Secrets of the past

Way back in the 1950s, when the world knew of the concentration camps mainly from documentaries, film director Jean-Luc Godard made a famously provocative remark: “If ever a film is to be made about Auschwitz, it will have to be from the point of view of the guards.” Clearly, what Godard meant by this was that it would be impossible, on film, to do justice to the suffering of those who died in the camps. No drama, however well intentioned, could possibly be adequate to the events themselves. Spreading the usual hokey conventions of melodrama over this particular subject would be both gratuitous and offensive. So the only way of paying proper respect to the victims would be by trying to explain something of the motives of their tormentors.

In fact, in the last 50 years, you may say Godard has turned out to be wrong. For good or ill, some 252 feature films have now been made about the Holocaust, and a fair few of them have not disgraced their subject. In particular, for me, as for so many people, “Schindler’s List” represented a kind of high-water mark both in its integrity and in its accomplishment. I saw it once and found it so perfect that I never needed to see it again.

And yet it is also interesting just how little of what has been written or filmed concentrates not on the crimes themselves but on their effect on succeeding generations.

Bernard Schlink’s novel “The Reader” was published in 1995 and became an immediate success in Germany and later globally.

It tells the story of Michael Berg, who, while still in his teens, has a passionate affair with an older working-class woman, Hanna Schmitz. She then suddenly disappears. It is only when, as a law student in the early 1960s, he attends a war crimes trial does Michael realize that he has given his heart to a woman who has worked as a guard in a concentration camp. When he finds he possesses information favorable to her during the trial, he faces a moral dilemma and an emotional confusion that stays with him for the rest of his life. Does he step forward to help her or not? What does he now feel for her? And what obligations remain to someone who has committed such terrible crimes?

The moment you read the book, you discover that like all great fables, “The Reader” is both incredibly simple and alarmingly complicated. It works both as a love story and as a harrowing metaphor for Germany’s own infatuation with Nazism. The pull of the personal story is made stronger by the parallel it provides with the narrative of a whole country. When, two years ago, I was first asked to write a screenplay that would present the feelings of post-war German guilt to an audience who perhaps knew little of it, I was determined the movie should not be a piece of history, nor even a curious romance. It should also lay out the painful and all too common process we now know as truth and reconciliation.

The final film, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, is not then what’s called a Holocaust picture. Rather, it seeks to describe the feelings of shame, despair and anger that characterize those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be born in the shadow of a great ethnic crime. I wish I could say that the need for such a story might one day grow less. At the moment, it’s not looking likely.