42 Bill Niven Notes 1 See, for instance, Sarrazin, Der Neue Tugendterror � 2 The “Flakhelfer” have also been criticised for staying silent about, denying or playing down their part in Nazism. See Herwig, Die Flakhelfer � 3 See Walser, “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede” 13. 4 See Welzer, Täter � 5 See Schlink, “Epilog” 146-47. 6 Bernhard Schlink, “Die Erschöpfte Generation”. 7 See, for instance, “‘Ich denke einfach gern,’” an interview with Bernhard Schlink conducted by Petra Ahne and Steven Geyer for Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (7 April 2013. Web. 10 May 2015). Works Cited Aly, Götz. Unser Kampf 1968: Ein irritierter Blick zurück . Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008. Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Herwig, Malte. Die Flakhelfer: Eine gebrochene Generation . Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2013. Sarrazin, Thilo. Der Neue Tugendterror: Über die Grenzen der Meinungsfreiheit in Deutschland . Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2014. Schlink, Bernhard. Der Vorleser . “Epilog: Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit.” Vergangenheitsschuld und gegenwärtiges Recht. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp: 2002. 145-56. ---. Der Spiegel 30 Dec. 2002: 134-35. ---. Die Frau auf der Treppe . Zurich: Diogenes, 2014. ---. Das Wochenende . Zurich: Diogenes, 2008. Walser, Martin, “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede.” Die Walser-Bubis- Debatte: Eine Dokumentation. Ed. Frank Schirrmacher . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. 7-17. Welzer, Harald, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden . Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2007. Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 43 Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader Brad Prager University of Missouri Abstract: This essay explores key differences between Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader and its 2008 film adaptation, directed by Stephen Daldry. It examines whether the film, unlike its literary source, clearly telegraphs that its depiction of the perpetrator’s trial is based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, and whether it thus is meant to function as a critique of those proceedings. Both the film and the novel are concerned with establishing parallels between their protagonists, Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg, and the film’s staging of the trial provides insight into how it means for us to perceive these characters’ behavior as well as the scope of their empathy with Holocaust victims and survivors. This essay is ultimately concerned with whether the film papers over major distinctions between its protagonists, tidying up the novel’s narrative. Keywords: trial, courtroom, Eichmann, Holocaust, Frankfurt Stephen Daldry’s 2008 adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel Der Vorleser stages the trial of the fictional character Hanna Schmitz, a former SS perpetrator. The film’s courtroom strongly resembles the chamber in which Attorney General Fritz Bauer’s 1963-65 prosecution of twenty-two Auschwitz perpetrators, also known as the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, was conducted. Daldry’s staging diverges from the description in the novel: Schlink’s Hanna, in contrast to the one in the film, spends most of the trial with her back to the spectators, not in a dock off to the left. The identifying details in Schlink’s version are only loosely reported. The trial, we are told, takes place in an anonymous “other city” (Schlink 90), away from where the narrator Michael Berg attends law school. The filmed image of the courtroom, by contrast, takes its cues from history. The proportions of the room are the same as those in Frankfurt: risers lead to the de- 44 Brad Prager fendants’ dock on the left, there is a simple table at which witnesses were made to testify, and a large dark curtain falls behind the judges, framed by the chamber’s wood paneling. The similarities are undeniable. This is that courtroom. However, it would be a mistake to unreservedly identify the fictionalized trial in Schlink’s novel with the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial; what we are reading and seeing is not based on fact. 1 Moreover, not one of the twenty-two perpetrators indicted by Bauer in Frankfurt was a woman. Yet the film’s use of mise-en-scène encourages us to feel that we are seeing a dramatization of historical reality, a recreation of a scene, rooted in a specific time and place. Fig. 1. The courtroom as depicted in The Reader (top) and the courtroom in Frankfurt. Top image from The Reader (2008, dir. Stephen Daldry). Bottom image from Strafsache 4 Ks 2 / 63 (1993, dir. Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner). DVD stills � Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 45 The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials have recently become objects of increased scrutiny. The proceedings were not filmed, apart from having been fleetingly captured for the sake of newsreel footage, but historian Rebecca Wittmann explains that the trial’s audio was preserved on tapes that ended up in the basement of the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt and remained there “until the Radio Broadcasting Company of Hesse began re-recording them onto more durable digital audiotapes in 1993.” Wittmann writes that the tapes had been “left to disintegrate” until then, and, “as a result there is much confusion and ignorance about the Auschwitz Trial” (4). She notes that the transcriptions of the tapes were first made public in coordination with the trial’s fortieth anniversary in 2004, when the Fritz Bauer Institute hosted an exhibition. The lion’s share of the renewed attention given to the trial came, in other words, after the 1995 publication of Schlink’s book and just prior to the production of Daldry’s film. It is little wonder that images of the trial, suddenly the subject of renewed public discussion, had an impact on the film’s conceptualization and design. Upon entering the courtroom, Marthe, one of the film’s fictional law students, gazes out over the proceedings and immediately concludes: “Wow, it’s a circus.” To look at the film, it would seem that Daldry agrees. Although the trial, as it is depicted, is mostly a calm affair, things degenerate just before the verdict is rendered. The court collapses into chaos, and the ostensibly ordinary Germans in the gallery begin angrily calling out that Hanna is a “Nazi whore.” Their jeers represent a somewhat free adaptation of the novel’s description, which tells us only that many observers “riefen Hanna zu, was sie von ihr hielten” (Schlink 157). The trial’s denouement is circus-like, and the prosecution is rife with error. We have come to know Hanna, both in the book and the film, as a victim of circumstance put in a difficult position by the cadre of obviously viler and unrepentant co-defendants seated near her in the dock, as well as by an entirely male panel of judges. We also know that the most significant piece of evidence against her—a misleading incident report—has been wrongly ascribed to her. Owing to her illiteracy, she could not have penned the key incriminating document. The trial is, therefore, a miscarriage of justice. But in depicting this, is the film disparaging the proceedings? The book and the film may mean to assert that Hanna is appropriately punished for having, in a general sense, participated in atrocities, yet as readers and viewers we are aware that the basis for the court’s verdict is faulty. She should be punished for her crimes, but the court’s findings do not correspond to the truth. Writing about Schlink’s novel, William Collins Donahue notes, “It is crucial to the storyline that Hanna’s conviction appear both deserved (for she has clearly been involved in some wrongdoing) and somehow fundamentally unjust” (80, emphasis in original). In the film and 46 Brad Prager in the novel justice founders, leaving us to wonder whether the authors involved—on the one hand, Schlink, who worked closely with David Hare on the screenplay, and on the other hand Daldry, whom we hold responsible for the film’s choice of mise-en-scène—believe that the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials were similarly flawed. 2 This parallel-universe-Frankfurt is not the only courtroom depicted in Daldry’s film. Because The Reader relies on flashbacks and flash-forwards, we are given insight early in the film into Michael’s fate, and we see that nearly thirty years after Hanna’s trial, the adult Michael has become a defense attorney. On this point as well, the film deviates from the novel, in which Schlink tells us that Michael has fled from courtroom work, choosing instead to become a legal historian (171-72). When the film fleetingly depicts Michael as a defense attorney, he is seated in front of a telltale glass booth—a so-called defendant’s cage. Although it is a fixture in courtrooms in many countries, for US and other Anglophone viewers such cages recall only Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. That trial was not generally derided as a circus, but Hannah Arendt, its most famous spectator, wrote about it in terms of spectacle and mise-en-scène. She famously reminded readers that whoever designed that Jerusalem courtroom conceptualized it as a theater, “complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage.” Arendt adds, “Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion […] had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the ‘final solution of the Jewish question.’ And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the ‘architect of the state,’ remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings” (4-5). As many spectators experience them, these defendants’ cages set the accused apart from the court, and Eichmann’s glass box contributed to presenting him to courtroom observers, both in Israel and on television screens around the world, as the monster they expected him to be. For many viewers, what served as a stage prop in Jerusalem underscored themes that were highlighted by the State’s prosecutor, Gideon Hausner: “Here stands before you the destroyer of a people, an enemy of mankind. He was born human, but he lived like a beast in the jungle. He committed atrocities so unspeakable that he who is guilty of such crimes no longer deserves to be called human. His crimes go beyond what we consider human. They go beyond what separates man from beast” (Hartouni 89). Eichmann, in his glass booth and separated from the galley, was placed before the court as a monstrous circus attraction. The use of the booth in The Reader ’s flash-forward reminds us, either deliberately or inadvertently, that from Schlink’s and Daldry’s perspective Hanna is not Eichmann, whose booth set him apart from the spectators as an enemy of mankind. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, for example, saw Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 47 Eichmann this way, initiating her trial observations by listening to the sounds that were emanating from his glass cage. Channeling the spectator’s questions, she asks: “How is it possible? He looks like a human being, which is to say he is formed as other men. He breathes, eats, sleeps, reads, hears, sees. What goes on inside him? Who is he; who on God’s earth is he? How can he have been what he was, done what he did? ” (52). Hanna’s prosecution is not meant to resemble Eichmann’s. She comes across as unthreatening, even helpless—less a villainous beast than a version of Elizabeth Proctor, wrongly accused of witchcraft in Arthur Miller’s Crucible . She need not be separated from Michael and the audience of ordinary German spectators by a glass partition. Fig. 2. Michael Berg in a flash-forward, as an attorney whose client is behind a glass partition in The Reader. DVD still. The fictional Hanna’s illiteracy is, of course, anomalous. In a critical assessment of Schlink, Cynthia Ozick points out that the novel contradicts historical reality, leaving us to discuss an exceptional case rather than the generally acknowledged rule. She describes the book as, “a softly rhetorical work that deflects from the epitome,” adding that, “It was not the illiterates of Germany who ordered the burning of books” (118). Daldry and Schlink would prefer that we not view Hanna as an ogre. She is meant to be an “ordinary” perpetrator. Both the book and film ask: How could someone like Hanna have planned and coordinated a mass murder when she could not even read? Certainly, in contrast to her lying co-defendants, viewers and readers alike are meant to perceive Hanna as sincere, and, as Donahue writes, “having come clean early, [Hanna] gains our 48 Brad Prager trust and spares us the gory details” (74). Her motives could hardly be called ideological, yet being in the SS was a murderous business, and SS members who killed large numbers of Jews generally killed them because they were Jews. Hanna, as we come to know her, neither held nor maintains genocidal convictions. 3 Neither Schlink nor Daldry take up with any earnestness the question of whether Hanna might be or have been anti-Semitic. In the novel, Hanna’s acquired literacy ultimately brings her to a point at which she considers the victims’ feelings, and Michael tells us that while in prison she has read books by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, and even Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem � This bibliography does not make it into the film. Many, like Arendt, chose to perceive Eichmann as ordinary, taking seriously his own claim that he was merely following orders. It was no coincidence that Stanley Milgram initiated his famous social psychology experiments in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Those experiments were undertaken to study how ordinary people can become agents in a murderous process, or how average people can commit atrocities when they are authorized to do so. Hanna does not read as ideologically anti-Semitic, but rather as an ideal Milgram subject; she had a job to do, and she did it. In general she appears as a sympathetic figure, yet we are provided with relatively little evidence that she has retrospectively second-guessed her own handling of the situation. In the film, Dr. Rohl, Michael’s law professor, philosophizes about the trial’s prosecution, noting that people who commit murder tend to