can be seen to stand in for the larger German quandary of remembrance and atonement," but prefers not to read the novel as an allegory.[15] That said, the novel is about Michael, not Hanna; the original German title, Der Vorleser, specifically indicates one who reads aloud, as Michael does for Hanna.[16]
The Reader abounds with references to representations of the Holocaust, both external and internal to Michael's narrative, some real and some invented by Schlink. Of the latter, the most important is the book by the death-march survivor that constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna. It is summarized at some length and even briefly quoted, although its title is never given. Michael must read it in English since its German translation has not yet been published: "(It was) an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy." On a second reading in later life, he says, "it is the book that creates distance."[17] For Michael, written media alone cannot convey a full impression of the Holocaust: the victims are not sympathetic, and the oppressors are too faceless to be judged. He cannot muster up the empathy to "make the experience part of his internal life," according to Froma Zeitlin.[16] Hanna, however, has the opposite experience upon reading books by Holocaust survivors. She tells Michael:
I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.[18]
When she breaks with German practice and asks the judge at her trial "What would you have done?" about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, her question indicates that she does not know that she could have acted differently,[5] and her statement that there was "no alternative" claims a lack of moral responsibility.[19] As a result of her shame at being illiterate, she has not only let the bulk of the crime be pinned on her, she has let those with a greater share of responsibility escape full accountability. Franklin writes that this is the moral center of the novel—that Hanna, as Michael puts it, chooses exposure as a criminal over exposure as an illiterate—and in Franklin's view the novel cannot recover from the weakness of this position. Franklin regards it not only as implausible, but the implication that Hanna chose the job and acted as she did because of her illiteracy appears intended to exonerate her. Her Nazism was accidental, and Franklin writes that Schlink offers no guidance about how to punish a brutality of convenience, rather than of ideology.[20]
Michael is aware that all his attempts to visualize what Hanna might have been like back then, what happened, are colored by what he has read and seen in movies. He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as she chose him later on, only to send that girl to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months. Did she do it to make the last months of the condemned more bearable? Or to keep her secret safe? Michael's inability to both condemn and understand springs from this. He asks himself and the reader:
What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?[21]
Intertextuality[edit]
The books read in the novel, both by Michael to Hanna and by Hanna herself, are significant. Michael selects texts from the Enlightenment, "with its emphasis on moral and ethical absolutes," and German classics by which means he tries to reclaim German heritage.[5] The texts include Friedrich Schiller's Intrigue and Love and Gotthold Lessing's Emilia Galotti.
Katharina Hall writes that the novel itself relies on intertextual knowledge: it "reworks the ‘Väterliteratur’ model of the 1970s and 1980s," which depicts the relationship between the first and second generations; here, however, the relationship is sexual rather than parent-child. She also notes the invoking of tropes present in mass-market romance fiction, though the gender roles are inverted.[22]
Reception[edit]
The Reader sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list.[23] Critic Rainer Moritz of Die Welt wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd."[24] Werner Fuld wrote in Focus that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them."[25] In 1998 The Reader was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.
As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages.[12] Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex."[15] While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work."[14] It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in Oprah's Book Club in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France,[12] and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.
Criticism[edit]
Schlink's problematic approach toward Hanna's culpability in the Final Solution has been a frequent complaint about the book. Early on he was accused of revising or falsifying history. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators.[26] In the English-speaking world, Frederic Raphael wrote that no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil."[27] Ron Rosenbaum, criticizing the film adaptation of The Reader, wrote that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate", "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate… You'd have to be exceedingly stupid."[13] (This refers to the January 30, 1939 statement to the Reichstag,[28] later deliberately misdated to 1 September 1939[29])
Cynthia Ozick in Commentary Magazine called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur."[30] Ozick's reading of the novel was challenged by Richard H. Weisberg, who highlighted a passage in the novel where Hanna strikes Michael repeatedly with a leather strap drawing blood and splitting his lip. In Weisberg's view, Schlink has Hanna revert to concentration-camp mode, the split lip reminding us of the bloodletting of millions.[31] Jeffrey I. Roth replied that Ozick had misread the novel, confusing the perspective of the immature and impressionable narrator, Michael Berg, who loves Hanna and cannot condemn her entirely, with the point of view of the author, Bernhard Schlink, who writes of Hanna, "That woman was truly brutal." Roth found in Hanna an unsympathetic character who behaves brutally and never fully accepts her criminal responsibility, making Ozick's suggestion, that Schlink wants us to sympathize with Hanna and by extension her Nazi cohorts, implausible.[32]
As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS appeared only in 2007, twelve years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on The Reader have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany. The study paints a historical picture as complex as Schlink's novel.[33]
Schlink wrote that "in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book," but those of his own generation were more likely to criticize Michael (and his) inability to fully condemn Hanna. He added, "I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."[12]
Film adaptation[edit]
Main article: The Reader (2008 film)
The film version, directed by Stephen Daldry, was released in December 2008. Kate Winslet played Hanna,[34] with David Kross as the young Michael and Ralph Fiennes as the older man.[35] Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin played supporting roles. It was nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Winslet won the Oscar for leading actress.
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 201ff.
2.Jump up ^ "Unsere Besten", ZDF, October 31, 2007, accessed January 21, 2011.
3.^ Jump up to: a b c Franklin 2010, pp. 201–202.
4.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 27.
5.^ Jump up to: a b c Kremer, S. Lillian (2003). Holocaust Literature: Lerner to Zychlinsky, index. Taylor & Francis.
6.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 181.
7.Jump up ^ The Reader, pp. 92–93.
8.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 157.
9.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 171.
10.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 151.
11.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 152.
12.^ Jump up to: a b c d Wroe, Nicholas. "Reader's guide to a moral maze", The Guardian, February 9, 2002. Wroe writes that the book had sold 75,000 copies in the U.S. by 2002. Ruth Franklin (2010) writes that the figure is two million; see p. 201.
13.^ Jump up to: a b Rosenbaum, Ron. "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader", Slate, February 9, 2009.
14.^ Jump up to: a b Ruta, Suzanne. "Secrets and Lies", The New York Times, July 27, 1997.
15.^ Jump up to: a b Bernstein, Richard. "Once Loving, Once Cruel, What's Her Secret?", The New York Times, August 20, 1997.
16.^ Jump up to: a b Zeitlin, Froma. "New Soundings in Holocaust Literature". In Postone, Moishe; Santner, Eric L. Catastrophe and meaning: the Holocaust and the twentieth century.
17.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 118.
18.Jump up ^ The Reader, pp. 198–199.
19.Jump up ^ Tabensky, Pedro Alexis (2006). Judging and understanding: essays on free will, narrative, meaning and the ethical limits of condemnation. Ashgate Publishing. p. 70.
20.Jump up ^ Franklin 2010, p. 204.
21.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 104.
22.Jump up ^ Hall, Katharina (July 2006). "The Author, The Novel, The Reader and The Perils of ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’: A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink's Selbs Justiz and Der Vorleser". German Life and Letters 59 (3). doi:10.1111/j.0016-8777.2006.00360.x.
