Film "The Reader": What Would You Do?
The psychologically confusing plot raises many questions from the audience. What connects such different people for many years? She's kind, why did she do it? He's decent, why didn't he save his beloved woman? The red lamp flashes, the main question Hannah posed to the judge and in his face to each of us sounds like a siren: "What would you do?"
I was feeling bad. One woman helped me …
The film "The Reader" shows the passionate love of 15-year-old Michael and 36-year-old Hannah. It lasted only a few months, but it went through their entire lives.
The psychologically confusing plot raises many questions from the audience. What connects such different people for many years? She's kind, why did she do it? He's decent, why didn't he save his beloved woman? The red lamp flashes, the main question Hannah posed to the judge and in his face to each of us sounds like a siren: "What would you do?"
All the insides are turned over from the desire to find answers for themselves.
1958 year. Germany
Hannah works as a tram conductor. Life taught her to keep her body in the shackles of a strict suit, her hair in a bun, and her feelings under lock and key. She is for order. At first glance, Hannah is dry and unemotional. But pity for the young man who cries from illness in the rain near her house, as if pulling frozen feelings out of her.
She helps him. And lets his walled heart look out. Michael immediately responds to this most attractive smell for a man - the smell of sensuality.
Inspired by passion, now after school he always runs to her. The first woman in his life opens up to him the world of maximum bodily pleasure. He also fills her mental lack. With him, she allows herself not to be strong and iron for a while, but learns to empathize, share someone’s hopes, someone’s grief, someone’s fate.
Immersion in the world of other people, living with them the entire palette of feelings is something that Hannah's soul lacks. What she corked up in herself in the harsh realities of life in Nazi Germany. But she badly needs it and gets with Michael in … reading.
Now he reads to her. Everyday. Homer, Chekhov … She laughs and is indignant, rejoices and cries. Her soul lives with the heroes of the books. But life dictates its own rules. Hannah creates a sense of security for herself. She does not count on anyone, especially the "baby". And reluctantly, after a few months of their romance, she deprives herself of his embrace and reading, which heals her soul. A promotion at work forces her to move out of that tiny apartment, which Michael used to visit her every day with a new book.
1966 year. Germany
The trial of six women overseers of Auschwitz is under way. Each of them, as part of their official duties, selected ten women every month, condemning them to death.
Five guards deny their guilt, and only Hannah confirms this fact. “We've all done it. This was our job. The women kept arriving and arriving, it was necessary to vacate places."
Hannah is telling the truth. She is an uneducated simple German. Her whole life is a job at a factory, then work in the SS, where she got a job on an ad. After all this wild horror of the concentration camp, she just lived. She did not dream of prisoners sent by her to death or burnt alive in a fire. She had long forbidden herself to sympathize with them. She didn't think about them. Until a book was published with the memories of the surviving prisoner of Auschwitz, which set the stage for the trial.
A sense of security and safety is a basic human need for life and development. Children receive it from their parents, adult men - from society, including in it by their contribution, their work, women - from men. And if the society around has gone crazy? If war? If the authorities give the order to kill? If you don't know any other way to survive on your own other than submitting?
Highly developed sensually women, even in war, found the strength to save others, thereby preventing the fear of death for themselves. Fragile and fearless frontline nurses, signalmen, scouts and machine gunners, snipers and pilots, sappers, miners, frontline singers - this is the answer of our women to the war for the Russian people, for the Russian land. The urethral-muscular mentality in each and every one of our grandmothers and grandfathers has grown with a willingness to give his life in order to save the country for future generations. Our women with all their being heroically joined in the cause of the common victory, not to save themselves, but to keep their children and grandchildren alive. Their cause was right - to protect their people.
And the women of Germany? What could they do in a country engulfed in the fanatical idea of the destruction of other peoples? What if you are a cog in a death machine? When asked by the judge about her connection with the SS, Hannah replies: “I just needed a job. You shouldn't have switched to it, right?"
The director shows us people who just wanted to live and love. But they began to kill.
