Michael Berg had an affair with Hanna Schmitz in 1958 .
Production began in Germany in September 2007 , and the film opened in limited release on 10 December 2008.It tells the story of Michael Berg , a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman , Hanna Schmitz , who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in the later years of World War II .
The Reader -LRB-2008 film-RRB-