23.Jump up ^ ZDF.de - Top 50
24.Jump up ^ Rainer Moritz. Die Welt. October 15, 1999
25.Jump up ^ Fuld, Werner. Focus. September 30, 1995.
26.Jump up ^ Oltermann, Philip. "Re-readings", Prospect, February 29, 2008.
27.Jump up ^ Raphael, Frederick. "Bad Beyond Imagination", Standpoint, March 2009.
28.Jump up ^ Ben Kiernan Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination Page 440 2007 "Hitler announced his priorities on January 30, 1939: "Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe'"
29.Jump up ^ Lessons and Legacies: Teaching the Holocaust in a changing world Page 27 Peter Hayes, Donald G. Schilling, Jeffry M. Diefendorf - 1998 "It is worth noting that this misdating, designed to associate the killing of Jews with the war, was not only broadcast on German radio and printed with the wrong date in German newspapers of the time; it was also repeated in print in"
30.Jump up ^ Ozick, Cynthia. "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination", Commentary, March 1999.
31.Jump up ^ Weisberg, Richard H. "A Sympathy That Does Not Condone", Law and Literature, summer 2004, vol. 16, No. 2. For the passage about the leather strap, see The Reader, pp. 54–55.
32.Jump up ^ Roth, Jeffrey I. "Reading and Misreading The Reader", Law and Literature, summer 2004, vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 163–177. For the quote about Hanna, see The Reader, p. 213.
33.Jump up ^ Milata, Paul. Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS. Böhlau. Cologne 2007.
34.Jump up ^ Jeff Labrecque, "Best Actress," Entertainment Weekly 1032/1033 (Jan. 30/Feb. 6, 2009): 45.
35.Jump up ^ Winslet Replaces Pregnant Kidman in Film IMDb
Further reading[edit]
Portal icon Germany portal
Portal icon Books portal
Portal icon 1990s portal
Portal icon World War II portal
BBC World Book Club. Podcast of Bernhard Schlink talking about The Reader, January 1, 2011, accessed January 20, 2011.
Oprah's Book Club. "The Reader", December 5, 2008, accessed January 20, 2011.
UC Santa Barbara. "Reading guide for Schlink: The Reader", accessed January 20, 2011.
Vintage Books and Anchor Books. "The Reader Reading Group Guide", accessed January 20, 2011.
Complete book review, analysis and interpretation "The Reader - Bernhard Schlink - Projectwork", accessed December 18, 2012.
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German historical novels
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The Reader
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For the film based on the book, see The Reader (2008 film). For other uses, see The Reader (disambiguation).
The Reader
The Reader cover.jpg
Author
Bernhard Schlink
Translator
Carol Brown Janeway
Cover artist
Kathleen DiGrado (design), Sean Kernan (photo)
Country
Germany
Language
German
Genre
Novel
Publisher
Vintage International
Publication date
1995
Pages
218 pp
ISBN
0-375-70797-2
OCLC
370051270
The Reader (Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Berthold Brecht called the Nachgeborenen, those who came after. Like other novels in the genre of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past, The Reader explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades.[1]
Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards. Der Spiegel wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. It sold 500,000 copies in Germany and was listed 14th of the 100 favorite books of German readers in a television poll in 2007.[2] It won the German Hans Fallada Prize in 1998, and became the first German book to top The New York Times bestselling books list. It has been translated into 45 different languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. A 2008 film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry was nominated for five Academy Awards, Kate Winslet winning for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz.
Contents [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Characters
1.2 Part 1
1.3 Part 2
1.4 Part 3
2 Literary elements 2.1 Style
2.2 Metaphor
2.3 Intertextuality
3 Reception 3.1 Criticism
4 Film adaptation
5 Notes
6 Further reading
Synopsis[edit]
Characters[edit]
Michael Berg, a German who is first portrayed as a 15-year-old boy and is revisited at later parts of his life: when he is a researcher in legal history, divorced with one daughter, Julia. Like many of his generation, he struggles to come to terms with his country's recent history.
Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship.
Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and whom he probably has a crush on. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, is when he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends.
Michael's father, a philosophy professor who specializes in Kant and Hegel. During the Nazi era he lost his job for giving a lecture on Spinoza and had to support himself and his family by writing hiking guidebooks. He is very formal and requires his children to make appointments to see him. He is emotionally stiff and does not easily express his emotions to Michael or his three siblings, which exacerbates the difficulties Hanna creates for Michael. By the time Michael is narrating the story, his father is dead.
Michael's mother, seen briefly. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. A psychoanalyst he sees, tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life.
The daughter of Jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz. She lives in New York City when Michael visits her near the end of the story, still suffering from the loss of her own family.
Part 1[edit]
The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as The Odyssey and Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog. Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally, despite their physical closeness. Hanna is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of her taints all his other relationships with women.
Part 2[edit]
Six years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial. Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants, sending him on a roller coaster of complex emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire. At first she denies this, but then in panic admits it in order to not have to give a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes that Hanna has a secret she refuses to reveal at any cost—she is illiterate. This realization explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women, and also the panic she carried her entire life over being discovered. During the trial, it transpires that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael decides she wanted to make their last days bearable; or did she send them to their death so they would not reveal her secret? She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. After much deliberation, he chooses not to reveal her secret.
Part 3[edit]
Michael is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.
While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He reveals his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, Michael visits Hanna's grave for the first and only time.
