The Holocaust Revisionism of Hollywood
It never crossed my mind that I would ever speak or write negatively about the work of a fellow filmmaker. But when it comes to the topic of the Shoah, I feel like I have to speak my mind -- as both a Jew and a Sabra.
The other day I was watching Stephen Daldry's film The Reader with my best friend and producing partner, Marc Frydman. His grandmother was a survivor of the camps. When it was over Marc seemed both saddened and shocked. The movie, he felt, served to diminish the suffering of the Jews and went toward not a nullification of Nazi behavior, but certainly a mitigation of it.
The Reader traces the relationship through the years between a female Schutzstaffel (SS) guard and a man whom she seduced when she was in her mid-thirties and he was but fifteen. It's an exceptionally well-made film. The performances, especially Kate Winslet's as Hanna, are unique and nuanced. It may even take home an Oscar or two next weekend.
Which is the problem.
The audience, many of them young people uneducated about the Holocaust, will take as fact what they see on screen. And that would be a damn shame. For this film gives ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the Archbishop Williamsons of the world, to the people who would tell us that the Shoah is a mass exaggeration.
Ron Rosenbaum has already written a brilliant piece in Slate, taking the film to task for more or less exonerating the German population for their part in the Final Solution. Several others have written about the inappropriateness of trying to solicit a kind of sympathy for an SS guard. Others have attacked it for using sexuality to soften and evoke pity for the lead character.
What I would like to explore are the film's versions of certain "facts" presented in the film that serve to diminish the culpability of the SS... if you can imagine such a thing.
First up is the notion that Winslet's Hanna Schmitz would ever have been allowed into the SS. In the trial portion of the film (especially well done) we learn the SS was "recruiting" guards and Hanna volunteered her services. (She was working in Siemens- - the giant electronics company that used Jewish slave labor). Hanna is an illiterate. Furthermore, her work ethic was driven by efficiency -- doing her job and duty -- and not anti-Semitism.
The problem here is every person, man or woman, who was in the SS was intimately indoctrinated into the teachings of several rabid Jew haters including Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer. In fact, that newspaper was required reading for the SS on Hitler's orders. One was not entering a job when they came to the SS. They were turning themselves over to an ideology with cult-like obedience. This was especially true of those who were entering the Totenkopf, the "deaths head," tasked with being guards at the camps.
Now, as with anything, you can find exceptions to the rule. Of course there were some members of the SS who were not educated (though Germany was easily the most literate European country at the time). There may have been a Hanna or two. But is that not the primary tool of the Holocaust denier? To turn the exception into the rule? I am sure the makers of this film are not deniers. But they are helping those who are.
Because Hanna is not presented as an anomaly, those uneducated on the Holocaust will assume her character is an accurate portrayal of a member of the SS. Indeed, this depiction leads to the kind of ignorant statement made in this excerpt from a letter to the Los Angeles Times defending the film:
"Is it all that wrong to realize, that maybe the murdered were not the only victims of that situation? To anyone watching the movie with an open mind, Hannah Schmitd [sic] is a sad victim, an illiterate working as a guard, merely following orders, either her rationality suspended and/or her judgment coloured by the atmosphere of the Third Reich."
No. Hanna is not a victim. But The Reader helps to foster the notion that she and her contemporaries may have been.
Indeed, Kate Winslet herself said this on The Charlie Rose Show of the people who entered the SS: "These were young men and women who didn't know what they were getting into."
Furthermore, Winslet quotes Daldry as saying that the "Holocaust was started by normal people."
It is a shocking lack of understanding of one of the most important and horrible moments in human history.
Also in question is the SS "report" written about the church-burning incident that is central to the film. One of Hitler's first orders was that the SS (and Gestapo) could only be investigated by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) -- created by Heinrich Himmler. Although the Wermacht were record keepers, the RHSA were not... and they were most certainly not in the business of investigating the murder of Jews (or in this case willfully allowing Jews to be cremated alive).
The Reader gives the appearance that the SS -- in the midst of fighting the war -- were policing themselves for their own atrocities like we Americans did with, say, My Lai. In France there were three cases of churches filled with civilians being burned to the ground. The RHSA never once filed a report on any of these incidents.
The hollowest scene is the one I am sure was intended to be the film's most redemptive. A grown up Michael goes to see a survivor of the very church burning Hanna was involved with. She lectures him about the camps and refuses the money Hanna has willed to her (though she accepts the tin the money came in). The beautiful Lena Olin plays the survivor. She is well dressed. Her New York apartment is large and gorgeously furnished, her art collection on display.
In the scenes preceding it we see Hanna. She has nothing. She is in bad health. She commits suicide.
So, the SS representative in the film ends up pathetic and sad and, by the way, not guilty of the crime for which she was sentenced.
