Ordinary Monsters

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Weinstein Company/Everett An exclusive interview with Bernhard Schlink, author of the celebrated novel The Reader, about Hollywood's controversial new take on his book, verboten love, and why Kate Winslet makes a convincing war criminal.

A book belongs to the writer as it is being written. It belongs to the reader as it is being read. Bernhard Schlink, the author of the best-selling 1995 book, The Reader, and a law professor and judge in Berlin, says the movie of The Reader, which is in theaters now is not a Holocaust film—and the book therefore is not a Holocaust novel. That may be the book he wrote. It is not the novel I read.

In my interview with him, Schlink gives a good accounting of why he feels The Reader is not about the murder of six million Jews. He feels it is instead about how his own generation of Germans learned about that Holocaust and discovered that those responsible—the murderers and their enabler—were ordinary people who dropped by the house now and again or, more disturbing, lived in it.

“Kate Winslet has in her face and her persona a variety—from the cruel to frightened, from soft to tough.”

This is why he chose the vehicle of an illiterate woman—Hanna Schmitz, played in the movie by Kate Winslet. She represents an entire generation of Germans who did what they did for personal, petty, banal, ordinary reasons and did not do what they should have done—resist, fight—for personal, petty, banal or ordinary reasons. The greatest crime in all history was enabled, in the end, by millions of misdemeanors.

The movie version of The Reader, adapted by dramatist David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, does not show the crime that is at the center of the book (six female guards left hundreds of Jewish women and children to burn to death inside a locked church). It would be too shocking, too awful—a jolt of horror that would switch the movie off its tracks and veer it onto the ones leading to Auschwitz. This was the choice made by Daldry and Hare, and for them, it was a sound one. The horror is avoided and another truth is illuminated. After all, for so many Germans, the Holocaust took place the way it does in the movie: out of sight.

In the film, a boy of 15 has a precocious sexual relationship with an older woman. He falls in love. He discovers years later that she has become a war criminal. What does he do with his love—his memory of love? What does a son do about his father, a member of a generation of war criminals, but still a good man to the son? These are the questions Schlink poses. If his answers are unsatisfactory it is because these questions are too tough.

Cohen: Oddly enough, I’m in Berlin and you’re in New York.

Schlink: What a strange world.

Cohen: I have an enduring fascination with Germany. It’s cold, but it’s nice. You’re in Berlin now, or in New York?

Schlink: I’ll be back in a week now. I spend maybe one third of the year in New York and two thirds in Berlin.

Cohen: First of all, the book to me was a stunning achievement and I enjoyed it immensely. What was the inspiration for it?

Schlink: In 1990, in January, I became a guest professor at Humboldt in Germany right after the wall had come down. I was living in East Berlin for weeks in a row and experiencing the grayness of East Berlin. The grayness of the whole city—the houses, the back streets, the crumbling fences. It all brought the Fifties, when I grew up in Heidelberg, back so vividly. This period growing up as a child of the second generation became very vivid again. And the other inspiration of course is, we of the second generation all dealt with what it meant to grow up as kids of the parent generation who had created the Third Reich. Many of us, either as scholars, teachers, media people, or authors have written about this one way or the other. So it had been on my mind for a long time.