In this blog post, I’d like to examine the questions raised by the film, focusing on the foreshadowing, illiteracy, revisionist interpretations, and the historical discourse surrounding the postwar generation as depicted in ‘The Reader’.
While serving as a public service worker, I found myself with some free time. Rather than investing it in self-improvement, I began watching movies and reading books. I suppose I wanted to fill my mind—which had been focused solely on science since high school—with knowledge from a wider range of fields, such as economics, philosophy, psychology, literature, and film. However, these hobbies naturally led me to focus on novels and movies, and that’s how I came to discover the critic Lee Dong-jin. I learned about various novels and films through TV shows, podcasts, and his blog, and one day, I became interested in a work he reviewed called ‘The Reader’. This interest stemmed from the fact that ‘The Reader’ differed from other works dealing with the Holocaust that I had encountered up to that point. The difference was that, unlike works told from the victims’ perspective, ‘The Reader’ unfolds the story from the perpetrator’s viewpoint.
Bernhard Schlink’s original novel ‘The Reader’ is, on the surface, divided into three parts. Part 1 tells the story of a teenage boy and a woman in her thirties who meet, fall in love, and part ways; Part 2 recounts their reunion eight years later at a Nazi war crimes trial; and Part 3 follows Michael, now an adult, as he undergoes a change of heart due to a chance encounter and once again becomes the person who reads books to her. Due to the provocative subject matter of a romance between a teenage boy and a woman in her thirties, director Stephen Daldry, who adapted the novel into a film, faced criticism regarding pedophilia. However, having experienced both the original novel and the film adaptation of ‘The Reader’, I realized that this work is not merely a romance.
While watching ‘The Reader’, the key themes I found most significant were foreshadowing, illiteracy, revisionism, and the historical discourse surrounding the postwar generation. Therefore, in this essay, I will focus my discussion on these aspects.
The story begins with a scene in which the protagonist, Michael, reminisces about the past, followed by Part 1, which chronicles their romance. Fifteen-year-old Michael meets Hanna Schmitz by chance and receives her help; later, he visits her to express his gratitude. The two then embark on an intense love affair. Part 1 thus superficially depicts the love between Hanna and Michael—a relationship that is both dangerous and marked by Hanna’s peculiar behavior. Through their love story, we are led to feel compassion—a more subjective emotion—rather than making an objective judgment about the events that will befall Hanna later in the story. However, I noted that the film paid close attention to foreshadowing in Part 1. Upon watching the film, it becomes clear that the story is not merely a love story between two people; rather, it contains hidden foreshadowing that the film will address the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jewish people. The scene of construction work taking place in front of Hannah’s house and the image of Michael being covered in coal while carrying it are reminiscent of prisoners performing forced labor in a concentration camp. Furthermore, the pattern on Hanna’s door appears to be a device reminiscent of the Star of David, a symbol of the Jewish people. In other words, foreshadowing of the plot’s future developments is scattered throughout the film. Additionally, the film contains hidden clues hinting at Hanna’s illiteracy. Hanna’s illiteracy is a crucial element in the narrative. Because she is illiterate, when she is promoted to a clerical position at the company where she worked, she quits her job to work as a guard at a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. Even after falling in love with Michael, when she is promoted from ticket inspector to a clerical position, she suddenly leaves him. Ultimately, many of the events that unfold in this work are closely linked to the fact that Hanna tried to hide her illiteracy.
Part 2 begins eight years after Hanna’s sudden departure, when Michael—now a law student—sees her again at a trial for Nazi war criminals. Before going to court, the members of a seminar composed of law students had already passed judgment on the wartime generation—that is, their parents’ generation—as “the shame of this generation” during a seminar focused on investigative research and uncovering the truth, and they went to observe the trial. However, when he actually attends Hannah’s trial in court, Michael feels paralyzed and confused. Although he had actively participated in the seminar’s decision to label her a “shame,” he found himself unable to either defend or condemn Hannah when faced with her in person. The line, “Even if I am not guilty because betraying a criminal is not a crime, I was guilty because I loved the criminal,” perfectly captures Michael’s feelings at that moment; at the same time, I believe it also reveals, to some extent, the sentiments of the author—a member of the postwar generation who viewed the wartime generation after World War II. While punishing the wartime generation may not have been a sin for the postwar generation, Michael is also guilty because, even as he strongly condemned their parents—the wartime generation—he simultaneously harbored understanding and compassion for the circumstances that left them with no other choice but to act as they did.