know it is wrong. Hanna’s attitude, as depicted here, throws Rohl’s seemingly self-evident claim into question. Whether her illiteracy or the enforced culture of silence surrounding the past is to blame, the book and film each naturalize Hanna’s apparent failure to regret her decisions, even with two decades of hindsight. In the portrait of her presented by Michael, Hanna’s feelings of guilt about her role in the Holocaust do not take up nearly as much psychic space as her embarrassment over her illiteracy. Her deficiencies of conscience are at no point presented as sociopathic. Hanna’s defense that she and the other guards were responsible for their prisoners, and that she therefore had to let victims burn rather than go free, would have served her well in Frankfurt. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, the prosecution was faced with certain legal constraints that compelled them to prosecute only the most monstrous acts. Consistent with German law, as opposed to comparable international courts, the perpetrators tried in Frankfurt had to know that their behavior was against German law at the time, which excluded those who committed murder as part of their assigned duties. According to Wittmann, the prosecution’s case, for this reason, had to center on those who behaved excessively, or “Exceßtäter” (6), and on persons guilty of extreme sadism (178). These included men such as SS Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Bo- Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 49 ger, infamous for the invention of the “Boger swing,” designed to suspend its victims from the ceiling and make interrogations particularly punishing. The Frankfurt Trials were not about ordinary perpetrators, and their obligatory focus on horrific crimes may have led Bauer to the disappointing conclusion that they did not achieve their goal. According to Wittmann, Bauer “wanted the public to learn from the Auschwitz Trial. But in many ways the misrepresentation of Nazi crime that came out of the trial is the prevalent interpretation informing people’s understanding of the Holocaust to this day.” Wittmann adds, “such popular films as Schindler’s List and The Pianist —by far the most influential sources of public information—show either excessively cruel, drunken Nazis gleefully shooting Jews at random, or sophisticated, cultured, sympathetic middlemen who can no longer take part in the evil. Missing from these depictions are the real people who participated every day” (274). Unlike Amon Göth, the monstrous commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, who was depicted in Schindler’s List as an excessively cruel, drunken Nazi, gleefully shooting Jews at random, we come to know Hanna as comprehensible and sympathetic. She also benefits from the excuse that she was doing primarily what her position demanded of her. She is hardly akin to Boger, and her lack of education apparently contributed more to her behavior than any desire to participate in sadistic schemes. This character would most likely have not been included as one of Bauer’s defendants, which already brings matters far afield from Frankfurt, yet Daldry, following Schlink, goes an additional mile, taking pains to offer viewers an exonerating and improbable backstory. In encouraging us to understand and pity Hanna, the novel and the film place her and Michael on similar footing. As John MacKinnon argues, Schlink is “concerned with establishing parallels between Michael and Hanna, insinuating them into the narrative in such a way as to expose the fundamental sameness that underlies their dramatically different circumstances” (186). Their entanglement establishes a kind of resemblance with regard to their shared history, their ersatz familial bond, and their intertwined fate. Daldry underscores this point in his film where he crosscuts between the two protagonists on the morning of the verdict, a scene not found in the novel. 4 That morning, Michael awakens in his dormitory-style room, and Hanna starts the day in her cell, each of them naked. Michael approaches a mirror, putting on his necktie, and suddenly Hanna is before a mirror, tying a necktie as well. The images are seamlessly assembled under cover of the musical score. The camera that had been over Michael’s right shoulder, filming him in the mirror, is then positioned behind Hanna’s left ear, situating the viewer between the two of them, observing them get dressed sideby-side. Whether by design or not, the scene functions as a citation of a famous one in Schindler’s List , in which the redeemable protagonist Oskar Schindler is 50 Brad Prager similarly tied to the irredeemably evil Amon Göth. (The effect of this cinematic echo is redoubled owing to Ralph Fiennes’s prominent role in both films). In the latter sequence, which takes place on the morning