The Reader - The Movie And The Novel

Did You Know That Nicole Kidman Was To Play Hanna In "The Reader" Movie? 

"Kidman, Fiennes book 'Reader' gig"

From Variety

"Winslet replaces Kidman in 'Reader'"

From Variety

"Nicole Kidman quits 'Reader'"

From Variety

Some Of The Most Interesting And Insightful Reviews Of "The Reader" Movie 

by Roger Ebert

"What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But if we were one of the rest of the Germans? Can we guess, on the basis of how most white Americans, from the North and South, knew about racial discrimination but didn't go out on a limb to oppose it? Philip Roth's great novel The Plot Against America imagines a Nazi takeover here. It is painfully thought-provoking and probably not unfair. "The Reader" suggests that many people are like Michael and Hanna, and possess secrets that we would do shameful things to conceal."

by Manohla Dargis

"...the novel was a best seller and an Oprah's Book Club selection, for starters - you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn't really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation."

by James Berardinelli

"Based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, the film asks big questions about the nature of evil and how sin, like disease, can be contagious. And, while not making excuses for those who participated in the Holocaust, The Reader becomes the latest Nazi-related motion picture to question whether redemption is an option or a possibility for someone who has committed monstrous acts....

At one point during The Reader, one character condemns not only the likes of Hanna but the whole of the previous generation of Germans for their willful ignorance of what was happening to the Jews. This question of responsibility and culpability has left a deep scar on the collective German consciousness that even now has not healed, and there are indications of it spread throughout The Reader.

...compelling material here to make it worthwhile as a meditation about the post-World War II implications of the Holocaust upon the German psyche and as the tale of the tragedy suffered by one man because, at a vulnerable time of his life, he fell in love with the wrong person."

by Todd McCarthy

"David Hare's astringent screenplay dispenses gradations of accountability across the decades, beginning with Nazi functionaries who might well have been just ?doing their jobs? to members of the ?second generation? of the postwar period who had to decide how to react to and judge their elders. The intense sexual relationship serves as a simple, effective metaphor for the elemental generational link, as well as for the shame and uncertainty of how to deal with the fallout....

A central problem with "The Reader" as a film is that one can never look inside the character of Hanna. Her life and behavior are invariably assessed from the outside -- what she represents to Michael, the way the court and history take stock of her actions -- but never by her. In fact, she denies that her own self-evaluation is of any importance. 'It doesn't matter what I feel, it doesn't matter what I think,' she insists when asked about wartime atrocities. 'The dead are still dead.'"

by John P. McCarthy

"It's curious to note that Hanna is a stickler for cleanliness and that she and Michael take lots of baths-together and separately-gaining mutual satisfaction from their scrubbing ablutions. The way in which the movie itself appears sanitized is problematic. Their obsession with bathing rituals, which is less pronounced in the book, can be interpreted as a metaphor for avoidance rather than as a symbolic attempt to wash away anything that will prevent a full and honest reckoning. The interrelation between Hanna's love for Michael, her lust for literature, her pride and her wartime actions remains mysterious. In the book, Michael finds this indefiniteness horrible but also wonders if it might be partially mitigating. In the movie version of The Reader, this uncertainty has a greater potential to seem exculpatory and therefore disturbing in a way the filmmakers most likely didn't intend."

by Sean O'Connell

"Mein Kampf meets Penthouse Forum in Stephen Daldry's The Reader, a chilly and surprisingly detached adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's passion play about a susceptible yet pensive teenage horn dog seduced by the former, female SS trooper who popped his cherry.

Their kinky relationship is fueled by carnal and intellectual curiosity. Hanna willingly beds this overeager virgin, then requires that he read to her as both foreplay and post-coital wind down. Winslet and Kross go largely au natural for Michael and Hanna's formative scenes. Clothing, in fact, is optional through most of Reader's early scenes. College students spend more on fast food than Daldry spent on costumes. The film alternates chapters and sex, sex and chapters. And we await the heartbreak that usually follows when a young person (or older person, I suppose) gives of their soul so completely."

by Mick LaSalle

"Clearly, something is wrong here. This woman is scarred in some way. She has seen something or done something or has been the victim of something, and sex is only a temporary relief from the psychological pain. Or maybe it's something else, a way of cutting through the psychological numbness that encases her. When they're not in bed, she tries to keep things at a distance. She calls him "kid" and tries not to open up. But it's a struggle, and Winslet is, no surprise, beautiful at conveying all aspects of this: the woman's strength and calculation, her growing affection and need, her despair and self-disgust.

Implicit in the last two-thirds of "The Reader" is the understanding that the boy was somehow permanently damaged by his early intimacy with this woman. But, however crass this sounds, if they wanted to convey this concept of permanent scarring, they really should have cast a woman less appealing than Winslet. For myself, I didn't know any Kate Winslet look-alikes when I was 15, but if I did, I doubt I'd be sitting around decades later all downcast and lizard-faced. I'd probably still be bragging about it.