The lone representative of the survivors is haughty and glamorous -- a near perfect (and negative) stereotype of the wealthy European Jew in New York.
Guess whom the audience can relate to more?
By the way, we never see the tattoo on Olin's wrist that every concentration camp prisoner was branded with (Olin is costumed in sleeves). It's almost as if the filmmakers want to make us intellectually aware of Jewish suffering but not emotionally aware of it. The opposite is true of the SS guard's "suffering."
After Marc took some time to think about The Reader he reminded me that the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once said that the victims of the Nazis, exterminated in the SS camps did not vanish forever in the smoke of the ovens. They have a grave and a fragile one: our memory.
As the years pass and those memories are buried with the survivors it then is up to the artists to tell the story of the six million and to tell it right.
And, by the way, there was something that neither Marc nor his late grandmother ever forgot. The number tattooed on her wrist: A5499.
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Oh trust me, we're all aware of the suffering of the jews. The Reader was a great film. And how easily you leave out the other SS guards Hannah stands trial with. I guess because they completely falsify your entire premise.
The horror of The Reader is that the Holocaust was carried out not by human monsters but by ordinary citizens like Hanna who did not start out as monsters but who willingly did monstrous things. Hanna’s ‘following orders’ excuse for her behavior is that of an ordinary person who went with the flow of her job, rationalizing or overlooking whatever misgivings she may have had. Research supports the recognition that the holocaust was carried out by ordinary citizens. The real message of the film is this: We are Hanna. This is sadly illustrated by the monstrous behavior of American Hannas at Abu Ghraib Prison. At least the film’s Hanna paid the price.
Eichmann in Jerusalem should be required reading.
Mr. Lurie,
Simply, you are off base. Just because you feel The Reader is revisionist doesn't mean it's true. I saw The Reader just days ago. I appreciated its complexity. I was quite taken with the main storyline of collective guilt and its complex and endless ramifications. Simply having a character who excuses her own guilt with the grotesque just following orders line doesn't not mean that is the belief of the filmmakers or the overriding take away of the audience on the whole. Nobody else in the film accepted her excuse. Your worry of revisionist movement in our present and future is worthy. But if we must forsake a complex and nuanced presentation of our collective Holocaust history for one that is simplified black and white, good vs. evil and if you will, typical Hollywood drivel, our present and future will be one of your narrow view and not one of a collectively informed and evolved one.
With respect,
Connor T. McDonald
I saw The Reader two nights ago and I am still thinking about it. I think it's a great testament to the power of film, in its place, that it can engender such passionate, thoughtful, challenging dialogue about the complexities of the human experience.
There is so much anger and outrage about the film (and book, which I have not read), for trying to humanize and create empathy for a character who commits monstrous acts with such callousness. But I think that Hanna's humanity is what makes this film such a challenging emotional, intellectual and philosophical experience. It is so much easier to reduce people to a state of "otherness", to deny our connection to one another, to not see the potential in ourselves for acts of horror that seem so unimaginable.
But to see a Nazi or George Bush or Hitler as a human being, with the potential for love, regret, anger, hurt, desire and empathy is to begin to contemplate the possibility of healing. This film does not excuse anything. It does not suggest that illiteracy is a justification. God what a simplistic response to such a layered and complicated problem.
We are ALL human. We all make choices. As a society, we judge those choices as moral or immoral, but these judgments to not negate our humanity. It is not wrong to depict a war criminal as human. It is life. And art imitates life.
Hollywood is about making money - they have never been the leader when it comes to truth about the human experience.
The racist Birth of a Nation is still considered a classic. 40 years after Stonewall their films are filled with anti-gay stereotypes and the "F a g g o t". etc. Women who show any enjoyment of sexuality must pay a price etc.
As far as revisionist history goes - I would worry more about the Republican party constanly lying about the past - trying to make it true.
Trying to blame the current financial crisis on Jimmy Carter for example. Or I just read a Republican claming FDR created problems during the great depression with his social programs. These are out and out lies. (and don't get me started on their patron sainting of the evil Ronald Reagan)
It was a good point to make but we have to keep our eye on the ball constantly for the revisionists.
The problem with movies such as "The Reader," is that most people have not taken the time to educate themselves about the Holocaust, and certainly our educational system does not do a good job of it. So impressions gained from watching movies set amid the Holocaust can become taken as historically accurate by uneducated viewers, and by uneducated, I mean most, in the sense that they know OF the Holocaust, but not very much ABOUT it in detail. So a movie like "The Reader," can have a misleading effect on the culture as a whole. Ironically, I recommend works of historical fiction, "Orbit of Darkness," and "Village of a Million Spirits," by Ian MacMillan, to anyone who wishes to get a sense of the very real pall of evil that covered Europe during the period of Nazi mastery.
