Ever since seeing The Reader earlier this week, I've been preoccupied with what I take to be one of its core themes: hermeneutics.
No no, hear me out. I'm not just projecting my dissertation topic onto everything. I swear.
In the last third of the film, as the plot nears the sentencing climax, the main character Michael, a law student in Heidelberg, engages in a seminar discussion about the meaning of the war crime trial he is observing. The professor has just made the point that law must be applied by taking into consideration the historicity of the events and people under consideration, that is, one must know what they knew and why they acted as they did. A rather truculent student, who sees no difficulty in assessing the motives, and thus the guilt of the accused women, volunteers to execute them himself.
In response both to this bellicose classmate and to his teacher, Michael states that the purpose of the trial is to understand. The point is not to go 'behind' the testimony and find some hidden purpose, or to explain away the actions by labeling them criminal. Rather, the sole purpose is to understand what happened.
This notion expands to include the remainder of the plot, since Michael himself has to struggle with Hannah's admission of guilt (really, her refusal to admit her illiteracy). The question surely is "why did she do that?", but Michael cannot begin to answer this before he even knows what she did, or to put it another way, who she is. The film ends with him not necessarily knowing 'why' she did anything (her suicide is not a 'motivated' act), but in the closing scene we see that he knows enough to tell the story: with Hannah's life complete, he can at least understand her by telling the story of their interaction.
The film shows really well the limits to our possible understanding. After all, neither we nor Michael ever get an explanation, of Hannah's acts or those of her fellow war criminals. The author of the book on which the film is based, Bernhard Schlink, has clearly struggled with questions of how to understand the past, specifically the history that every contemporary German is burdened with. In a recent talk at Boston University, he spoke about the difficulty in keeping the issue of the Holocaust an open topic for understanding. It is not something that has been 'digested,' that is 'over and done,' as so many German students lament to their teachers. Yet neither is it simply a problem, lacking data, awaiting a solution. It's a history that has to be taken up continually and anew. To understand it is to understand differently.
Coming soon: thoughts on the word 'historic' in current political discourse.