of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, the protagonists each shave before a mirror, going through identical masculine rituals. Spielberg’s images are photographed like Daldry’s: one protagonist seen from the left and the other from the right. In the case of Schindler’s List , the film’s assertion is that Schindler and Göth are more alike than Schindler cares to imagine. Here, Daldry’s aim is to highlight the extent to which these protagonists are intertwined. Because she was his first lover, and because he has never gotten past the memory, the two continue to function as a couple, still together. If one of them is appointed with the hangman, so is the other. Later, when Michael prepares audiotapes for Hanna in prison, this same cinematic intertwinement is reinforced by a series of cross dissolves. Fig. 3. Michael and Hanna, before their mirrors, preparing to return to court for the verdict in The Reader. DVD stills. Fig. 4. A similar pair of interconnected shots featuring Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes (r.) in Schindler’s List (1993, dir. Steven Spielberg). DVD stills. These former lovers have never ceased being together, even during the time that they were physically apart. As a consequence of their intimacy, Michael has become Hanna’s deputy, experiencing an empathy for the victims that she cannot. At the trial he encounters survivors’ suffering, hearing and seeing their Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 51 testimony. Michael’s experience of the courtroom as a theater is here central to the film’s drama; the courtroom is a play within a play. As Donahue writes, “we watch the trial with Berg, or better, we often watch the impression the trial is having on him. His face—registering, by turns, astonishment, grief, and revulsion—commands our attention and constitutes the film’s central focus” (158, emphasis in original). Where Michael’s empathy is concerned, Daldry’s rack focus shots tell a story. When the survivors, Rose and Ilana Mather, come to testify, Michael looks not at Hanna, but at Ilana, the younger of the two survivors. 5 In the moment the judge says, “I want to thank you for coming to this country today to testify,” and in saying so highlights the difficult facts of the survivors’ enforced exile and their return journey, Daldry shifts focus from Michael’s face to Ilana’s. If his expression has thus far commanded the viewer’s attention, we now witness him finally attending to the Jewish victims. This adjustment also represents a break in his erotic fixation with Hanna; at least for a moment, another woman seems to have a genuine hold on him. Fig. 5. A rack focus shot in The Reader : Michael Berg gazes at Ilana Mather. DVD stills. 52 Brad Prager In the book and in the film, Michael then visits the site of a former concentration camp. Because neither the book nor the film are specific about the trial’s time and place, there is no mention of the fact that the court at Frankfurt went on a three-day fact-finding excursion to Auschwitz in December 1964. Devin Pendas notes that the court’s intention was “to pit brute physical reality against the torrent of ‘mere’ words in the trial.” He also remarks that the trip was one of the trial’s “most photogenic moments” (180). Because Michael epitomizes Germany in the mid-1960s, a representative of his generation sitting in judgment on perpetrators such as Hanna (were there such a thing as perpetrators such as Hanna), his excursion in the film represents both of these things: it is an effort to pit reality against the mere words of the testimonies, and it is an intensely photogenic moment, in which a representative of the postwar generation stages himself against the backdrop of the camp. In the book Michael is said to visit Natzweiler-Struthof, a former camp about 170 miles from Frankfurt. Without naming it, Daldry instead uses the death camp Majdanek as his set. 6 The film’s cool blue and gray color palette throughout contrasts with the warm reds of Hanna’s apartment—scenes, which, as Ozick describes their appearance in the book, are “tender and picturesque, as in a Dutch interior” (114). When Michael arrives, he grasps the barbed wire fence, and the rack focus shot shows his changing mindset. Looking at his hand, he may be thinking about those prisoners who longed for liberation. It is not clear whether this is the inner or outer fence at Majdanek, but it is likely that no prisoner would have touched that wire and lived. Regardless, viewers of the film would likely believe that Michael’s trip, coupled with the survivors’ testimony, is a turning point. His head hangs low as he stands by the crematorium ovens. Whether this posture connotes sorrow or shame, the film would have to work against its own images to say, as does the novel, that Michael was struggling to feel anything. 