>>The problem with movies such as "The Reader," is that most people have not taken the time to educate themselves about the Holocaust, and certainly our educational system does not do a good job of it.
That is not a problem with "The Reader." That is a problem with most people.
Dear Mr. Laurie, thank you, thank you, thank you for putting words the anger/outrage I felt while watching this otherwise exquisite film. The more beautifully wrenching the film's scenes, the more I felt the fraud and apologist revision that was being stuffed down my throat! This movie works fantastically as a piece of fiction but is an absolute crime if viewed in a historical context. I cannot remember feeling more conflicted about any film... ever. While I understand that the film makers are artists first... I can't help but think that even art has a responsibility to the TRUTH.
OverIt: Could you please specify where the movie apologizes for or revises history? One of the most powerful scenes is when one of Michael's classmates demands that every German who knew about the "thousands of camps" should have shot himself. Michael himself feels so guilty and ashamed of his affair with Hanna that he withholds evidence in the trial, therefore complicating the historical examination of the crimes. This almost ruins him. I respect your outrage (I had some problems with aspects of the film myself), but I don't think it apologizes or covers up anything.
I saw the film as a metaphor for power and social class divisions. Hannah's actions - seducing the boy, her actions as a guard - can be seen as motivated to overcome the persecutions of her class from the more educated, monied and literate classes. She doesn't take any boy as a lover, but an educated boy of a station above her own. Illiteracy has it's own category of shame and humility and Hannah felt different, isolated and judged.
My belief is that later in her life when she taught herself to read, as what the book tells us that the film does not, is that she read the stories of Holocaust survivors while in prison, she became more like the people she persecuted and felt judged by, and the shame of her actions was magnified.
The final act is ironic because it it two privileged, educated people being the ones to make the decision about Hannah's final bit of power - her money. Yet their decision smacks of a balancing of power - a jewish agency for illiteracy, something that was at the heart of the Holocaust and was at the heart of Hannah's pain. I believe that The Reader does not evoke sympathy or lessen the horrors of the Holocaust but sheds light on power imbalances in our society that contribute to divisions and sadly, to the pain that is inflicted on others.
Rod is right about the historical inaccuracy of the movie, especially regarding the SS. Membership in the SS was not just a "job," it was a sacred avocation to those who committed themselves to its ideals. And one of those ideals was the elimination from the earth of every Jew they could lay their hands on. Also, the thing that distinguishes the Holocaust of World War II from every other holocaust in history is the planning, scale, and industrial organization and efficiency of the effort to eliminate the targeted populations. The majority of Jews were NOT killed with bullets; early on, the SS noticed that even the back of a person's head assumed some aspect of personality to an executioner, and repeated executions disturbed the killers. They moved on to experiment with trucks that channeled exhaust fumes into the box holding the people, and eventually evolved into a system of forced labor camps, labor camps with adjoining extermination camps, and pure extermination camps, where gassing was accomplished with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B. The Nazi method of enclosing Jews in ghettos, then using a variety of psychological ploys to keep the population from revolting as they siphoned off some portion of it periodically was part of this industrial conception, failing only in Warsaw. And yes, SS men went home each night and kissed their wives, hugged and played with their kids, then got up each morning and went back to work, exterminating Jews (also gypsies and Slavs).
Actually, Hanna in the movie worked FOR the SS, she was not a MEMBER of the SS (an all male organization). Just to be exact here.
Actually, there were about 20 female members of the SS. Many of the female guards in the camps were members of the Waffen-SS, the SS's combat arm. I swiped this paragraph from Wapedia; I can't vouch for its accuracy, but in context it seems true:
The "SS" women, as they have been called, were generally strong, stout and healthy. In 1944 as German losses mounted on both fronts, Reich Minister Albert Speer ordered Germany to attain "Mobilization for Total War." Thousands of women were forcibly recruited from factories and sent to many of the larger concentration camps to be trained. One survivor[who?] described how a group of fifty of them were led in and one by one they were told to hit an inmate. She went on to state that out of the fifty women, only three women asked the reason why and only one refused to do it, which caused her to be thrown into the camp herself. She went on to say that they soon got "into the swing of things, which they have been warming up their entire lives for."
Who, exactly, is the reader when it comes to this subject? And what is our responsibility in being readers?
Well, yes. However, I read the book as a metaphor of the romance between "ordinary" Germans and Nazis, wherein they all end by excusing themselves or walking away from the problem. The author himself is lost at the end, as the narrative changes voice and then peters out.
The Holocaust remains inexplicable and inexcusable to anyone with a moral compass--and totally repellent. The weakness of the book lies in the seduction of a boy, someone who might be excused for his inexperience and susceptibility. It's debatable what sort of character would have been a better "seductee," but German citizens were neither inexperienced nor uninformed, and certainly were not innocent. They were members of an old and, one might have presumed, wise civilization, so as a society or as individuals had no excuse for enabling, joining, and serving an utterly corrupt and murderous political and social system.