Literary elements[edit]
Style[edit]
Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it,[3] a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her."[4] His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism.[5] Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis: "the past which brands us and with which we must live."[6] For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation:
… [which] had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from their midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame … We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst … The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse.[7]
But while he would like it to be as simple as that, his experience with Hanna complicates matters:
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.[8]
Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical relationship enacts, in microcosm, the pas de deux of older and younger Germans in the postwar years: Michael concludes that "the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate."[9] This idea plays itself out in the scene where the student Michael hitchhikes to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site during the trial, to get what he hopes will be some sense of the place. The driver who picks him up is an older man who questions him closely about what he believes motivated those who carried out the killings, then offers an answer of his own:
An executioner is not under orders. He's doing his work, he doesn't hate the people he executes, he's not taking revenge on them, he's not killing them because they're in his way or threatening or attacking them. They're a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.[10]
After the man tells an anecdote about a photograph of Jews being shot in Russia, one that he supposedly saw, but which showed an unusual level of insight into what a Nazi officer might have been thinking, Michael suspects him of being that officer and confronts him. The man stops the car and asks him to leave.[11]
Metaphor[edit]
Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities.[3] Nicholas Wroe, in the Guardian, likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy,"[12] and Ron Rosenbaum of Slate says that Hanna is "a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to 'read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens."[13] Michael's relationship with Hanna, partly erotic and partly maternal, stands for the ambivalent relationship of present-day Germany and its Nazi past: the past is "mother" of Michael's generation, and he eventually finds out, like other Germans of his generation, that his "parents" were guilty. "The paralyzing shame, the psychic numbing, the moral failures of the 'lucky late-born' are the novel's central focus," writes Suzanne Ruta in the New York Times.[14] Only through his relationship with Hanna can Michael get well; Franklin interprets that to mean that "postwar Germany is sick, and it can begin to heal only through its encounter with the Nazi past."[3] Richard Bernstein of the New York Times also notes that "In some sense, perhaps, Hanna can be seen to stand in for the larger German quandary of remembrance and atonement," but prefers not to read the novel as an allegory.[15] That said, the novel is about Michael, not Hanna; the original German title, Der Vorleser, specifically indicates one who reads aloud, as Michael does for Hanna.[16]
The Reader abounds with references to representations of the Holocaust, both external and internal to Michael's narrative, some real and some invented by Schlink. Of the latter, the most important is the book by the death-march survivor that constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna. It is summarized at some length and even briefly quoted, although its title is never given. Michael must read it in English since its German translation has not yet been published: "(It was) an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy." On a second reading in later life, he says, "it is the book that creates distance."[17] For Michael, written media alone cannot convey a full impression of the Holocaust: the victims are not sympathetic, and the oppressors are too faceless to be judged. He cannot muster up the empathy to "make the experience part of his internal life," according to Froma Zeitlin.[16] Hanna, however, has the opposite experience upon reading books by Holocaust survivors. She tells Michael:
I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.[18]
When she breaks with German practice and asks the judge at her trial "What would you have done?" about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, her question indicates that she does not know that she could have acted differently,[5] and her statement that there was "no alternative" claims a lack of moral responsibility.[19] As a result of her shame at being illiterate, she has not only let the bulk of the crime be pinned on her, she has let those with a greater share of responsibility escape full accountability. Franklin writes that this is the moral center of the novel—that Hanna, as Michael puts it, chooses exposure as a criminal over exposure as an illiterate—and in Franklin's view the novel cannot recover from the weakness of this position. Franklin regards it not only as implausible, but the implication that Hanna chose the job and acted as she did because of her illiteracy appears intended to exonerate her. Her Nazism was accidental, and Franklin writes that Schlink offers no guidance about how to punish a brutality of convenience, rather than of ideology.[20]
Michael is aware that all his attempts to visualize what Hanna might have been like back then, what happened, are colored by what he has read and seen in movies. He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as she chose him later on, only to send that girl to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months. Did she do it to make the last months of the condemned more bearable? Or to keep her secret safe? Michael's inability to both condemn and understand springs from this. He asks himself and the reader:
What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?[21]
Intertextuality[edit]
The books read in the novel, both by Michael to Hanna and by Hanna herself, are significant. Michael selects texts from the Enlightenment, "with its emphasis on moral and ethical absolutes," and German classics by which means he tries to reclaim German heritage.[5] The texts include Friedrich Schiller's Intrigue and Love and Gotthold Lessing's Emilia Galotti.
Katharina Hall writes that the novel itself relies on intertextual knowledge: it "reworks the ‘Väterliteratur’ model of the 1970s and 1980s," which depicts the relationship between the first and second generations; here, however, the relationship is sexual rather than parent-child. She also notes the invoking of tropes present in mass-market romance fiction, though the gender roles are inverted.[22]
Reception[edit]
The Reader sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list.[23] Critic Rainer Moritz of Die Welt wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd."[24] Werner Fuld wrote in Focus that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them."[25] In 1998 The Reader was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.
As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages.[12] Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex."[15] While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work."[14] It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in Oprah's Book Club in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France,[12] and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.
Criticism[edit]
Schlink's problematic approach toward Hanna's culpability in the Final Solution has been a frequent complaint about the book. Early on he was accused of revising or falsifying history. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators.[26] In the English-speaking world, Frederic Raphael wrote that no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil."[27] Ron Rosenbaum, criticizing the film adaptation of The Reader, wrote that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate", "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate… You'd have to be exceedingly stupid."[13] (This refers to the January 30, 1939 statement to the Reichstag,[28] later deliberately misdated to 1 September 1939[29])
Cynthia Ozick in Commentary Magazine called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur."[30] Ozick's reading of the novel was challenged by Richard H. Weisberg, who highlighted a passage in the novel where Hanna strikes Michael repeatedly with a leather strap drawing blood and splitting his lip. In Weisberg's view, Schlink has Hanna revert to concentration-camp mode, the split lip reminding us of the bloodletting of millions.[31] Jeffrey I. Roth replied that Ozick had misread the novel, confusing the perspective of the immature and impressionable narrator, Michael Berg, who loves Hanna and cannot condemn her entirely, with the point of view of the author, Bernhard Schlink, who writes of Hanna, "That woman was truly brutal." Roth found in Hanna an unsympathetic character who behaves brutally and never fully accepts her criminal responsibility, making Ozick's suggestion, that Schlink wants us to sympathize with Hanna and by extension her Nazi cohorts, implausible.[32]
As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS appeared only in 2007, twelve years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on The Reader have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany. The study paints a historical picture as complex as Schlink's novel.[33]
Schlink wrote that "in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book," but those of his own generation were more likely to criticize Michael (and his) inability to fully condemn Hanna. He added, "I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."[12]
Film adaptation[edit]
Main article: The Reader (2008 film)
The film version, directed by Stephen Daldry, was released in December 2008. Kate Winslet played Hanna,[34] with David Kross as the young Michael and Ralph Fiennes as the older man.[35] Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin played supporting roles. It was nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Winslet won the Oscar for leading actress.
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 201ff.
2.Jump up ^ "Unsere Besten", ZDF, October 31, 2007, accessed January 21, 2011.
3.^ Jump up to: a b c Franklin 2010, pp. 201–202.
4.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 27.
5.^ Jump up to: a b c Kremer, S. Lillian (2003). Holocaust Literature: Lerner to Zychlinsky, index. Taylor & Francis.
6.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 181.
7.Jump up ^ The Reader, pp. 92–93.
8.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 157.
9.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 171.
10.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 151.
11.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 152.
12.^ Jump up to: a b c d Wroe, Nicholas. "Reader's guide to a moral maze", The Guardian, February 9, 2002. Wroe writes that the book had sold 75,000 copies in the U.S. by 2002. Ruth Franklin (2010) writes that the figure is two million; see p. 201.
13.^ Jump up to: a b Rosenbaum, Ron. "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader", Slate, February 9, 2009.
14.^ Jump up to: a b Ruta, Suzanne. "Secrets and Lies", The New York Times, July 27, 1997.
15.^ Jump up to: a b Bernstein, Richard. "Once Loving, Once Cruel, What's Her Secret?", The New York Times, August 20, 1997.
16.^ Jump up to: a b Zeitlin, Froma. "New Soundings in Holocaust Literature". In Postone, Moishe; Santner, Eric L. Catastrophe and meaning: the Holocaust and the twentieth century.
17.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 118.
18.Jump up ^ The Reader, pp. 198–199.
19.Jump up ^ Tabensky, Pedro Alexis (2006). Judging and understanding: essays on free will, narrative, meaning and the ethical limits of condemnation. Ashgate Publishing. p. 70.
20.Jump up ^ Franklin 2010, p. 204.
21.Jump up ^ The Reader, p. 104.
22.Jump up ^ Hall, Katharina (July 2006). "The Author, The Novel, The Reader and The Perils of ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’: A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink's Selbs Justiz and Der Vorleser". German Life and Letters 59 (3). doi:10.1111/j.0016-8777.2006.00360.x.