Furthermore, during the trial, readers, viewers, and Michael himself learn that Hanna is illiterate. Hanna’s complex about her illiteracy was the reason she spent her life constantly on the run. Fearing that her illiteracy would be exposed, she quit her job at Siemens and applied to be a Nazi janitor; when she was promoted from ticket inspector to a clerical position, she left that job as well, which in turn caused Michael to leave her. In other words, she lived a life of constant flight. Such a life forced her to become accustomed to mechanical, repetitive actions without being able to make her own judgments—all to hide her illiteracy—and to live simply by carrying out whatever tasks she was told to do. That is why, rather than acknowledging her own mistakes, she ends up asking the judge in court how she should have lived her life. Perhaps the sense of numbness that Michael felt signified a state of ethical and moral paralysis, just as Hanna had lived ignorantly and without a sense of guilt. And just as illiteracy was a source of insecurity for Hanna, the fact that he had loved her became a source of insecurity for Michael, and he, like Hanna, becomes unable to open his heart to anyone but each other.
While Part 2 primarily focuses on the trial of the postwar generation in Germany, it has also been criticized for displaying a revisionist attitude toward Germany’s wartime generation. Here, “revisionism” refers to a movement that seeks to critically reinterpret historical facts; the term is also used to describe positions that deny widely accepted historical facts themselves—such as Holocaust denial.
Perhaps Bernhard Schlink, the author—a member of Germany’s postwar generation and a former law professor—wrote this work to express the sense of guilt he had long felt as a member of the postwar generation through the character of Michael. However, as a German himself, there are parts where he presents a revisionist account of his parents’ generation—the wartime generation. The fact that Hanna, being illiterate, simply fulfilled her duties at the concentration camp as ordered, combined with the sense of numbness Michael felt—as discussed earlier—gives the impression that the majority of Germans were paralyzed by guilt due to the actions of a small minority who started the war, and thus acted as they did out of no choice, unable to make rational judgments. Furthermore, the description of how the residents of the German village gave the Jewish mother and daughter—survivors of the church massacre that served as the primary basis for the trial—food and clothing when they escaped, as well as the mention that the book in which the daughter recorded her experiences in the concentration camp failed to resonate with the public, are also examples of this revisionist stance.
In Part 3, Michael undergoes a change of heart and sends Hannah, who is in prison, a recording of himself reading a book to her—just as he used to do when they were in love. Later, before she is released on parole, he asks her about her thoughts on the past during a visit. He also asks what she has learned in prison. This is because the guilt Michael felt stemmed from Hanna, so her atonement could also serve as his own. As a result, Hanna realizes her wrongdoing and chooses suicide as the greatest act of atonement she can conceive. Following her suicide note, Michael attempts to transfer her estate to a Jewish survivor. These scenes illustrate how the postwar generation seeks to hold the wartime generation accountable while also fulfilling their own responsibilities. Furthermore, in the final scene, although Michael had been unable to open up to anyone—not even his own daughter—except for Hanna, the moment when he confesses his story about her and the emotions he had experienced—as if in confession—gave the impression that he was resolving his conflict with the younger generation while simultaneously passing on the remaining tasks for the post-war generation regarding the war generation.
But can Michael really force Hanna to atone? I have given this question a great deal of thought. Of course, this work has faced significant criticism for its revisionist stance, which—through the premise of illiteracy—portrays the war generation’s complicity in the Holocaust under Nazi rule as something they could not help. But can we truly hold people who were forced to survive the hardships of wartime under Nazi rule strictly accountable for their actions? South Korea, too, continues to grapple with the issue of pro-Japanese collaborators—a legacy of the Japanese colonial period—without having reached a clear resolution, even more than 80 years after liberation. We must reflect deeply on these historical discourses and consider how to reconcile accountability for past actions with an understanding of the individuals who lived through that era.
That concludes my review of ‘The Reader’. Although it tackles a heavy subject, I believe the film skillfully and sensitively unfolds the story from the perspective of the perpetrators of the Holocaust by framing it as a love story between a teenage boy and a woman in her thirties. Precisely because it is such a sensitive work, I think it is a film that encourages viewers to reflect with a historical consciousness not only on the conflict and reconciliation process between Germany’s wartime and postwar generations but also on the discourse of that era.
