That is apparently the excuse the audience of ''The Reader'' swallowed as violins played & they sat dumbstruck at the end of the Oscar nominated movie. I was the only vocally outraged customer in the New York movie theater. Could be that the book is ''a different story'' so to speak. But the movie made me mad as hell here are some reasons
Hanna Schmitz is unequivocably a ''Nazi whore'' -as one puny voice shouted out at the trial at which she was defiantly unrepentant (''What would you do....allow them to escape?....doing my job'', etc)
Illiteracy, not inhumanity, is her secret
shame. She can't take an office job, so she is a bus conductor, but being a death conductor is the option she chooses during the war -- because she can't read write?? Uber educated Germans may consider illiteracy the ultimate shame -& maybe this is the nuance I am missing & might have gotten from the book- but the movie audience is manipulated into feeling sorry for her for no good reason whatsoever
The ''love'' story, it is a lust story. No-brainer: adolescent boy used by a horny older woman. Throwing a pail of water on him when he's sick and scrubbing him fiercly is an indication of her gruffness and lack of compassion. One shudders to think of how she treated her concentration camp victims.. She was in this hook up solely for her gratification -- and it is no surprise she leaves him suddenly literally high & dry
And speaking of literal, the reading that got her off most was from ''Lady Chatterly's Lover''. So much for her elevating pursuit of literature
What disturbs me most aobut this movie is its apparent success (aided by those violins) in causing the audience
at best to feel ambivalent towards this woman (and via linkage to other perpetrators) and at worst to feel sympathetic
I felt no such ambivalence, and found it quite appropriate if the outcome of her mastering literature was to raise her high enough to hang