It has been some time since I’ve read the book and even more time since I’ve watched the movie. But it’s been the best thing I’ve seen/read in 2009. My mom has the book now so I will try and capture as much as I can from memory.
Recapping the story line is dulling the book for me and doesn’t do it justice. What I loved about this book is that it put a human face to Nazis. And it explained to me the paradox of German guilt. How can you love yourself as a German when you, as a German, are despised around the world? The fact is, upwards of 90% of Germans were Nazis during WWII. Some of those were by choice others were by force. You were not truly a citizen unless you were a Nazi. Couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t make a living unless you were part of the party. And I think, for some of these people, it was a choice of supporting their family versus being morally right.
However, that doesn’t absolve any of them of their crimes. And in this novel, the crimes from the past come back to cut your life in the future. It follows the time period where Germany has rebuilt itself and now has time to think about and do something about its awful past. But it is hard to find the culprits because 1) you would probably have to jail the whole country; 2) evidence was destroyed during the war; and 3) most of the victims were dead. In this particular case, though, there was a novel recording events and people. And a trial was to be had. Not to spoil the trial but it really revealed to me how deep the need for order and obedience is in German life. For the woman in question, extinguishing lives was not the moral question for her to answer. She was told to do it and, in order to keep order and obedience, she must comply. That is as far as she thought it through. That is as much as the book showed us. A simple woman following her orders simply. The very question of why did she not protest was incomprehensible to her. She signed up for a job so she must do it to her best ability.
However, there was more to this woman than her horrible past. She had a life, albeit a troubled one due to her secret that shamed her into becoming a Nazi in the first place, but she had a life. She was human to us for the majority of the book. She was real. She was not just a nameless face saluting a black, white, and red symbol. That is how Nazis have always come across to me in the past. Nameless faces of evil. But she had a name, she had a life, she had had choices to make as we all do, and she was human. Yes she had to pay for what she did, rightfully so, but she became less of a monster to me. And it made me rethink the impulse thought that all Nazis were evil. Evil is a very hard thing to be. And, I still believe, that there were a lot of monsters let loose in a Nazi uniform. But there were also a lot more of people like this woman who had made the wrong choice and her sense of duty obliged her to follow the path that that choice took.
I’m not trying to belittle the horridness of the actions in the Holocaust. But I was able to see another side of the fence that gets rarely seen. People try and dismiss the Nazis as being evil. I think it makes it easier for people to distance themselves from this horrible capability of our minds. If you write those people off as evil, then they are not like the rest of the humans on the planet, they are not normal; therefore, we, the normal humans, could never do something like this. But, The Reader makes you realize that these people were human and they were capable of doing this. And yes, for the most part, they were normal (at least at the beginning). They were one of us. And if one of us could do that then, then one of us could do it again.
And it is happening, again & again, it’s called genocide now and it is happening today as you read this. It happened before the Holocaust and it still continues after The Holocaust. To me, it seems there have been so many Holocausts since then that we have become numb to it.
