stephanSE 2010-05-28
IL PORTIERE DI NOTTE, Maximilian Theo Aldorfer, a former SS-’kaltenbrunner’-officer, playing ’doctor’ and taking ’sensational photographic studies’, is after yesterday today the night porter of the Hotel zur Oper in Vienna, choosing to ’live as a church mouse’, blended into the shadows, hiding yesterdays shame, consciouss of his ’sense of shame in the light’: ”I have a reason for working at night. It’s the light. I have a sense of shame in the light.” Aldorfer is played by Dirk Bogarde, commenting in his biography the Germans: he wouldn't ”take an elevator” The Reader, the movie and Der Vorleser, a book, fiction: Hannas suicide is the sign that she decided for the night-of-death and not the outside-day...
Lena Olin, the surviver Ilana Mather: “People ask all the time what I have learned in the camps. They where not therapy. Do you believe it was a univerity? We where not there to learn something. What do you want? Forgiveness for her (Hanna) To feel better yourself?
Go to theatre if you want catharsis, go to literature, don’t go to the camps. Nothing comes out from the camp. Nothing”
Popup: prel filmthought The Reader
Ludvig Igra: "Man muss sich Gedanken machen...Nach dem Krieg wurde bekannt und eingestanden, dass die, die die Juden von Jedwabar in der Scheune getötet haben, deren Nachbarn waren. Man muss sich Gedanken machen ueber unsere menschlichen Fähigkeiten zur Entmenschlichung eines Nachbarn, eines Freundes oder sonst wie Nahestehenden. Diese Tatsache sollte uns nicht zynisch werden lassen. Sie sollte uns eher sensibilieren ueber unsere eigene Verantwortung hinsichtlich eines solchen Potenzials das in jedem von uns steckt." englisch mit deutschen Untertitel.
The cover of the TheReaderBook shows 'Nollendorfplatz', Berlin, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1912. Here is also the Metropol where the euthansia-movie 'Ich klage an' was screened. Hanna Schmitz: "Doch, aber die neuen kamen, und die alten mussten Platz machen fuer die neuen." youtube The ReaderLinks
Peter Nestlers 2002-Dokumentar 'Die Verwandlung des guten Nachbarn , transformation of the good neighbour focuses the shame, helped by late Ludvig Igra 1945-2003, psychoanlytic author of books like 'Den tunna hinnan mellan omsorg och grymhet' 2001, Peter Nestlers reason to ask for participation. Peter Nestler translated the book to German "Die duenne Haut zwischen Fuersorge und Grausamkeit, published by iatros.verlag.de
Ludvig Igra 2001 in front of Stockholms Nationalmuseum, Camera: Peter Nestler (zusatz: "Igra wurde übrigens nicht von mir aufgenommen, ich hatte Rainer Hartleb gebeten, mit seiner Kamera zu kommen, so er stand hinter der Kamera, ich daneben. Im übrigen haben bei der Verwandlung des guten Nachbarn teils Rainer Komers und teils ich die Kamera bedient (ich drehte die Winteraufnahmen mit einer kleinen Sony PD 100, weil ich die plötzliche Gelegenheit nutzten wollte, mit Toivi Blatt nach Polen zu fahren und zu drehen und damals so schnell kein Filmteam organisieren konnte). Also entweder sollte Rainer Hartleb genannt werden oder überhaupt keine „Camera“., 2010-06-10)
listening
reading Vorleser
"Ich klage an" (1941): 15 000 000 visitors and awarded at Venice-Biennale)
Judge: "Sie haben also, weil sie Platz schaffen wollten, gesagt: Du und du und du musst zurueckgeschickt und umgebracht werden?"
Hanna verstand nicht, was der Vorsitzende damit fragen wollte: "Ich habe ... ich meine... Was hätten Sie denn gemacht." ...
Judge: "Es gibt Sachen, auf die man sich einfach nicht einlassen darf und von denen man sich, wenn es einen nicht Leib und Leben kostet, absetzen muss."
Hanna Schmitz: "Also hätte ich ... hätte nicht... hätte ich mich bei Siemens nicht melden duerfen?"
(meine Kurzgedanken: sie hat aus der situation gehandelt; weichte aus um dort zu bleiben was sie ist und zu dem sie fähig ist, als Analphabet; mit jedem Ausweichen verstrickte sie sich mehr. Einzige Wahl: Sophie's Wahl, Pech und Schwefel. Der Ausweg: der Dritte. Warum sah sie das nicht?)
Playwriter David Hare: (in the interview of the extraDVD) "It's about the question how do you live in the shaddow of the greatest crimes of history. From the point of view of the impact not on the victims but on themselves."
Wie drei junge erwachsene Analphabeten das Schreiben und Lesen lernen
Mehr als vier Millionen deutschsprachige funktionale Analphabeten leben in Deutschland.
