By: Rachel Turner
The movie The Reader unfolds the aftermath of an affair between a sixteen-year-old boy Michael, and an older woman, which takes place in post-holocaust Germany. The two cross paths later in life when Michael, then a law student, attends the trial of some former concentration camp guards, one of them being his aforementioned lover, Hannah.
Law school in that era scarcely resembles the well-populated institutions of our time, presumably since the law had failed to prevent the atrocity they all lived through. It is hard to imagine maintaining faith in a system which failed so notoriously. Michael and his few classmates, however, remain committed to the justice system.
Their learning process is surprisingly much more moral as opposed to legalistic. The Professor probes beyond the narrow view of the law. The morality of the law is displayed during the trial when the judges interrogate Hannah’s position as a guard and are particularly interested in her backstory. It is important for the panel of judges to discern how the guards selected people to be sent to the ovens, and how they in fact locked the doors with people clammoring to survive. Hannah accounts her role as though it were completely obvious and understandable. It is a particularly painful scene to watch as the judge earnestly attempts to find some humane reason for Hannah’s behavior, after which she pointedly responds, “well, what would you have done?”
In the American justice system, Hannah’s testimony alone would have been enough to guarantee sentencing and punishment, but in post-holocaust Germany there was a need to figure out why. The procedure went beyond our narrow rules of evidence to discern how people can partake in true evil.