In this country, we must forever examine--know, but not excuse--what our own parents and grandparents did in terms of racial crimes. Our own descendants will have to study and learn from our current cursed behaviors. If they choose fiction as a method of examining reality, so be it. Maybe it helps some to find the truth, to turn over the facts in all sorts of ways and try to understand, with a view to preventing, but not excusing and not rationalizing. But it can be a dangerous path.
Let us never forget--or excuse.
And there is the problem that has plagued the American South since the end of the Civil War: So many Southerners have never owned up to the depravity of slavery, and tried to wipe away the stain by blaming the victims with Jim Crow and segregation.
I read The Reader a long time ago, and the movie hasn't opened in Aus yet, so I can't comment on it. However, I have just recently read Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief and Steven Conte's The Zookeeper's War, both on the subject of "ordinary" German's during WWII. Both books to an extent provide a view from the other side, as it were, and I always felt that that was also the intent of The Reader. I do understand and agree with Rod's feelings about the almost apologist view given of the German populace when the incredible atrocities were taking place on the outskirts of their cities and in their name. I think it is necessary for the world to have this POV in light of Arendt's "banality of evil"; the horror of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Buchenwald and all the others, is highlighted against the very ordinariness of the German people. The fiction of an illiterate SS guard allows that contrast to be made. I agree wholeheartedly however, with the comments on the Lena Olin depiction of the survivor. I find that I am still moved unbearably by the sight of a tattooed number on a forearm, and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man remains a book I re-read constantly as the finest memoir on the subject.
All right - I admit that I might have come away with the wrong impression, but (having read the book) I didn't think of this as a "holocaust" film. I thought of this as a story of a young man who falls in love with a woman he can't get out of his mind - an obsessive love story, in otherwords, with the holocaust and the war in the background.
The love is so obsessive it takes an act like Hanna's involvement with the SS to throw it into relief.
But of course, reading the book automatically means that I came to the film looking for, and mentally emphasizing, the things I had found in the book.
You missed the mark on The Reader, Rod. If we only choose to see evil in people who are unlike us, we will not see it when it is right in front of us. I think it's important to acknowledge that some of these guards were 'normal'. They went home to their families, they raised their kids, hugged their wives, etc. If we only choose to see them as evil devils, we will fail to recognize this type of evilness when it rears it's ugly head today.
Agreed. If anything - and I say this as a Jew who had family members die in the Holocaust - I think it pointed to the importance of remembering it in all its complexity, so that we might recognize the early stages before we allow such a thing to happen again.
I have not seen the movie, but there have been so many good comments, both in favor of it and against it, that it seems to be doing what a good film should do; create discussion, likes and dislikes about it, debate. So much of what Hollywood produces is just schlock anyway, but this film may at least be worth seeing for all the controversy that it has caused.
It seems far worse for a religious leader, like Bishop Williamson, to discount, deny, or revise the number of Jews who died during the Holocaust. The 6 million Jews that were annihilated during the Holocaust is an estimation, an unknown number. There were also at least 6 million Gypsies, Poles, political opponents, homosexuals, disabled people, etc. killed at the Death Camps. But every one of those people had a name and a face and family/friends, they weren't numbers.
Think about how Hitler was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1938, before World War II had started, but still after Hitler's bombing campaign in Spain and his support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Also, in 1938, Walt Disney was the only studio executive to meet publicly with Leni Riefenstahl(Nazi film maker/prop
Finally, let's not forget the American industrialists and bankers who supported and continued to trade with the Nazis even after the U.S.A. had entered World War II, like Union Banking Corp., Prescott Bush, Wm. Harriman.
PT 2
“Winslet quotes… ‘Holocaust was started by normal people'… a shocking lack of understand
Utterly wrong: it wasn’t that they “were policing themselves for their own atrocities
“So, the SS representative in the film ends up .. not guilty of the crime.” No, she WAS guilty. Michael could’ve gotten her off for not writing the report, hence receiving a lesser sentence, but didn’t. A point is that the guilty were treated disproportionately. An overall theme: Jews (as a group) were subject to a (greater) mistreatment in German society for what? They’d done nothing different. Where’s the justice in treating Hanna differently or treating Jews differently? None.
We get this drivel anytime something comes around whose theme isn’t one-dimensional, in lock-step with the party-line. That there was humanness amongst Germans; most regular civilians needed to put bread on the table and conformed to do so. Or that there were any but Jewish victims—see; non-Jews killed. Humanity, and a belief in a simple—and false--theory of progress among humanity were victims (see: Horkheimer and Adorno). There are many lessons of the Holocaust.
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