23.Jump up ^ ZDF.de - Top 50
24.Jump up ^ Rainer Moritz. Die Welt. October 15, 1999
25.Jump up ^ Fuld, Werner. Focus. September 30, 1995.
26.Jump up ^ Oltermann, Philip. "Re-readings", Prospect, February 29, 2008.
27.Jump up ^ Raphael, Frederick. "Bad Beyond Imagination", Standpoint, March 2009.
28.Jump up ^ Ben Kiernan Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination Page 440 2007 "Hitler announced his priorities on January 30, 1939: "Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe'"
29.Jump up ^ Lessons and Legacies: Teaching the Holocaust in a changing world Page 27 Peter Hayes, Donald G. Schilling, Jeffry M. Diefendorf - 1998 "It is worth noting that this misdating, designed to associate the killing of Jews with the war, was not only broadcast on German radio and printed with the wrong date in German newspapers of the time; it was also repeated in print in"
30.Jump up ^ Ozick, Cynthia. "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination", Commentary, March 1999.
31.Jump up ^ Weisberg, Richard H. "A Sympathy That Does Not Condone", Law and Literature, summer 2004, vol. 16, No. 2. For the passage about the leather strap, see The Reader, pp. 54–55.
32.Jump up ^ Roth, Jeffrey I. "Reading and Misreading The Reader", Law and Literature, summer 2004, vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 163–177. For the quote about Hanna, see The Reader, p. 213.
33.Jump up ^ Milata, Paul. Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS. Böhlau. Cologne 2007.
34.Jump up ^ Jeff Labrecque, "Best Actress," Entertainment Weekly 1032/1033 (Jan. 30/Feb. 6, 2009): 45.
35.Jump up ^ Winslet Replaces Pregnant Kidman in Film IMDb
Further reading[edit]
Portal icon Germany portal
Portal icon Books portal
Portal icon 1990s portal
Portal icon World War II portal
BBC World Book Club. Podcast of Bernhard Schlink talking about The Reader, January 1, 2011, accessed January 20, 2011.
Oprah's Book Club. "The Reader", December 5, 2008, accessed January 20, 2011.
UC Santa Barbara. "Reading guide for Schlink: The Reader", accessed January 20, 2011.
Vintage Books and Anchor Books. "The Reader Reading Group Guide", accessed January 20, 2011.
Complete book review, analysis and interpretation "The Reader - Bernhard Schlink - Projectwork", accessed December 18, 2012.
Categories: 1995 novels
German historical novels
Novels about the Holocaust
German-language novels
German novels adapted into films
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The Reader (2008 film)
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The Reader
Reader ver2.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by
Stephen Daldry
Produced by
Anthony Minghella
Sydney Pollack
Donna Gigliotti
Redmond Morris
Screenplay by
David Hare
Based on
The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
Starring
Kate Winslet
Ralph Fiennes
David Kross
Lena Olin
Bruno Ganz
Music by
Nico Muhly
Cinematography
Chris Menges
Roger Deakins
Edited by
Claire Simpson
Production
company
Mirage Enterprises
Neunte Babelsberg Film GmbH
Distributed by
The Weinstein Company (US)
Senator Film (Germany)
Release dates
December 12, 2008 (US: Limited)
February 6, 2009 (Berlin)
February 26, 2009 (Germany)
Running time
124 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Germany[2]
Language
English
German
Greek
Latin
Budget
$32 million[3]
Box office
$108,901,967[3]
The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. The film was written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry. Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet star along with the young actor David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom had died before it was released. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on December 10, 2008.
It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past – a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial.
Winslet and Kross, who plays the young Michael, received much praise for their performances; Winslet won a number of awards for her role, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film itself was nominated for several other major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Release
5 Critical reception
6 Awards and nominations
7 References
8 External links
Plot[edit]
Berlin in 1995. Michael Berg watches an U-Bahn pass by—then flashing back to a tram in 1958 Neustadt. A 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) gets off because he feels sick and wanders the streets, pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a tram conductor, comes in and helps him return home.
Michael, diagnosed with scarlet fever, rests at home for the next three months. After he recovers, he visits Hanna with flowers to thank her. The 36-year-old Hanna seduces him and they begin an affair. They spend much of their time together having sex in her apartment after she has had Michael read to her from literary works he is studying. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. She abruptly moves without telling Michael.
In 1966 Michael is at Heidelberg University law school. As part of a seminar, the students observe a trial (similar to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials) of several women accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of a concentration camp near Krakow. Michael is stunned that Hanna is one of the defendants.
In the trial the key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather (Alexandra Maria Lara), author of a memoir of how she and her mother, who also testifies, survived. She describes how Hanna had women from the camp read to her in the evenings.
Hanna, unlike her co-defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's Selektion were gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the church fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it rather than complying with a demand to provide a handwriting sample.
Michael realizes Hanna's secret: she is illiterate and has concealed it her whole life. The other guards who claim she wrote the report are lying to place responsibility on Hanna. Michael informs the professor that he has information favourable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since the defendant herself chose not to disclose the information. Michael arranges a visit with Hanna in prison, but once there he leaves without seeing her.
Hanna receives a life sentence for her admitted leadership role in the church deaths while the other defendants are sentenced to four years and three months each. Michael (Ralph Fiennes) meanwhile marries, has a daughter, and divorces. Retrieving his books from the time of the affair with Hanna, he begins reading them into a tape recorder. He sends the cassette tapes and a recorder to Hanna. Eventually, she begins to check the books out from the prison library and teaches herself to read and write by following along with Michael's tapes. She starts writing back to Michael in brief, childlike notes, asking him to write to her. As time goes on, the letters reflect her gradually improving literacy.
Michael does not write back or visit but continues simply sending tapes, and in 1988 a prison official (Linda Bassett) telephones him to seek his help with Hanna's transition into society after her upcoming early release due to good behavior. He finds a place for her to live and a job and finally visits Hanna a week before her release. In their meeting, Michael remains somewhat distant and confronts her about what she has learned from her past. Michael arrives at the prison on the date of Hanna's release with flowers only to discover that Hanna hanged herself. She has left a tea tin with cash in it with a note asking Michael to give the cash and money in a bank account to Ilana. He discovers that she killed herself after reading Ilana's memoir of her horrifying experience in the concentration camp.
Michael travels to New York City where he meets Ilana and confesses his relationship with Hanna. He tells her about the suicide note and Hanna's illiteracy. Ilana tells Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps and refuses the money. Michael suggests that she donate the money to an organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one. She wants him to take care of this instead. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one stolen from her in Auschwitz.
Michael drives Julia, his daughter, to Hanna's grave and tells her their story.
