A love microcosm - metaphor of post-war Germany

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2009)

This is a non-linear narrative of a relationship between two incongruous protagonists, aged a generation apart, set in post-WWII Germany.
Over the summer of 1958, fifteen year old school teenager Michael Berg (David Kross/Ralph Fiennes) fortuitously through an illness entered into the lonely non-abstract world of Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a thirty-six year old tram conductor, who carried a tightly kept life-long debilitating personal secret. She bartered sex that satisfied his youthful lust for his lively literature reading sessions that colored her world. He fell deeply in love while she remained rather nonchalant and mysteriously disappeared from his life one day without a trace.
Eight years later, as a law student observing a court trial of ex-SS guards, Michael was stunned to see Hanna as one of the defendants. In the ensuing court room drama, her personal secret was threatened with exposure. It was then that Michael realized what it was and the enormous sacrifice she was prepared to bear by assuming the guilt of others in order to preserve it.
Shocked by the revelation of her horrid past, tinged by fear of social ostracism for his association, yet still captivated by his love for her, and constrained by knowing that she was unwilling to reveal her secret, he was unable to find the moral compass to intervene in her favor during the trial.
During her years of incarceration he found comfort in continuing his reading sessions copiously but remotely through the medium of tape recordings. It was this long and dedicated labor of love that eventually enabled her to overcome the 'albatross around her neck'. She in turn indirectly provided the catharsis that liberated him from the torment of his covert relationship for most of his adult life. However, don't expect a happy Hollywood ending!
Based on Bernhard Schlink's novel, now a standard text in the German school curriculum for understanding the country's history and the first German novel to top the New York Times' bestseller list, the microcosm of Hanna and Michael, weaved into the country's tumultuous post-war soul searching, was a complex set of metaphors for a country grappling with the truth, meaning and reconciliation of its past emotional and moral morass.
The innocent naivety of the immediate post-war generation was shattered when they discovered the crimes perpetrated by those whom they loved and cherished. They had to come to terms with the past, struggle to comprehend its meaning. Michael's emotional turmoil following his awakening to her secret and past history represented what was exactly happening in his society.
The personality traits of Hanna could be portrayed as being reminiscent of Hitler's Germany. Yet there was much humanity that seeped through that facade - her unsolicited act of kindness to Michael's illness which was the genesis of the liaison, her thorough emotional immersion in his readings, her rapturous response to the church choir, her attempt at reconnecting with him near the end, and her final remorseful acts. We could not hate her. Liberation from their respective debilitating secrets conveyed a positive metaphor for the country's future.
"You don't have to apologize to anyone!" "Nothing comes out of the camps." "Love completes the soul." "Society thinks they are guided by morality but in fact they are following laws." "Why don't you start by being honest with me?" These are examples of many dialog pieces that were laden with meaning beyond the context of the narrative.