"The Reader": A Learning Disabilities Specialist's Perspective   

"The Reader": A Learning Disabilities Specialist's Perspective

By Carol McMullen

This film is a disturbing analysis of how ordinary individuals in Nazi Germany became involved in Hitler’s machinery directed at the destruction of the Jewish people. Much past Holocaust analysis has focused on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, within the Christian church, and ultimately within the German media. Many Germans, however, were drawn into Nazi service through Hitler’s appeal to nationalism and the restoration of German pride and supremacy.

Others, like Hanna Schmitz, just needed a job. During her trial, she seems astounded that the court would not understand that she and her co-accused were simply following orders. She asks the chief judge, “What would you have done?” in her circumstances.

Beyond rating the quality of the script and superb acting performances, most reviewers also assess the way this film handles the ongoing and troubling issues of German civilian knowledge, complicity, and guilt. An intriguing question in this regard is the motive of the law professor in involving his select student seminar in the war crimes trial. Where was he during this period, one wonders? He vaguely alludes to shadows in his past after one of his students rages about who is and who is not being brought to trial. We are initially drawn into viewing the character of Hanna through this lens.

Her Nazi involvement is confounded by her seduction, after the war, of a teenage German boy, Michael. What seems an inordinate amount of naked bath and lovemaking footage, portrays her as a self-centred individual, oblivious to the damaging effect of her relationship with a youth less than half her age. Many of her actions portray a moody, hardened woman with very limited sensitivity. And she clearly signs up as an SS Auschwitz guard, carries out her duties with no seeming remorse, and uses various prisoners to read to her, as she does later with Michael. Even in leaving her money to a survivor, we are deeply troubled - like Michael - that she doesn’t actually “get it”.

But The Reader is dealing with so much more. Hanna is more than just a simple, uneducated person, isolated and unfulfilled. We are given clues all along that she is actually illiterate, but most viewers do not grasp this until Michael does; when he agonizes over whether to share this information with the court after Hannah accepts responsibility for authoring a death march report she did not – and could not - write when challenged with a handwriting sample. Her co-accused say she was their leader to protect themselves, and when she is unwilling to provide a writing sample, or to declare her disability, she is sentenced to life imprisonment, rather than four years like the others.  

Anyone with what we now know to be Learning Disabilities, or who have family members with these disorders, will view this drama though a very different prism.
An insatiable and even obsessive desire to know what is in the books that others read, the shame of being unable to plan a trip, read a map, or order from a menu (Hanna has Michael do these) are pieces of what some of these individuals live with daily. Hanna leaves two jobs – with the trolley company and at Siemens, rather than explain why a promotion to an office position is impossible for her. Out of work, she signs up with the S.S. Following the trolley company offer, she just disappears, leaving young Michael distraught.

People with certain Learning Disabilities are often unable to deal with the subtleties of language, appearing naïve and rather black-and-white in their communication. While intelligent enough to be offered two promotions and to crave listening to Michael read Homer and Latin, Hanna can’t understand the rationale of protective deception in court, she openly offers the simple, and damning, truth. She misses the connection between the graphic sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover which disgusts her, and her own behaviour, and later, when Michael poignantly asks what she has learned (about the past) while in prison, she simply says, “I learned to read”.

Those not afflicted with or living with someone with Learning Disabilities, often experience affected individuals as emotionally insensitive, as Hanna certainly appears. And yet she weeps in Michael’s arms about Checkhov’s Lady with the Little Dog and when she hears a children’s choir for the first time in a church during their bicycle trip. It is literally traumatizing for children and teens to be shamed by parents, teachers, and schoolmates because of these disabilities, to be perceived as “stupid” or “lazy”, and to be excluded from so many activities which require reading and writing skills. Their self-esteem can be devastated. They develop an iron shell of self-protection, become moody or emotionally hardened to their own feelings of pain and sometimes to the feelings of others as well. Hanna’s isolated existence also suggests other possible tragedies in her life. Music or stories read TO her may touch those hidden feelings in an indirect, emotionally “safer” way.

Is her ultimate suicide because she is actually too deeply ashamed of her war crimes to return to society pending her release from prison? Or is her existential “difference” and isolation in the world, and fear of not being able to re-integrate too painful to bear?

So while The Reader may contribute further to the analysis of citizen participation in Nazi Germany, I believe it has something far more profound to say about the issue of Learning Disabilities, where today there are thankfully many resources available to help children and adults not suffer like Hanna and so they can make more positive life choices.

Kate Winslet may not realize the wider implication and contribution of her phenomenal portrayal of Hanna. Contact your local Learning Disabilities Association.

Carol McMullen is a Learning Disabilities Specialist and personal coach specializing in Attention Deficit Disporders, Asperger's and Acquired Brain Injuries.