Cast[edit]
Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz
Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael Berg
David Kross as the younger Michael Berg
Bruno Ganz as Professor Rohl, a Holocaust survivor
Alexandra Maria Lara as Ilana Mather, a former victim of a concentration camp
Lena Olin as Rose Mather (Ilana's mother) the older Ilana Mather
Vijessna Ferkic as Sophie, Michael's friend at school
Karoline Herfurth as Marthe, Michael's friend at university
Burghart Klaußner as the judge at Hanna's trial
Linda Bassett as Mrs. Brenner, prison official
Hannah Herzsprung as Julia, Michael Berg's daughter
Susanne Lothar as Carla Berg
Florian Bartholomäi as Thomas Berg
Volker Bruch as Dieter Spenz, a student in the seminar group
Production[edit]
In April 1998, Miramax Films acquired the rights to the novel The Reader,[4] and principal photography began in September 2007 immediately after Stephen Daldry was signed to direct the film adaptation and Fiennes was cast in a lead role.[5][6] Winslet was originally cast as Hanna, but scheduling difficulties with Revolutionary Road led her to leave the film and Nicole Kidman was cast as her replacement.[7] In January 2008, Kidman left the project, citing her recent pregnancy as the primary reason. She had not filmed any scenes yet, so the studio was able to recast Winslet without affecting the production schedule.[8]
Filming took place in Berlin and Görlitz and was finished in Cologne on July 14.[9] Filmmakers received $718,752 from Germany's Federal Film Board.[10] Overall, the studio received $4.1 million from Germany's regional and federal subsidiaries.[11]
Schlink insisted the film be shot in English rather than German, as it posed questions about living in a post-genocide society that went beyond mid-century Germany. Daldry and Hare toured locations from the novel with Schlink, viewed documentaries about that period in German history, and read books and articles about women who had served as SS guards in the camps. Hare, who rejected using a voiceover narration to render the long internal monologues in the novel, also changed the ending so that Michael starts to tell the story of Hanna and him to his daughter. "It's about literature as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication", he explained.[7]
The primary cast, all of whom were German besides Fiennes, Olin, and Winslet, decided to emulate Kross's accent since he had just learned English for the film.[7] Chris Menges replaced Roger Deakins as cinematographer. One of the film's producers, Scott Rudin, left the production over a dispute about the release date and had his name removed from the credit list. Rudin differed with Harvey Weinstein "because he didn't want to campaign for an Oscar along with Doubt and Revolutionary Road, which also stars Winslet."[12] Winslet won the Best Actress Academy Award for The Reader. Marc Caro wrote, "Because Winslet couldn't get Best Actress nominations for both movies, the Weinstein Co. shifted her to supporting actress for The Reader as a courtesy."[13] Winslet also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for Revolutionary Road.
Entertainment Weekly reported that to "age Hanna from cool seductress to imprisoned war criminal, Winslet endured seven and a half hours of makeup and prosthetic prep each day."[14]
Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly writes that "Ralph Fiennes has perhaps the toughest job, playing the morose adult Michael – a version, we can assume, of the author. Fiennes masters the default demeanor of someone perpetually pained."[15]
The sex scenes were shot last after Kross had turned 18.[16]
Release[edit]
On December 10, 2008 The Reader had a limited release at 8 theaters and grossed $168,051 at the domestic box office in its opening weekend. The film had its wide release on January 30, 2009 and grossed $2,380,376 at the domestic box office. The film's widest release was at 1,203 theaters on February 27, 2009, the weekend after the Oscar win for Kate Winslet.
In total, the film has grossed $34,194,407 at the domestic box office and $108,901,967 worldwide.[3] The movie was released in the US on April 14 (DVD)[17] and April 28 (Blu-ray), 2009[18] and in the UK on May 25, 2009 (both versions).[19] In Germany two DVD versions (single disc and 2-disc special edition) and Blu-ray were released on September 4, 2009.[20]
Critical reception[edit]
The Reader received mixed to positive reviews and has a rating of 61% on Rotten tomatoes based on 193 reviews with an average score of 6.4 out of 10. The consensus states, "Despite Kate Winslet's superb portrayal, The Reader suggests an emotionally distant, Oscar-baiting historical drama."[21] The film also has a score of 58 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 38 reviews.[22]
Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote:
This engrossing, graceful adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's semi-autobiographical novel has been adapted by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry with equal parts simplicity and nuance, restraint and emotion. At the center of a skein of vexing ethical questions, Winslet delivers a tough, bravura performance as a woman whose past coincides with Germany's most cataclysmic and hauntingly unresolved era.[23]
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote:
...you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.[24]
Patrick Goldstein, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said "The picture's biggest problem is that it simply doesn't capture the chilling intensity of its source material," and noted that there was a "largely lackluster early reaction" to the film by most film critics. Most felt that while the novel portrayed Hanna's illiteracy as a metaphor for generational illiteracy about the Holocaust, the film failed to convey those thematic overtones.[25]
Ron Rosenbaum was critical of the film's fixation on Hanna's illiteracy.
so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy – despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn't require reading skills – that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it's been declared "classic" and "profound") actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder... Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you're guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it's not shown in the film.[26]
Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter was more generous, concluding the picture was a "well-told coming-of-age yarn" but "disturbing" for raising critical questions about complicity in the Holocaust.[27] He praised Winslet and Kross for providing "gutsy, intense performances", and noted that Olin and Ganz turn in "memorable appearances."[27] He wrote that the cinematographers Chris Menges and Roger Deakins lent the film a "fine professional polish".[27] Colm Andrew of the Manx Independent also rated it highly and said the film had "countless opportunities to become overly sentimental or dramatic and resists every one of them, resulting in a film which by its conclusion, has you not knowing which quality to praise the most".[28]
At the Huffington Post, Thelma Adams found the relationship between Hanna and Michael, which she termed abusive, more disturbing than any of the historical questions in the movie:
Michael is a victim of abuse, and his abuser just happened to have been a luscious retired Auschwitz guard. You can call their tryst and its consequences a metaphor of two generations of Germans passing guilt from one to the next, but that doesn't explain why filmmakers Daldry and Hare luxuriated in the sex scenes – and why it's so tastefully done audiences won't see it for the child pornography it is.[29]
When asked to respond, Hare called it "the most ridiculous thing ... We went to great lengths to make sure that that's exactly what it didn't turn into. The book is much more erotic." Daldry added, "He's a young man who falls in love with an older woman who is complicated, difficult and controlling. That's the story."[30]
The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Rex Reed of The New York Observer named it the 2nd best film of 2008. Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter named it the 4th best film of 2008,[31] Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club named it the 8th best film of 2008,[31] and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times put it on his un-ranked top 20 list.[31]
Special praise went to Winslet's acting; she then swept the main prizes in the 2008/2009 award season, including the Golden Globe, the Critic's Choice Award, the Screen Actor's Guild Award, the BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Several writers noted that her success seemed to have made real her appearance in the BBC comedy Extras, in which she played a fictionalized version of herself desperate to win an Academy Award. In the episode, Winslet decided to increase her chance of winning an Oscar through starring in a film about the Holocaust, noting that such films were often awarded Oscars.[32] However, in the fictional film, Winslet played a nun sheltering children from the Holocaust, rather than one of its perpetrators. Regarding the similarity, Winslet commented that the similarity "would be funny" but the connection didn't occur to her until "midway through shooting the film...this was never a Holocaust movie to me. That's part of the story and provides something of a backdrop, and sets the scene. But to me it was always an extraordinarily unconventional love story."[33]
Awards and nominations[edit]
Awards
Award
Category
Name
Outcome
Academy Awards Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Cinematography Roger Deakins and Chris Menges Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Picture Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Redmond Morris, Donna Gigliotti
Best Adapted Screenplay David Hare
BAFTA Awards Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Cinematography Roger Deakins and Chris Menges Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Film
Best Screenplay – Adapted David Hare
Broadcast Film Critics Association Top 10 Films of the Year Won
Best Film Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Young Performer David Kross Nominated
Golden Globe Awards Best Director – Motion Picture Stephen Daldry Nominated
Best Picture – Drama
Best Screenplay David Hare
Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Kate Winslet Won
San Diego Film Critics Society Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Satellite Awards Top 10 Films of 2008 Won
Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Kate Winslet Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Film – Drama
Best Adapted Screenplay David Hare
Screen Actors Guild Awards Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role Kate Winslet Won
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "THE READER (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 2008-12-02. Retrieved 2013-06-17.