7 The novel’s narration emphasizes his numbness, his desire to feel something, yet these images, accompanied by no narrated monologue, suggest that he feels sadness and regret. 8 At first it seems that Michael has learned something from the trial, yet Schlink’s narrative subsequently undercuts that perception. Shortly after Hanna’s suicide, Michael travels to New York in furtherance of her plan for posthumous atonement. Ilana is now decades older, and she takes the opportunity to rebuke Michael, essentially explaining to him that he is a German who thinks the problems of the past can be solved with a gift, in this case some cash and a tea tin. Ursula Mahlendorf writes that this turn of events indicates that Schlink knows more than his naïve narrator, and that he was right to assign an “extraordinarily perceptive role as judge” to the survivor (471). Troublesome stereotypes underpin the scene insofar as this fabricated survivor happens to be a wealthy Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 53 New York Jew with a servant, but the encounter also allows a survivor to voice some important truths. The stylizations in the film, particularly the prolonged silences, and those moments at which the actors gaze directly into the camera, are meant to call into question what we have seen, and to present a challenge to the audience. Ilana informs Michael that the camps were not universities and that one did not go there to learn. She concludes: “What are you asking for? Forgiveness for [Hanna]? Or do you just want to feel better yourself ? My advice, go to the theater, if you want catharsis. Please. Go to literature. Don’t Fig. 6. A rack focus shot at Majdanek: Michael Berg reaches for the barbed wire in The Reader. DVD stills. 54 Brad Prager go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.” The screenplay’s soliloquy, a variation on the scene as it appears in the novel, seems inspired by Ruth Klüger, a survivor famous for her hard-hitting assertions about past and present German and Austrian anti-Semitism, whose autobiography was first published in 1992, and then made available in English in 2001. 9 In her rebuke, Ilana rejects what Michael might have believed he learned from the trial. She tells him “go to the theater if you want catharsis.” But hadn’t he, after all, spent hours being schooled in that German court? Was he wrong to believe he learned from his experiences? Had it ended there, the film would have been a tough pill to swallow. Michael’s confrontation with Ilana can be read as an accusation against even contemporary Germans who are inclined to fool themselves with their own good intentions. He hopes he can take steps toward reconciliation, but those steps are in his interest, not the survivor’s, and neither forgiveness nor reconciliation is forthcoming. In its harsh censure, a film with this ending would have resembled Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014), which is dedicated to Fritz Bauer and takes an unkind view toward postwar German attitudes. 10 That film, freely adapted from Hubert Monteilhet’s novel Le Retour des cendres (1961), deals with Germans’ willingness to exploit Jewish survivors after the war. Jews were hardly in the position of receiving too many apologies for their suffering, nor were they on the receiving ends of abundant acts of absolution. On the contrary; as Jean Améry wrote about it, they were more likely to be walking wounds, made to apologize for not “getting over it,” and prone to tactlessly reminding the Germans of what they had done. 11 Daldry’s film could have concluded with a provocation. The survivor is right: it is hardly enough to watch a trial and feel that one has processed the past. Yet in its drive for closure—what Donahue calls its “rage for order and closure” (185)—the film tidies things up. Michael and his daughter Julia, who are otherwise estranged from one another, begin, in the absence of outside influences, to work on improving their relationship. It appears that Michael aims to do better by his daughter, starting with taking her to church and coming clean about his secrets. In this way, his past, and perhaps Germany’s as well, can be exposed to the light of day. In centering on the father and daughter, Daldry’s ending is revealing: this Holocaust film is less about the victims’ experiences, than it is about the Germans’ need to talk to one another, or about German-German relations. As Mahlendorf observes, this is a story about “the psychodynamics of silence in family and society […]; the psychodynamics of the abuse and deformation of the children because of the silence; and the failed insight into some of the causes of the Holocaust by the post- WWII generation” (462). After Hanna is finally out of the picture, and after an ocean separates the Bergs from Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader 55 any reproachful