„Das G muss weg“ begleitet fuer zwölf Monate drei erwachsene, funktionale Analphabeten, die sich zur Kursteilnahme durchgerungen haben. ...
The Reader: Bernhard Schlink on forgiveness and reconciliation
...................................................
Professor Rohl: You have been skipping seminars.
Michael: I have a piece of information, concerning one of the defendants. Something they do not admitting.
Professor Rohl: What information? You don't need to tell me. It's perfectly clear you have a moral obligation to disclose it to the court.
Michael: It happens this information is favorable to the defendant. It can help her case. It may even affect the outcome, certainly the sentencing.
Professor Rohl: So?
Michael: There's a problem. The defendant herself is determined to keep this information secret.
Professor Rohl: What are her reasons?
Michael: Because she's ashamed.
Professor Rohl: Ashamed of what? Have you spoken to her?
Michael: Of course not.
Professor Rohl: Why "of course not"?
Michael: I can't. I can't do that. I can't talk to her.
Professor Rohl: What we feel isn't important. It's utterly unimportant. The only question is what we do. If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?
Guaranteeing truth, and avoiding it
The Reader: the author Bernhard Schlink
The Reader: youtube
The Reader: youtube
The Reader: youtube
The Reader: youtube
youtube, Bernhard Schlink author of The Reader, 5,21 min
G E Lessings fragment D. Faust asks seven 'spirits' who is the 'fastest'...
It is the seventh: "Nicht mehr und nicht weniger als der Uebergang vom Guten zum Bösen." "Ha! Du bist mein Teufel! So schnell als der Uebergang vom Guten zum Bösen! - Ja, das ist schnell; schneller ist nichts als der! - Weg von hier, ihr Schnecken des Orkus! Weg! - Als der Uebergang vom Guten zum Bösen! Ich habe es erfahren, wie schnell er ist. Ich habe es erfahren!
usw, - -
Was sagen Sie zu dieser Szene? Sie wuenschen ein deutsches Stueck, das lauter solche Szenen hätte? Ich auch!
Roger Ebert Sunday Times, December 23, 2008.
The crucial decision in The Reader is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general. The film intends his decision as the key to its meaning, but most viewers may conclude that The Reader is only about the Nazis' crimes and the response to them by post-war German generations.
The film centers on a sexual relationship between Hanna, a woman in her mid-30s, and Michael (David Kross), a boy of 15. That such things are wrong is beside the point; they happen, and the story is about how it connected with her earlier life and his later one. It is powerfully, if sometimes confusingly, told in a flashback framework and powerfully acted by Winslet and Kross, with coldly enigmatic as the elder Michael.
(...........)
(...........)
One day Hanna disappears. Michael finds her apartment deserted, with no hint or warning. His unformed ego is unprepared for this blow. Eight years later, as a law student, he enters a courtroom and discovers Hanna in a group of Nazi prison guards being tried for murder. Something during this trial suddenly makes another of her secrets clear to him and might help explain why she became a prison guard. His discovery does not excuse her unforgivable guilt. Still, it might affect her sentencing. Michael remains silent.
The adult Michael has sentenced himself to a lonely, isolated existence. We see him after a night with a woman, treating her with remote politeness. He has never recovered from the wound he received from Hanna, nor from the one he inflicted on himself eight years after. She hurt him, he hurt her. She was isolated and secretive after the war, he became so after the trial. The enormity of her sin far outweighs his, but they are both guilty of allowing harm because they reject the choice to do good.
At the film's end, Michael encounters a Jewish woman in New York, who eviscerates him with her moral outrage. She should. But she thinks he seeks understanding for Hanna. Not so. He cannot forgive Hanna's crimes. He seeks understanding for himself, although perhaps he doesn't realize that. In the courtroom, he withheld moral witness and remained silent, as she did, as most Germans did. And as many of us have done or might be capable of doing.
There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along. Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, "I was only doing my job. I didn't know what was going on." President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does.
Many of the critics of The Reader seem to believe it is all about Hanna's shameful secret. No, not her past as a Nazi guard. The earlier secret that she essentially became a guard to conceal. Others think the movie is an excuse for soft-core porn disguised as a sermon. Still others say it asks us to pity Hanna. Some complain we don't need yet another "Holocaust movie." None of them think the movie may have anything to say about them. I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe.
What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But if we were one of the rest of the Germans? Can we guess, on the basis of how most white Americans, from the North and South, knew about racial discrimination but didn't go out on a limb to oppose it? Philip Roth's great novel The Plot Against America imagines a Nazi takeover here. It is painfully thought-provoking and probably not unfair The Reader suggests that many people are like Michael and Hanna, and possess secrets that we would do shameful things to conceal
the 'borrowed' pictures from their sites are a link to these sites.