...The Reader, Rohl: ”… then what the hell is the point of anything?”

The book by the near Bodelschwinghs Bethel 1944 born author: ”It is about how my generation of Germans came to terms with what the generation before us had done". The movies begins: "The notion of secrecy is central in Western literature. You may say the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information, which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to disclose." The playwriters comment: "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". 80 million Germans participated during the brown years. Seen, looking away, denial of happened guilt, left with shame. In need of cover-up-stories. As Hannas: born in Siebenbuergen, with seventeen to Berlin and Siemens, then to the soldiers. After the war various jobs. The English movie with English actors has one German, the young David Kross. When others did/do didn’t see, some acted having seen: the Weisse-Rose-students, the stand-in-”better part of us”, quoating a German in Germany. In the country of Schiller and Goethe also G E Lessing, his fragment D Faust: chosen of the seven quickest ’spirits’ the last for his fast transition from good to evil. The father in the book, professor Rohl in the movie: "Society believes that society follows moral principles. But it is not. It follows what we call the law. You are not guilty only that you have worked at Auschwitz. 8000 people worked there. Nineteen where persecuted and only six for murder. To prove that it was murder the intention has to be prooved. That is the law. The question is never if it was wrong but was it according the law, not today's but those times law". The student Michael wants but fails to tell in school of his hanna-affair. And fails again as student, realising why she accepts the life sentence: ”I can't. I can't do that. I can't talk to her”. And Rohl: ” What we feel isn't important. It's utterly unimportant. The only question is what we do. …” She, Michael and others had their secrets: part of the crime. But mother: "He is not lying. Michael never lies." Roger Eberts, Sunday Times, December 23, 2008 : ”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 ”. After the trial ’Jungchen’ sends tapes, reads again for her, she using the tapes to learn read and write. The release coming near, she knows that she is unable to be in the outside-daylight. As the former SS officer in Il Portiere di Notte, blending into the shadows: ”I have a reason for working at night. It’s the light. I have a sense of shame in the light”. Hanna never says “I am sorry” to the Jewish survivor Ilana Mather. “It doesn’t matter what I did, it doesn’t matter what I feel, the dead are still dead”. Is forgiveness possible for the different-born: I am what I am and not should be. From me, human as I am, the evil, the evil person with his evil deed has taken my humanity. Jesus’s ’skandalon’: they never should have been seen born. The book 2000 and the movie 2010 leaves emptiness. It follows Sophy’s discussed Choice of pestilence or cholera: the blindeds trap, blinded by their blind spot. Hanna asks: ”What would you have done”, the 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". But she did exactly this! The promotion at Siemens, the promotion to tram driver, moving whenever a promotion was offered. Her choice the life sentence in prison. The third Choice for Sophy’ shoould not have been one of her children or both but she herself. As for Sara (and the real Tabira) was not ”religion or love” but she herself in Worlds Apart. The same , but on a different level, was for the child Bruno: in contact with his wimwenderangel, listening to what to do – and did in The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas. This the alternative, avoiding the cholera-pestilence-dilemma. As Hanna requests, Michael gives the tea box with her money to Ilana Mather. She returns the money ("People ask all the time what I have learned in the camps. They where not therapy. Do you believe it was a university? We where not there to learn something. What do you want? Forgiveness for her. To feel better yourself? Go to theater if you want catharsis, go to literature, don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out from the camp. Nothing" ), keeping the tea box for her thoughts of her time behind the fence, inside. Rohl continues: ” ... If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?” And ”Or I could come to you …” says Bruno 2006:132, answered by Shmuel with ”You’re on the wrong side of the fence, though”, Bruno: ”I could crawl under”.
stephanSE 2010-06-05, 2010-11-12