2.Jump up ^ "The Reader (2008)". The New York Times. Retrieved March 21, 2011.
3.^ Jump up to: a b c "The Reader (2008)". Box Office Mojo. 2010-12-30. Retrieved 2010-12-30.
4.Jump up ^ Monica Roman (1998-04-22). "Miramax books 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
5.Jump up ^ Michael Fleming (2007-08-17). "Kidman, Fiennes book 'Reader' gig". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
6.Jump up ^ Christian Koehl (2007-09-14). "Senator inks rights to 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
7.^ Jump up to: a b c Kaminer, Ariel. "Translating Love and the Unspeakable." New York Times. December 5, 2008.
8.Jump up ^ Ed Meza; Michael Fleming (2008-01-08). "Winslet replaces Kidman in 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2008-01-10.
9.Jump up ^ "Gestern letzter Dreh für 'Der Vorleser'". (in German). Sächsische Zeitung. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
10.Jump up ^ Ed Meza (2007-10-26). "'Reader' receives German funds". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
11.Jump up ^ Ed Meza (2008-01-08). "Nicole Kidman quits 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2008-01-08.
12.Jump up ^ Thompson, Anne (October 9, 2008). "Scott Rudin leaves 'The Reader'". Variety. Retrieved February 7, 2009.
13.Jump up ^ Caro, Mark (February 8, 2009). "How Kate Winslet outdid herself". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
14.Jump up ^ Jeff Labrecque, "Best Actress," Entertainment Weekly 1032/1033 (Jan. 30/Feb. 6, 2009): 45.
15.Jump up ^ Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Review of The Reader," Entertainment Weekly 1026 (December 19, 2008): 43.
16.Jump up ^ Clarke, Cath (2008-12-19). "First sight: David Kross". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 2010-05-25.
17.Jump up ^ "amazon.com". Retrieved 2009-03-18.
18.Jump up ^ "amazon.com". Retrieved 2009-03-19.
19.Jump up ^ "amazon.co.uk". Retrieved 2009-03-18.
20.Jump up ^ "areadvd.de". Retrieved 2009-03-31.
21.Jump up ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reader/
22.Jump up ^ http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-reader
23.Jump up ^ Hornaday, Ann. "'Reader' Lets Rending Story Speak for Itself" The Washington Post. December 25, 2008.
24.Jump up ^ Dargis, Manohla. "Innocence Is Lost in Postwar Germany." New York Times. December 10, 2008.
25.Jump up ^ Goldstein, Patrick. "No Oscar glory for 'The Reader'?" Los Angeles Times. December 3, 2008.
26.Jump up ^ Ron Rosenbaum: "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader", Slate 9/2/2009 http://www.slate.com/id/2210804/pagenum/2
27.^ Jump up to: a b c Honeycutt, Kirk. "Film Review: The Reader." The Hollywood Reporter. November 30, 2008.
28.Jump up ^ Review by Colm Andrew, IOM Today
29.Jump up ^ Thelma Adams (2008-12-02). "Reading Between the Lines in The Reader: When is Abuse Not Abuse?". Huffington Post.
30.Jump up ^ The Baguette (December 4, 2008). "Sex and the Younger Man". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). Retrieved March 11, 2009.
31.^ Jump up to: a b c "Metacritic: 2008 Film Critic Top Ten Lists". Metacritic. Retrieved January 11, 2009.[dead link]
32.Jump up ^ Grabert, Jessica. "Extras' Best Episode: Kate Winslet". Cinema Blend. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
33.Jump up ^ Rich, Katey. "Kate Winslet intervieq". Cinema Blend. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
External links[edit]
Portal icon Film in the United States portal
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Portal icon Germany portal
Official website
The Reader at the Internet Movie Database
The Reader at Box Office Mojo
The Reader at Rotten Tomatoes
The Reader at Metacritic
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The Reader (2008 film)
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The Reader
Reader ver2.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by
Stephen Daldry
Produced by
Anthony Minghella
Sydney Pollack
Donna Gigliotti
Redmond Morris
Screenplay by
David Hare
Based on
The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
Starring
Kate Winslet
Ralph Fiennes
David Kross
Lena Olin
Bruno Ganz
Music by
Nico Muhly
Cinematography
Chris Menges
Roger Deakins
Edited by
Claire Simpson
Production
company
Mirage Enterprises
Neunte Babelsberg Film GmbH
Distributed by
The Weinstein Company (US)
Senator Film (Germany)
Release dates
December 12, 2008 (US: Limited)
February 6, 2009 (Berlin)
February 26, 2009 (Germany)
Running time
124 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Germany[2]
Language
English
German
Greek
Latin
Budget
$32 million[3]
Box office
$108,901,967[3]
The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. The film was written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry. Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet star along with the young actor David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom had died before it was released. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on December 10, 2008.
It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past – a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial.
Winslet and Kross, who plays the young Michael, received much praise for their performances; Winslet won a number of awards for her role, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film itself was nominated for several other major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Release
5 Critical reception
6 Awards and nominations
7 References
8 External links
Plot[edit]
Berlin in 1995. Michael Berg watches an U-Bahn pass by—then flashing back to a tram in 1958 Neustadt. A 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) gets off because he feels sick and wanders the streets, pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a tram conductor, comes in and helps him return home.
Michael, diagnosed with scarlet fever, rests at home for the next three months. After he recovers, he visits Hanna with flowers to thank her. The 36-year-old Hanna seduces him and they begin an affair. They spend much of their time together having sex in her apartment after she has had Michael read to her from literary works he is studying. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. She abruptly moves without telling Michael.
In 1966 Michael is at Heidelberg University law school. As part of a seminar, the students observe a trial (similar to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials) of several women accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of a concentration camp near Krakow. Michael is stunned that Hanna is one of the defendants.
In the trial the key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather (Alexandra Maria Lara), author of a memoir of how she and her mother, who also testifies, survived. She describes how Hanna had women from the camp read to her in the evenings.
Hanna, unlike her co-defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's Selektion were gassed. She denies authorship of a report on the church fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it rather than complying with a demand to provide a handwriting sample.
