“ What you feel isn’t importnat its utterly unimportant.The question is what you do”
I saw the film ‘The Reader “.It is an adaptation after the award wining novel by German law professor and judge by Bernard Schlink .The book has two major themes: a love story and the difficulties of subsequent generation to comprehend Holocaust.The issue of German gulit is part of the debate within the social and narrative realm, as the victims and witnesses of the Holocaust die and its living memeory starts to fade .
Frist of all Iam concerned about the author’s point of view andhis intention to define gulit .This book is unusual in the way it deals with this issue.The autohr distinguishes 3 major perspectives in constructing blame and guilt:JUSTICE ,MORALITY AND LAW.
You are not gulity if you are working at Auschwitz or in Gulgas.Over one hundred of Germans worked there.They only did their job .Was it legal?Yes it was taking into consideration the laws of that time.In order to be guilty of something you have to prove INTENT(intention to kill). Was Hannah guilty ?Was her gulit a moral wrong or a legal wrong or both??
The author tries to understand Hannah ’s crime and condemn it.Bt it proves to difficult and terrible to do that.It is difficult to both understand and condemn”When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding … I wanted to pose myself both tasks — understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both”
Hannah is the symbol of the German postwar gerneration.She is the metaphor of fate and love,war and guilt ,Triumph anf ignorance.”… the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate,” Michael concludes.In this we can read “beyond Good and Evil”(Nietzsche)because we all new that but we didn’t kill ourselves for that wrong.It was a collective participation to a Crime in ‘the past which brands us and with which we must live” .The Nuremberg Trial was a duty to call and condemn crimes.But who condemnd who? . Everbody has its individual guilt.Nobody did sometihing to stop it.The answer was silence .The trial of shame was the “shame of our parents’. So the Nazi past raises not only moral and legal issues but personal responsability and family relationships :”the children who couldn’t accuse their parents of anything, or didn’t want to”
Hannah illiteracy becomes a metaphor of modern understanding of Holocaust .Even the title of the book plays with the term and the process of reading.Literature is not only a simple and innocent narrative of the past but also constructs and deconstructs reality and fiction alike.The book of the death-march survivor constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna.The title is not given.Michael says “it is the book itself that creates distance.”Holocaust is seen through the distortiunate lences of time and life itself.Michael asks himself and the reader.Michael’s inability is to both condemn and understand Hannah.
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?
AT the Trial Hannah asks not only the judge but all of us a simple and personal question :
“What would you have done?”
