MB UNIUD

THE READER

The film The Reader is very important for the reflection on some interesting themes, not least Shoah and the importance of reading, as the title suggests.

We can notice the value of the latter theme from the beginning, when Hannah asks Michael to read for her, but it assumes a stronger significance during Hannah's process for Nazi crimes. As a matter of fact she admits something she has not done just not to say that she is illiterate. It represents a big contradiction: she feels ashamed because she can't read or write, and not she has killed lots of Jude women.

It is as if her real life and the many experiences that she lives through books, novels and poems represented two different dimensions. Until the process she doesn't seem to feel anything but when she is listening to a person who reads. Only in that moment her real sensibility and personality come to the surface (as a matter of fact she moves often when somebody reads). She realizes herself in that dimension in which she probably thinks that she could redeem herself (as a matter of fact she made the Jude women read, before sending them to Auschwitz), but she would later understand that it is not enough.

Her illiteracy is a metaphor of her life and her knowledge and comprehension of the world. Her oral and superficial culture determines her banality. She knows something only because she has heard it, she can't demonstrate, she can't really know anything. Her triviality can be perfectly noticed during the process. She admits anything, but not because she feels guilty; she admits because she can't understand the seriousness of her actions: she has just done what she should have done, it was just her work. That's way she appears ingenuous and almost innocent during his confession.

In fine, she commits suicide only after she has learnt reading. As a matter of fact through reading she could understand her previous banality her actions, her responsibility and her influence on other people's life. Books make her reflect on her past life, even if she would not admit it. Moreover she notices that reading and life are not two opposite and different dimensions. Her crimes (as any other human action) becomes part of written works and so, even if she states that thinking of the past is not useful, because the dead are dead, she understands that the past can't be removed, unlike words in oral culture.