In Auschwitz, she invited young prisoners to her place, and they read to her. And she fed them and showed the scanty care that she was capable of. And then she sent them to death, like everyone else.
Sentence
Michael comes to this court session as part of the law students. He sees Hannah in the dock. He cannot find a place for himself, smokes nervously, then lowers his head, then tries to gaze at her with at least some support in understanding what is happening. And he finds it.
Everyone except Hannah denies the charges. Only she says everything as it is. The rest of the women decide to shift most of the blame onto her - they claim that Hannah was their boss and made all the decisions.
The main evidence is the report, which all six signed after the incident with the burned prisoners. It said that the fire happened by accident and no one knew about it, and when they found out, it was already too late - everything burned down, everything burned down. Thus, this paper relieved them of responsibility for the premeditated murder of people.
Hannah tells how it really was, and admits that she did not open the doors because in this chaos of fire, bombing and panic, all the prisoners would have fled. And her task was to protect the prisoners.
Then the judge accuses her of false testimony contained in the report. And the fact that according to the testimony of the rest of the guards, Hannah drew up the report, and the other women just signed it.
The judge invites Hannah to write something on a piece of paper in order to compare the handwriting with the handwriting in the report, and this confirms or refutes the terrible accusations. But Hannah refuses.
In Michael's memory, episodes of their meetings flash past, where Hannah rejects his offers to read something: “You better read it”, puts down the menu with the words: “I will be the same as you”, and a saving thought for her dawns on him!
The viewer expects that now he will jump up from his bench and shout the truth, and save Hannah. But he is silent, still bashfully hiding behind the backs of people.
He is tormented by this situation, he discusses it with the teacher, and he advises him to talk to Hannah. “If your generation doesn’t extract all the mistakes and fix what our generation has done, then why all this at all? Humanity has no chance."
His fellow student shouts about the guilt of the guards to his professor:
- I would shoot them all!
- For what? They did their job. More than 8000 people worked there.
- They all need to be shot! They are all guilty! YOU'RE ALL GUILTY! You all knew about what was going on in the camps, and you did nothing! Why didn't any of you shoot yourself ?!
Michael seems to think not so categorically, but by his inaction and he administers his own wordless trial over Hannah, pronounces a sentence on his beloved woman. She gets a life sentence.
Turning the shutter, saving people and doing it according to your conscience, not by order, is scary. It is no less scary to intercede and tarnish your reputation by having a connection with the Auschwitz warden. With each of our actions and words, we make a choice that affects not only ourselves. Every step we take changes the world.
last hope
Michael gets married and has a daughter. But he cannot be happy. After the divorce, he comes with his little daughter to the house of his parents, where he has not appeared since those events.
Michael searches in the parental home for the books that Hanne read, begins to read them on a dictaphone and send cassettes with recordings to prison. Hannah lives with these books again. Thanks to them, she again waits for something, rejoices, wants something.
Living together with strong emotions while reading is the basis for a strong emotional connection between people. Reading sensually charged works of classical literature, we rise above our interests. Together we want happiness to the heroes of the work. We begin to feel stronger, brighter, deeper and learn to verbalize the incomprehensible that is happening in the soul. Heart to heart words unite people stronger than any other bond. That is why Michael has been living with the image of Hannah in memory for so many years, and she keeps the hope of happiness with him until deep gray hairs.
But condemnation and an attempt to escape from their own cowardice become an insurmountable obstacle for two.
I WAS VERY ILL. One woman helped me …
- Michael begins his story to his daughter. With the hope that the next generation of people will break this inconceivable circle of hatred, cowardice, tacit consent, criminal indifference, betrayal …
Is there any point in shifting the responsibility for your own misfortune onto others? The time has come not to condemn, but to understand. To realize that evil in ourselves that slays the most beloved and does not allow us to rejoice. To understand that every person - of any nationality, position in society, religion, age, with already committed acts and mistakes made - is part of the mosaic of the human psyche, this is all of us. And then there is a chance that the wall of misunderstanding will not separate the two and destroy the lives of billions. We will no longer survive without being aware of ourselves.
