There is still much debate over the central character in The Reader. The latest attack comes from filmmaker Rod Lurie who writes an op-ed for the Huffington Post which seeks to contradict the film’s idea that Hanna Schmitz, wonderfully played by Kate Winslet, wasn’t an ant-semite:
The problem here is every person, man or woman, who was in the SS was intimately indoctrinated into the teachings of several rabid Jew haters including Julius Streicher in Der St√ºrmer. In fact, that newspaper was required reading for the SS on Hitler’s orders.
One was not entering a job when they came to the SS. They were turning themselves over to an ideology with cult-like obedience. This was especially true of those who were entering the Totenkopf, the “deaths head,” tasked with being guards at the camps.
The film, though, leaves the inner world of Schmitz mostly a mystery. The subject of anti-semitism is never brought up. When Hanna is confronted in her last days she refuses to talk about it. But the disgust on Ralph Feinnes’ face seems to make clear that he believes she went along with it internally, which is why he never lets her off the hook. He feels guilt, shame – and the film does a good job, I thought, of showing the levels of guilt or culpability. Someone like Michael Berg is completely let off the hook, even though he lived in Germany when all of this was going on, as did his family. But they didn’t work for Hitler’s army. Hanna Schmitz did. I am not sure I buy Lurie’s fear that the film will invite young viewers to have mistruths about the Holocaust – after all, there are five times as many films that say the opposite. I understand it is a real fear but Holocaust denyers have been rattling that same tired song for decades now; and it isn’t getting any traction. All this film is saying that when Hanna Schmitz had a chance to defend herself by saying she couldn’t have written that report, she does not do so out of shame. Michael Berg also does not step forward out of shame. That is really what the movie is about, to my view. I don’t think any film, especially a little Oscar one, can particularly change the world view like that. What do you think, readers?