Jewish survivors, nothing remains but an all too comfortable conclusion, which suggests that Germans really need to converse more honestly with other Germans. Apart from that, anything else is only a circus. Notes 1 Juliane Köster posits that one of Schlink’s sources was the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf from 1975 to 1981, in which the female camp guard Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, famous for stomping on women with her boots, was tried along with Hildegard Lächert, who was known as “Bloody Brigitte.” The Viennese Braunsteiner was known to have committed countless atrocities and was tried for her complicity in over 250,000 deaths. The German court, which convicted her on multiple counts, imposed a life sentence on June 30, 1981. If Braunsteiner-Ryan was one of Schlink’s sources, then he grossly diminished the dimensions of that perpetrator’s violence. Some have proposed that the trial of SS Unterscharführer Horst Czerwinski was a basis for Der Vorleser , but the links are weak, given that proceedings against Czerwinski began in 1976-77 and were halted many times owing to his ill health. Czerwinski was not sentenced until 1989. Also, Czerwinski is a man. 2 Ariel Kaminer reports that Schlink was assumed to be a part of the production “from beginning to end.” He was influential in the decision to film in English rather than German, and he toured “various locations in the novel” along with Daldry and Hare. 3 Bettina Stangneth argues convincingly that Eichmann was far more anti-Semitic than had been previously assumed. Based on the taped conversations known as the Sassen interviews, her portrait of Eichmann depicts him as someone who held on to his beliefs after the war and boasted at length about his decisive role in persecuting Jews. Stangneth’s book upends a number of Arendt’s conclusions. 4 The novel does not include this scene, although Michael reports that Hanna, on the day of the judgment, is oblivious to the fact that she is wearing a tie that calls to mind a camp guard’s uniform ( Der Vorleser 156-57). 5 This role is played by Alexandra Maria Lara who played Hitler’s secretary in Der Untergang (2004). Insofar as she is playing a Jewish survivor, and the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in that same film, plays the role of a philosophically minded law professor, Daldry’s film casts German-speaking actors best known in the Anglophone world for playing Hitler and his secretary in highly sympathetic roles. 6 The fact that the production goes to Majdanek may once again call to mind that Schlink attempted to draw parallels between his sympathetic protag- 56 Brad Prager onist and the notorious Braunsteiner-Ryan, who committed many of her crimes at that camp. After confirming that this was a parallel Schlink had in mind, Donahue rightly points out that, “pedagogues who recommend that their students deliberately reacquaint themselves with the Majdanek trial realize, to their credit, that the comparison quickly breaks down. Ryan was, after all, notorious for ripping children from their mothers’ arms, beating them and other prisoners bloody with a riding whip or kicking them with steel-capped boots” (107). 7 On the question of shame in the novel, see Niven. 8 With regard to the absence of narrated monologue, see Donahue 158. Donahue, using the term “narrated monologue” is drawing on Dorrit Cohn. 9 Donahue remarks on the similarity between Klüger’s text and the speech in the screenplay (180). For corresponding passages in Klüger, see Still Alive 65. 10 Petzold’s Phoenix , which challenges its German audiences to reflect on Germany’s treatment of Jews in the postwar era, sharply contrasts with Giulio Ricciarelli’s Im Labyrinth des Schweigens ( Labyrinth of Lies , 2014), a melodramatic film that attempts to stage the genesis of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. In an attempt to appeal to German viewers, Ricciarelli all but erases Fritz Bauer’s influence, centering the narrative chiefly on a young, dogged, and fictionalized non-Jewish German prosecutor, who acts as the prosecution’s lone advocate. 11 See Améry’s comments on survivors and their ostensible tactlessness in his chapter on “Resentment” ( At the Mind’s Limits , esp. 67-68). Works Cited Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities . Trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1980. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gellhorn, Martha. “Eichmann and the Private Conscience.” Atlantic Monthly 29.2 (1962): 52-59. Hartouni, Valerie. Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness � New York: NYU Press, 2012. Kaminer, Ariel. “Translating Love and the Unspeakable.” New York Times 5 Dec. 2008. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered . New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001.