Michael realizes Hanna's secret: she is illiterate and has concealed it her whole life. The other guards who claim she wrote the report are lying to place responsibility on Hanna. Michael informs the professor that he has information favourable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since the defendant herself chose not to disclose the information. Michael arranges a visit with Hanna in prison, but once there he leaves without seeing her.
Hanna receives a life sentence for her admitted leadership role in the church deaths while the other defendants are sentenced to four years and three months each. Michael (Ralph Fiennes) meanwhile marries, has a daughter, and divorces. Retrieving his books from the time of the affair with Hanna, he begins reading them into a tape recorder. He sends the cassette tapes and a recorder to Hanna. Eventually, she begins to check the books out from the prison library and teaches herself to read and write by following along with Michael's tapes. She starts writing back to Michael in brief, childlike notes, asking him to write to her. As time goes on, the letters reflect her gradually improving literacy.
Michael does not write back or visit but continues simply sending tapes, and in 1988 a prison official (Linda Bassett) telephones him to seek his help with Hanna's transition into society after her upcoming early release due to good behavior. He finds a place for her to live and a job and finally visits Hanna a week before her release. In their meeting, Michael remains somewhat distant and confronts her about what she has learned from her past. Michael arrives at the prison on the date of Hanna's release with flowers only to discover that Hanna hanged herself. She has left a tea tin with cash in it with a note asking Michael to give the cash and money in a bank account to Ilana. He discovers that she killed herself after reading Ilana's memoir of her horrifying experience in the concentration camp.
Michael travels to New York City where he meets Ilana and confesses his relationship with Hanna. He tells her about the suicide note and Hanna's illiteracy. Ilana tells Michael there is nothing to be learned from the camps and refuses the money. Michael suggests that she donate the money to an organization that combats adult illiteracy, preferably a Jewish one. She wants him to take care of this instead. Ilana keeps the tea tin since it is similar to one stolen from her in Auschwitz.
Michael drives Julia, his daughter, to Hanna's grave and tells her their story.
Cast[edit]
Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz
Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael Berg
David Kross as the younger Michael Berg
Bruno Ganz as Professor Rohl, a Holocaust survivor
Alexandra Maria Lara as Ilana Mather, a former victim of a concentration camp
Lena Olin as Rose Mather (Ilana's mother) the older Ilana Mather
Vijessna Ferkic as Sophie, Michael's friend at school
Karoline Herfurth as Marthe, Michael's friend at university
Burghart Klaußner as the judge at Hanna's trial
Linda Bassett as Mrs. Brenner, prison official
Hannah Herzsprung as Julia, Michael Berg's daughter
Susanne Lothar as Carla Berg
Florian Bartholomäi as Thomas Berg
Volker Bruch as Dieter Spenz, a student in the seminar group
Production[edit]
In April 1998, Miramax Films acquired the rights to the novel The Reader,[4] and principal photography began in September 2007 immediately after Stephen Daldry was signed to direct the film adaptation and Fiennes was cast in a lead role.[5][6] Winslet was originally cast as Hanna, but scheduling difficulties with Revolutionary Road led her to leave the film and Nicole Kidman was cast as her replacement.[7] In January 2008, Kidman left the project, citing her recent pregnancy as the primary reason. She had not filmed any scenes yet, so the studio was able to recast Winslet without affecting the production schedule.[8]
Filming took place in Berlin and Görlitz and was finished in Cologne on July 14.[9] Filmmakers received $718,752 from Germany's Federal Film Board.[10] Overall, the studio received $4.1 million from Germany's regional and federal subsidiaries.[11]
Schlink insisted the film be shot in English rather than German, as it posed questions about living in a post-genocide society that went beyond mid-century Germany. Daldry and Hare toured locations from the novel with Schlink, viewed documentaries about that period in German history, and read books and articles about women who had served as SS guards in the camps. Hare, who rejected using a voiceover narration to render the long internal monologues in the novel, also changed the ending so that Michael starts to tell the story of Hanna and him to his daughter. "It's about literature as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication", he explained.[7]
The primary cast, all of whom were German besides Fiennes, Olin, and Winslet, decided to emulate Kross's accent since he had just learned English for the film.[7] Chris Menges replaced Roger Deakins as cinematographer. One of the film's producers, Scott Rudin, left the production over a dispute about the release date and had his name removed from the credit list. Rudin differed with Harvey Weinstein "because he didn't want to campaign for an Oscar along with Doubt and Revolutionary Road, which also stars Winslet."[12] Winslet won the Best Actress Academy Award for The Reader. Marc Caro wrote, "Because Winslet couldn't get Best Actress nominations for both movies, the Weinstein Co. shifted her to supporting actress for The Reader as a courtesy."[13] Winslet also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for Revolutionary Road.
Entertainment Weekly reported that to "age Hanna from cool seductress to imprisoned war criminal, Winslet endured seven and a half hours of makeup and prosthetic prep each day."[14]
Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly writes that "Ralph Fiennes has perhaps the toughest job, playing the morose adult Michael – a version, we can assume, of the author. Fiennes masters the default demeanor of someone perpetually pained."[15]
The sex scenes were shot last after Kross had turned 18.[16]
Release[edit]
On December 10, 2008 The Reader had a limited release at 8 theaters and grossed $168,051 at the domestic box office in its opening weekend. The film had its wide release on January 30, 2009 and grossed $2,380,376 at the domestic box office. The film's widest release was at 1,203 theaters on February 27, 2009, the weekend after the Oscar win for Kate Winslet.
In total, the film has grossed $34,194,407 at the domestic box office and $108,901,967 worldwide.[3] The movie was released in the US on April 14 (DVD)[17] and April 28 (Blu-ray), 2009[18] and in the UK on May 25, 2009 (both versions).[19] In Germany two DVD versions (single disc and 2-disc special edition) and Blu-ray were released on September 4, 2009.[20]
Critical reception[edit]
The Reader received mixed to positive reviews and has a rating of 61% on Rotten tomatoes based on 193 reviews with an average score of 6.4 out of 10. The consensus states, "Despite Kate Winslet's superb portrayal, The Reader suggests an emotionally distant, Oscar-baiting historical drama."[21] The film also has a score of 58 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 38 reviews.[22]
Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote:
This engrossing, graceful adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's semi-autobiographical novel has been adapted by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry with equal parts simplicity and nuance, restraint and emotion. At the center of a skein of vexing ethical questions, Winslet delivers a tough, bravura performance as a woman whose past coincides with Germany's most cataclysmic and hauntingly unresolved era.[23]
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote:
...you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.[24]
Patrick Goldstein, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said "The picture's biggest problem is that it simply doesn't capture the chilling intensity of its source material," and noted that there was a "largely lackluster early reaction" to the film by most film critics. Most felt that while the novel portrayed Hanna's illiteracy as a metaphor for generational illiteracy about the Holocaust, the film failed to convey those thematic overtones.[25]
Ron Rosenbaum was critical of the film's fixation on Hanna's illiteracy.
