The novel by Bernard Schlink was a nice piece of work, doing the sort of things a novel can do without rising to the richness of texture or character or plot or meaning that makes a novel great, yet nonetheless good enough to be satisfying and memorable. It told an allegorical tale of a woman who represents the Germany of the war years who has to be dealt with by the younger generation. She is morally obtuse, which means morally illiterate, really, and so has to be educated so that she can take on the burden of her guilt and then, finally, die, so that the new Germany can be free of her, even if that means that she will in her life after the war damage those younger Germans who love her in spite of her continued callousness and insensitivity. But, oh, Germany was beautiful, and it is difficult to give up the memories of that, to be untrue to that, just because she, the country and the woman, were also so awful.

This is a nice conceit, and the novel works it out nicely from the sexy affair at the beginning of the novel between the woman and the young man who had been a boy during the war, and though himself therefore guiltless, had a father who was implicated, all the way through to the final act of the novel, which was the suicide of the woman as she was about to be released from prison, an act presumably provoked by the fact that she had finally come to realize the magnitude of her guilt. The moral education came about because she both literally and figuratively learned to read books and so read meanings into events, and so was freeing Germany of her kind as well as freeing the no longer young man of his burden. Nothing too deep, nothing beyond the conceit, but the novel was an insight nonetheless into the generation of Germans that came after the Holocaust, what they had to come to terms with. Not as moving a novel as was Fassbinder’s movie trilogy about post World War II Germany, but then Fassbinder is more than a bit of a genius.

The movie is at least as popular and commercial a piece of work as the novel, produced as it was by the late Anthony Minghella and the also just dead Sydney Pollack, both known for their polished popular successes that implied more profundity than they carried, Minghella most notable for The English Patient, which sees no humor in the coincidences it piles up to reach a mock tragic resolution, also with a death at the end, and Sydney Pollack for Tootsie, which was misread but summed up for me by a woman actor I knew who said it was untrue because there were really very few good parts for women, and so male actors shouldn’t horn in on them. So much for Pollack’s subplot, whereby Teri Garr plays an old fashioned unreconstructed wimp of a woman while Dustin Hoffman shows the tenderness attributed in the old days only to women. It was the style of the thing, the good humor, the tight dialogue and characterizations, which made the movie a pleasure. Remember when Dustin Hoffman says he can play a fruit (pun intended?) better than anyone else? Or when he tells Jessica Lange, whom he had fooled with his female impersonator routine, that they can now build a romantic relationship because they have accomplished the harder part, which is to become friends?

The movie version of The Reader, though, adds to the strengths of the novel by making use of the possibilities available to the movie maker: settings, apt cuts within and between scenes, and the capabilities of the faces of the actors to convey complex emotions. Much more information is therefore provided in the movie than in the novel and the allegory loses precedence to the narrative drive of the tale and the emotions evoked in each of the movie’s parts, as well as the overarching brooding sense of loss, both moral and emotional, that ties together the various parts of the movie. At the beginning is a romantic idyll that would inevitably go wrong, given the mismatch of ages, the affair creating the grief and pain universal at least since Goethe’s young Werther, what with the ambivalence that an audience would sense in an older woman introducing a young man to sex. That gives way to a way of seeing Germany and the Holocaust through the eyes of lawyers and courts of law, where the emotions are contained only with great difficulty, the young man understanding that there is a limit to what law can offer as a way to understand what had happened, for had he believed that law took precedence over everything else, he would have told the defense attorney that the prisoner in the dock could not read and so could not have composed the report concerning the prisoners who had died in a fire while under the care of their guards. A nice moment, just as when Billy Budd (in both opera and novel) is drawn into the law that has nothing to do with what he did or why he did it, and yet the law has its place, just as it does at the end of An American Tragedy, (again, in both the opera and the novel) however much legal proceedings seem out of joint with the stories that have just been told that the trials are now examining, as perhaps is always the case in trials. Then there follows in the movie a montage of a suspended time while the prisoner learns to read, desperately connected to the person she had despoiled, while the Germany outside her prison is transformed, which the audience and her former pupil know, because they wander through it, Germany finally physically reconstructed by the time the movie ends in 1995. (Well, not entirely so, or at least not the East Berlin that I visited well into this decade.) Then there are the ambiguities of her suicide as those are carefully spelled out in what serves as the final mystery and symbol of the novel. And then there takes place in the movie an even more final reckoning that occurs after her suicide, in a few brilliant scenes that reinterpret the movie, one of which doing so by taking it outside of Germany, those scenes used by Minghella and Pollack to make clear what they made of the story.

