Wow. It’s all I can say to an amazing movie. I have gone through a range of emotions watching this movie. One of those movies that makes you think. I highly recommend watching it if this kind of thing interests you. It stars Kate WInslet who I have always admired as an actress.

The Reader (Der Vorleser) is an award-winning novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink. It was published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States  in 1997. It deals with the difficulties of subsequent generations to comprehend the Holocaust; specifically, whether a sense of its origins and magnitude can be adequately conveyed solely through written and oral media. This question is increasingly at the center of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses of the Holocaust die and its living memory begins to fade.

The story is in three parts, Part I begins in an unnamed West German city (Heidelberg) in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz brings him to her apartment and cleans him up before bringing him to his parents. He spends the next several months absent from school battling a pre-existing case of hepatitis.

On a subsequent visit to thank her for her help, he realizes he is attracted to her; embarrassed after she catches him watching her get dressed, he runs away, but he returns at a later date. After she asks his help retrieving coal from downstairs, he becomes dirty and she bathes him; afterwards, they make love. He begins returning to her apartment on a regular basis, and the two take part in an affair. They develop a ritual of bathing and making love, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, chiefly from works of German literature. Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally despite their physical closeness. Hanna also is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael.

Months later, Hanna suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between the two of them had grown while Michael spent more time with his school friends, and so he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of Hanna taints all his other relationships with women.

In Part II, eight years later, while attending law school, he is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as guards at a satellite of Auschwitz near Cracow are being tried for allowing Jewish women under their ostensible protection to die in a fire at a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident had been chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to America after the war; she is the star witness at the trial.

And I won’t tell you the rest as it’s worth watching yourself. Here’s the trailer…

You can view the movie here (the one with 82% good and in two parts is the best copy)