so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy – despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn't require reading skills – that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it's been declared "classic" and "profound") actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder... Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you're guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it's not shown in the film.[26]
Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter was more generous, concluding the picture was a "well-told coming-of-age yarn" but "disturbing" for raising critical questions about complicity in the Holocaust.[27] He praised Winslet and Kross for providing "gutsy, intense performances", and noted that Olin and Ganz turn in "memorable appearances."[27] He wrote that the cinematographers Chris Menges and Roger Deakins lent the film a "fine professional polish".[27] Colm Andrew of the Manx Independent also rated it highly and said the film had "countless opportunities to become overly sentimental or dramatic and resists every one of them, resulting in a film which by its conclusion, has you not knowing which quality to praise the most".[28]
At the Huffington Post, Thelma Adams found the relationship between Hanna and Michael, which she termed abusive, more disturbing than any of the historical questions in the movie:
Michael is a victim of abuse, and his abuser just happened to have been a luscious retired Auschwitz guard. You can call their tryst and its consequences a metaphor of two generations of Germans passing guilt from one to the next, but that doesn't explain why filmmakers Daldry and Hare luxuriated in the sex scenes – and why it's so tastefully done audiences won't see it for the child pornography it is.[29]
When asked to respond, Hare called it "the most ridiculous thing ... We went to great lengths to make sure that that's exactly what it didn't turn into. The book is much more erotic." Daldry added, "He's a young man who falls in love with an older woman who is complicated, difficult and controlling. That's the story."[30]
The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Rex Reed of The New York Observer named it the 2nd best film of 2008. Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter named it the 4th best film of 2008,[31] Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club named it the 8th best film of 2008,[31] and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times put it on his un-ranked top 20 list.[31]
Special praise went to Winslet's acting; she then swept the main prizes in the 2008/2009 award season, including the Golden Globe, the Critic's Choice Award, the Screen Actor's Guild Award, the BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Several writers noted that her success seemed to have made real her appearance in the BBC comedy Extras, in which she played a fictionalized version of herself desperate to win an Academy Award. In the episode, Winslet decided to increase her chance of winning an Oscar through starring in a film about the Holocaust, noting that such films were often awarded Oscars.[32] However, in the fictional film, Winslet played a nun sheltering children from the Holocaust, rather than one of its perpetrators. Regarding the similarity, Winslet commented that the similarity "would be funny" but the connection didn't occur to her until "midway through shooting the film...this was never a Holocaust movie to me. That's part of the story and provides something of a backdrop, and sets the scene. But to me it was always an extraordinarily unconventional love story."[33]
Awards and nominations[edit]
Awards
Award
Category
Name
Outcome
Academy Awards Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Cinematography Roger Deakins and Chris Menges Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Picture Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Redmond Morris, Donna Gigliotti
Best Adapted Screenplay David Hare
BAFTA Awards Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Cinematography Roger Deakins and Chris Menges Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Film
Best Screenplay – Adapted David Hare
Broadcast Film Critics Association Top 10 Films of the Year Won
Best Film Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Kate Winslet Won
Best Young Performer David Kross Nominated
Golden Globe Awards Best Director – Motion Picture Stephen Daldry Nominated
Best Picture – Drama
Best Screenplay David Hare
Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Kate Winslet Won
San Diego Film Critics Society Best Actress Kate Winslet Won
Satellite Awards Top 10 Films of 2008 Won
Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama Kate Winslet Nominated
Best Director Stephen Daldry
Best Film – Drama
Best Adapted Screenplay David Hare
Screen Actors Guild Awards Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role Kate Winslet Won
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ "THE READER (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 2008-12-02. Retrieved 2013-06-17.
2.Jump up ^ "The Reader (2008)". The New York Times. Retrieved March 21, 2011.
3.^ Jump up to: a b c "The Reader (2008)". Box Office Mojo. 2010-12-30. Retrieved 2010-12-30.
4.Jump up ^ Monica Roman (1998-04-22). "Miramax books 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
5.Jump up ^ Michael Fleming (2007-08-17). "Kidman, Fiennes book 'Reader' gig". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
6.Jump up ^ Christian Koehl (2007-09-14). "Senator inks rights to 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
7.^ Jump up to: a b c Kaminer, Ariel. "Translating Love and the Unspeakable." New York Times. December 5, 2008.
8.Jump up ^ Ed Meza; Michael Fleming (2008-01-08). "Winslet replaces Kidman in 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2008-01-10.
9.Jump up ^ "Gestern letzter Dreh für 'Der Vorleser'". (in German). Sächsische Zeitung. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
10.Jump up ^ Ed Meza (2007-10-26). "'Reader' receives German funds". Variety. Retrieved 2007-12-28.
11.Jump up ^ Ed Meza (2008-01-08). "Nicole Kidman quits 'Reader'". Variety. Retrieved 2008-01-08.
12.Jump up ^ Thompson, Anne (October 9, 2008). "Scott Rudin leaves 'The Reader'". Variety. Retrieved February 7, 2009.
13.Jump up ^ Caro, Mark (February 8, 2009). "How Kate Winslet outdid herself". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved September 6, 2012.
14.Jump up ^ Jeff Labrecque, "Best Actress," Entertainment Weekly 1032/1033 (Jan. 30/Feb. 6, 2009): 45.
15.Jump up ^ Lisa Schwarzbaum, "Review of The Reader," Entertainment Weekly 1026 (December 19, 2008): 43.
16.Jump up ^ Clarke, Cath (2008-12-19). "First sight: David Kross". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 2010-05-25.
17.Jump up ^ "amazon.com". Retrieved 2009-03-18.
18.Jump up ^ "amazon.com". Retrieved 2009-03-19.
19.Jump up ^ "amazon.co.uk". Retrieved 2009-03-18.
20.Jump up ^ "areadvd.de". Retrieved 2009-03-31.
21.Jump up ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reader/
22.Jump up ^ http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-reader
23.Jump up ^ Hornaday, Ann. "'Reader' Lets Rending Story Speak for Itself" The Washington Post. December 25, 2008.
24.Jump up ^ Dargis, Manohla. "Innocence Is Lost in Postwar Germany." New York Times. December 10, 2008.
25.Jump up ^ Goldstein, Patrick. "No Oscar glory for 'The Reader'?" Los Angeles Times. December 3, 2008.
26.Jump up ^ Ron Rosenbaum: "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader", Slate 9/2/2009 http://www.slate.com/id/2210804/pagenum/2
27.^ Jump up to: a b c Honeycutt, Kirk. "Film Review: The Reader." The Hollywood Reporter. November 30, 2008.
28.Jump up ^ Review by Colm Andrew, IOM Today
29.Jump up ^ Thelma Adams (2008-12-02). "Reading Between the Lines in The Reader: When is Abuse Not Abuse?". Huffington Post.
30.Jump up ^ The Baguette (December 4, 2008). "Sex and the Younger Man". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). Retrieved March 11, 2009.
31.^ Jump up to: a b c "Metacritic: 2008 Film Critic Top Ten Lists". Metacritic. Retrieved January 11, 2009.[dead link]
32.Jump up ^ Grabert, Jessica. "Extras' Best Episode: Kate Winslet". Cinema Blend. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
33.Jump up ^ Rich, Katey. "Kate Winslet intervieq". Cinema Blend. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
External links[edit]
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Official website
The Reader at the Internet Movie Database
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The Reader at Metacritic
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Categories: 2008 films
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