I suggest that those who have not seen the movie stop reading here because I am about to give away what happens in those two scenes and I do not want to rob the movie goer of the pleasure that results from coming upon these scenes freshly, as a surprise revelation. Remember that this movie is no Hamlet, where it doesn’t matter how many times one has seen the ending for it not to come across as a surprise, something that didn’t have to happen, and yet, because of the fates and the playwright, did.

The lawyer, who remained emotionally aloof all of his life, is introduced by a maid into the living room of one of those very well decorated Park Avenue apartments that go on forever. There he meets the daughter, now sixtyish, who had appeared at the trial and had survived in spite of the fact that the church door had been locked to make sure the prisoners did not escape or become unruly, as the ex-guard, in her naiveté, confessed at her trial, which meant that most of the prisoners were allowed to die in a fire at the church. A magnificently stately and well turned out Lena Olin tells him that her mother, who had also survived the fire, had died years before in Israel. The lawyer misses the moral point. He says he is sorry, with a bit more sorrow than one offers for someone who inevitably would have to die somewhere and sometime. He misses the point that she died in her own country rather than in Germany, and that must have been some consolation. Israel is posed as something of a raw answer to the Holocaust; that it exists at all showing how much things have changed since the war, something the lawyer finds difficult to grasp.

The lawyer also finds himself deferring to the moral authority of this survivor, and not only because of her survivor status. She does not act like a survivor, but as a commanding presence in her own right--the lawyer always having been a sucker for dominating and independent women. She becomes his analyst. He admits to her what she infers, that his love for the camp guard had been the passion of his entire life, something he says he had never confessed to anyone. He also tells her that the camp guard had learned how to read, and is told that the concentration camps were not a university. He offers her a decorated tin can filled with money the camp guard had saved up so as to be turned over to Jewish causes, perhaps an organization devoted to illiteracy. The survivor refuses the money because it is tainted and adds, in mock self deprecation, that there is any number of Jewish organizations and so there might be one for this but that illiteracy is hardly a Jewish problem. He, she says, is the one who should decide what to do with the money.

This Jewish woman may have been victimized, but she is not now a victim. Jews in New York and elsewhere did rather well for themselves in the years after the war. The Holocaust was not a Jewish problem however much it was a Jewish disaster and had become a Jewish memory, one referred to by the picture of her pre-war family that stood on the survivor’s dressing table and on which she placed the tin can because it reminded her of one she had when she was young. The lawyer would have to go elsewhere to sum up his story.

And so he does. Back in Germany, he escorts his grown daughter to the church where the fire had occurred and which he had once visited with his illiterate lover. He shows her the overstated gravestone of his lover, presumably paid for with the money he had offered the survivor, and then begins to tell his story to his daughter, perhaps in search of some freedom from the past through the act of recounting the past. The Holocaust was a German problem that Germans have to deal with, and the gravestone is not in praise of a dead concentration camp guard but of a woman who had altered herself so as to understand her participation in ghastly events. She is a symbol, fully realized in the performance, of a Germany that had to be laid to rest for Germany to go on, as he is a symbol of the shattered and deformed generation that followed. It is a well wrought and well made point as well as a well wrought movie that makes a point that is now worth making, there being enough time between the Holocaust and now to allow it to be made.