This is not to deny that "The Reader," based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, touches on issues that are monumental - crime, guilt, complicity, conscience. Such subjects carry with them intrinsic interest, and they buy the film considerable indulgence. But, in the end, these grand subjects are simply not integrated into the relationship between the woman and the man. That unlikely couple is the movie's subject, and their interaction is the movie's story, its source of drama. When that source dries up, the movie degenerates into an intellectual exercise, without suspense or revelation.

To the end, the direction of Stephen Daldry ("The Hours") remains intelligent and graceful. But it's a measure of the story's ultimate barrenness that Daldry must reach for symbols in an attempt at significance. Early in the film, the woman asks the boy to read to her, and this becomes a ritual for them. Later, in the absence of any narrative urgency, this idea of the boy (and now the man) being a reader becomes important - and yet, not really. Everything really important can be found on the edges of this story, not within it."

by Peter Bradshaw

"Hanna's condition is by no means a metaphor for the moral illiteracy of nazism. She is shown as being the only honest defendant among the guards on trial; she silences the presiding judge with a heartfelt: "What would you have done?" She only takes the blame for having written a mendacious SS report, and therefore having been the guards' ringleader, because disproving it would mean submitting a handwriting specimen - and Hanna is still ashamed of being illiterate.

The dramatic and emotional structure of the film insidiously invites us to see Hanna's secret misery as a species of victimhood that, if not exactly equivalent to that of her prisoners, is certainly something to be weighed thoughtfully in the balance, and to see a guilt-free human vulnerability behind war crimes. The movie boldly flashes backwards and forwards between Michael's youth and middle age, but there are no flashbacks to the Auschwitz era, so we cannot judge the central facts of Hanna's life and behaviour, and her continuing silence on the subject of antisemitism is never challenged.

In a final scene, Ralph Fiennes, as the older Michael, comes to New York to visit Ilana Mather, one of Hanna's surviving victims, bearing Hanna's savings in an old tea-can. (Alexandra Maria Lara plays Ilana as a young woman, with whom young Michael had exchanged a friendly grimace of sympathy in court; she is played in middle age by Lena Olin.) This is because Hanna wanted Ilana to have her money, to do with "as she wishes". Surely any sentient human being, no matter how burdened they might feel by a perverse obligation to carry out Hanna's wishes, would see what a grotesque insult that is? Michael's failure to acknowledge it is one of the most agonising, toe-curling aspects of the film.

He explains Hanna's illiteracy to Ilana and the woman asks sharply: "Is that an explanation? Or an excuse?" This highly pertinent question never gets a satisfactory answer from Michael or anyone else. Ilana does not take the money, but incredibly, she does accept the battered old tea-can because it resembles one she lost in the camps - thus legitimising this appalling payment in a far deeper, more emotional sense. The sheer fatuity of this exchange left me gasping."

More reviews of "The Reader" movie. Read as many as you want and then please write your comments at the bottom of this lens... Thank you!

Siemens And Auschwitz Death Camp 

What Did Siemens Have To Do With SS And Auschwitz?

Siemens AG

Preceding World War II Siemens was involved in funding the rise of the Nazi Party and the secret rearmament of Germany. During the Second World War, Siemens supported the Hitler regime, contributed to the war effort and participated in the "Nazification" of the economy. Siemens had many factories in and around notorious extermination camps such as Auschwitz and used slave labor from concentration camps to build electric switches for military uses. In one example, almost 100,000 men and women from Auschwitz worked in a Siemens factory inside the camp, supplying the electricity to the camp.

Prisoners at forced labor in the Siemens factory. Auschwitz camp, Poland, 1940-1944.

Photo

Siemens retreats over Nazi name (September 5, 2002)

German engineering giant Siemens has hastily abandoned plans to register the trademark "Zyklon", the same name as the Zyklon B poison gas used in Nazi extermination camps, BBC News Online has learnt.... Like many other large German firms, Siemens is now involved in plans to compensate victims of the Nazi regime. The German Government is still working on ways to deliver about £3.5bn in reparations to victims and their families. Efforts to distribute compensation have been complicated by a mass of private lawsuits, mainly in US courts, alleging use of slave labour and other forms of profiteering from the Holocaust.

Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State . Auschwitz 1940-1945 . Corruption

By PBS - very well done!

Siemens Products: Ravensbruck, Buchenwald and Auschwitz Concentration Camps.The Crematorium ovens at Buchenwald still bear the Siemens name .

"Siemens should know better because it was directly complicit in the use of slave labour," said Dr Shimon Samuels, head of the European arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation.