The Holocaust Revisionism of Hollywood, by Rod Lurie (The Huffington Post)

It never crossed my mind that I would ever speak or write negatively about the work of a fellow filmmaker. But when it comes to the topic of the Shoah, I feel like I have to speak my mind -- as both a Jew and a Sabra.

The other day I was watching Stephen Daldry's film The Reader with my best friend and producing partner, Marc Frydman. His grandmother was a survivor of the camps. When it was over Marc seemed both saddened and shocked. The movie, he felt, served to diminish the suffering of the Jews and went toward not a nullification of Nazi behavior, but certainly a mitigation of it.

The Reader traces the relationship through the years between a female Schutzstaffel (SS) guard and a man whom she seduced when she was in her mid-thirties and he was but fifteen. It's an exceptionally well-made film. The performances, especially Kate Winslet's as Hanna, are unique and nuanced. It may even take home an Oscar or two next weekend.

Which is the problem.

The audience, many of them young people uneducated about the Holocaust, will take as fact what they see on screen. And that would be a damn shame. For this film gives ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the Archbishop Williamsons of the world, to the people who would tell us that the Shoah is a mass exaggeration.

Ron Rosenbaum has already written a brilliant piece in Slate, taking the film to task for more or less exonerating the German population for their part in the Final Solution. Several others have written about the inappropriateness of trying to solicit a kind of sympathy for an SS guard. Others have attacked it for using sexuality to soften and evoke pity for the lead character.

What I would like to explore are the film's versions of certain "facts" presented in the film that serve to diminish the culpability of the SS... if you can imagine such a thing.

First up is the notion that Winslet's Hanna Schmitz would ever have been allowed into the SS. In the trial portion of the film (especially well done) we learn the SS was "recruiting" guards and Hanna volunteered her services. (She was working in Siemens- - the giant electronics company that used Jewish slave labor). Hanna is an illiterate. Furthermore, her work ethic was driven by efficiency -- doing her job and duty -- and not anti-Semitism.

The problem here is every person, man or woman, who was in the SS was intimately indoctrinated into the teachings of several rabid Jew haters including Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer. In fact, that newspaper was required reading for the SS on Hitler's orders. One was not entering a job when they came to the SS. They were turning themselves over to an ideology with cult-like obedience. This was especially true of those who were entering the Totenkopf, the "deaths head," tasked with being guards at the camps.

Now, as with anything, you can find exceptions to the rule. Of course there were some members of the SS who were not educated (though Germany was easily the most literate European country at the time). There may have been a Hanna or two. But is that not the primary tool of the Holocaust denier? To turn the exception into the rule? I am sure the makers of this film are not deniers. But they are helping those who are.

Because Hanna is not presented as an anomaly, those uneducated on the Holocaust will assume her character is an accurate portrayal of a member of the SS. Indeed, this depiction leads to the kind of ignorant statement made in this excerpt from a letter to the Los Angeles Times defending the film:

"Is it all that wrong to realize, that maybe the murdered were not the only victims of that situation? To anyone watching the movie with an open mind, Hannah Schmitd [sic] is a sad victim, an illiterate working as a guard, merely following orders, either her rationality suspended and/or her judgment coloured by the atmosphere of the Third Reich."

No. Hanna is not a victim. But The Reader helps to foster the notion that she and her contemporaries may have been.

Indeed, Kate Winslet herself said this on The Charlie Rose Show of the people who entered the SS: "These were young men and women who didn't know what they were getting into."

Furthermore, Winslet quotes Daldry as saying that the "Holocaust was started by normal people."

It is a shocking lack of understanding of one of the most important and horrible moments in human history.

Also in question is the SS "report" written about the church-burning incident that is central to the film. One of Hitler's first orders was that the SS (and Gestapo) could only be investigated by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) -- created by Heinrich Himmler. Although the Wermacht were record keepers, the RHSA were not... and they were most certainly not in the business of investigating the murder of Jews (or in this case willfully allowing Jews to be cremated alive).

The Reader gives the appearance that the SS -- in the midst of fighting the war -- were policing themselves for their own atrocities like we Americans did with, say, My Lai. In France there were three cases of churches filled with civilians being burned to the ground. The RHSA never once filed a report on any of these incidents.

The hollowest scene is the one I am sure was intended to be the film's most redemptive. A grown up Michael goes to see a survivor of the very church burning Hanna was involved with. She lectures him about the camps and refuses the money Hanna has willed to her (though she accepts the tin the money came in). The beautiful Lena Olin plays the survivor. She is well dressed. Her New York apartment is large and gorgeously furnished, her art collection on display.

In the scenes preceding it we see Hanna. She has nothing. She is in bad health. She commits suicide.

So, the SS representative in the film ends up pathetic and sad and, by the way, not guilty of the crime for which she was sentenced.

The lone representative of the survivors is haughty and glamorous -- a near perfect (and negative) stereotype of the wealthy European Jew in New York.

Guess whom the audience can relate to more?

By the way, we never see the tattoo on Olin's wrist that every concentration camp prisoner was branded with (Olin is costumed in sleeves). It's almost as if the filmmakers want to make us intellectually aware of Jewish suffering but not emotionally aware of it. The opposite is true of the SS guard's "suffering."

After Marc took some time to think about The Reader he reminded me that the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once said that the victims of the Nazis, exterminated in the SS camps did not vanish forever in the smoke of the ovens. They have a grave and a fragile one: our memory.

As the years pass and those memories are buried with the survivors it then is up to the artists to tell the story of the six million and to tell it right.

And, by the way, there was something that neither Marc nor his late grandmother ever forgot. The number tattooed on her wrist: A5499.

Don't Give an Oscar to "The Reader" (Slate)

By Ron Rosenbaum

If I hadn't used the locution so recently, I would be certain to call The Reader "The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made."

Somebody has to say it. I haven't seen others do so in print. And if I'm not the perfect person to do so, I do have some expertise.

And so I will: This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it's a "Holocaust film," it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that "ordinary Germans" were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.

A deeply depressing indication of how the film misreads the Holocaust can be found in a recent New York Times report on the state of the Oscar race. The paper gave disproportionate attention to The Reader by featuring a wistful-looking still of Kate Winslet above the headline "Films About Personal Triumphs Resonate With Viewers During Awards Season."

What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character's "personal triumph"? While in prison for participation in an act of mass murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish women locked in a burning church would die in the fire—she taught herself to read! What a heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!

True, she's unrepentant for the most part about allowing those women and children to burn to death. (Although we do see one scene in which it turns out she's saved some pennies in prison that she wants to be given to the children of the women she murdered—thanks!) But most of what we see of her prison experience is her excitement at her growing literacy skills. Get a load of those pages turning! Reading is fun!

It's been argued that no fictional film can do justice to the events of 1939-45, that only documentaries like Alan Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour-long Shoah can begin to convey the reality of the evil. And there certainly have been execrable failures (example: Life Is Beautiful). I've argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness—what some critics have called "Nazi porn." But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed—the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of "Holocaust revisionism," which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.

Weitzman mentioned three films in particular: In addition to The Reader, there was Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, which gave the impression that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was full of good men and true (identifiable in the film by their British accents) who had always opposed that lout Hitler with his whole silly Jewish obsession, when in fact the more we learn about the Wehrmacht's role, the more disgracefully complicit it turns out to have been with the mass murderers of the SS. Yes, a few Wehrmacht officers did plot against Hitler, but they waited to take action until the successful Normandy invasion, when it seemed Hitler would lose the war.

"The Valkyrie conspiracy took place in 1944," Weitzman told me. "If it had been 1941, it might have made a difference."

And then there was Cruise's character, Claus von Stauffenberg, very brave, it's true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British magazine History Today reminds us), he was describing the Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as "an unbelievable rabble" made up of "Jews and mongrels." With friends like these ...

Moral: Don't go looking for heroes in the largely mythical "German resistance" to Hitler. The German resistance was not much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its legend outgrew its deeds after the war. (Although it is worth seeking out the two movies about the tiny, brave-but-doomed, Munich-based "White Rose" resistance, The White Rose and Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which tell the story of a few students who didn't—like the Valkyrie conspirators—believe the goal was to help Germany win the war more efficiently than Hitler, but to bear moral witness against the exterminators. For which they were brutally guillotined in Munich in 1943.)

The third film Weitzman mentions as an example of this soft revisionism is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one I haven't been able to bring myself to see but that features a young German boy, son of Nazi parents, who lives near a concentration camp and befriends a young death camp "boy in striped pajamas." The tale is not dissimilar in saccharine sentiment to the recently revealed, Oprah-fied fraud about the girl who gave the death camp boy apples, although it avoids the happy ending of that treacly sham.

But at least they didn't give these two films Oscar nominations or awards like the disgraceful one given to Life Is Beautiful.

Still, cumulatively, Weitzman believes they achieve a sinister effect: "Where overt Holocaust denial has failed in America," Weitzman said, "the way it has not elsewhere, these films represent a kind of Holocaust revisionism that misconstrues the German role in it, which extended far beyond Hitler's circle." (Which reminds me of another example, The Reader's partner in exculpatory shame: Downfall, which did exactly that—make it seem as though Hitler and Goebbels and a few others were the source of all evil in Germany while the poor, unknowing German people were victims, too. It's revolting.)

In this repellent form of revisionism, most Germans (you know, the ones who helped bring Hitler to power, who enthusiastically joined in his hysterical Jew-hatred and his pogroms, who supported his mass deportations "to the East") were somehow ignorant of the extermination of the Jews going on "in the East." They presumably noticed the disappearance of the Jews from their midst (since they eagerly stole their apartments and everything valuable the Jews were forced to leave behind). I once confronted a spokesman for the German Consulate on a panel in New York who was pushing a version of this line; he'd referred to a recent poll that purported to show that the majority of Germans alive at the time of the extermination had—surprise!—no knowledge of it.

"What did they think?" I asked him. "The Jews all decided to go on vacation and forgot to come home?"

Please, let's not allow films like The Reader to misrepresent history by pretending the Germans—even those too young to fight—didn't know what was going on until (as The Reader would have it) after the war, when they learned about all the troubling things that some of their fellow citizens did "in the East."

Only then, the film asks us to believe, did these ordinary Germans find themselves shocked, shocked at the mass murder, the gassing, the industrialized killing. Germans had actually participated? So hard to believe! So few clues!

In fact, one of the most damning documents I uncovered in researching my book Explaining Hitler was a revelation that appeared in a Munich anti-Hitler newspaper, the Münchener Post, on Dec. 9, 1931. It had been lost to history until I found it in the basement of a state archive. The courageous reporters of the social-democratic paper had gotten hold of a secret Nazi Party plan for the disposition of the Jews that first used what was to become the widespread euphemism for extermination: "Final Solution" (Endlössung), a word that left little doubt over the mass murder it euphemized. I've written about the difficulties I met with in trying to make their story into a film: Hollywood resists Hitler-related movies when they lack "a happy ending." But it's clear Germans could have known as early as 1931 (or 1926 if they'd bothered to read Mein Kampf).

They could have known if they'd read about the legal dehumanization of Jews in the Nuremberg laws of 1935 or the state-sponsored pogroms after Kristallnacht in 1938. And if they happened to be illiterate as in The Reader (something Cynthia Ozick dispatches as a fraudulent red-herring metaphoric excuse in an essay that examined the book), they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate, to miss what Kate Winslet's character seems to have missed (while serving as a guard at Auschwitz!). You'd have to be exceedingly stupid. As dumb as the Oscar voters who nominated The Reader because it was a "Holocaust film."

But that's what The Reader is about: the supposedly difficult struggle with this slowly dawning postwar awareness. As Cynthia Ozick put it in her essay: "After the war, when she is brought to trial, the narrator ['Michael Berg'] acknowledges that she is guilty of despicable crimes—but he also believes that her illiteracy must mitigate her guilt. Had she been able to read, she would have been a factory worker, not an agent of murder. Her crimes are illiteracy's accident. Illiteracy is her exculpation."

Indeed, so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn't require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it's been declared "classic" and "profound") actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder. From the Barnes & Noble Web site summary of the novel: "Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges, Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret more shameful than murder." Yes, more shameful than murder! Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you're guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it's not shown in the film. As I learned from the director at a screening of The Reader, the scene was omitted because it might have "unbalanced" our view of Hanna, given too much weight to the mass murder she committed, as opposed to her lack of reading skills. Made it more difficult to develop empathy for her, although it's never explained why it's important that we should.

And so the film never really questions the presumption that nobody could know and thus register moral witness against mass murder while it was going on. Who could have imagined it? That's the metaphoric thrust of the Kate Winslet character's "illiteracy": She's a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to "read" the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock! Or if Hollywood has its way: Here's your Oscar.

Hard to believe, but it's almost unfair to say it's the fault of ignorant West Coast types. I witnessed a shocking moment of this sort of deferential ignorance in an audience of supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers, many of them Jewish.

It was a relatively small early screening for "opinion-makers," hosted by a high-profile public-relations person. Harvey Weinstein, a producer of the film, stopped by to wave at the well-connected crowd (don't ask me why I was invited, probably because I wrote Explaining Hitler) before catching a flight to London, we were told.

There was already some inside-Hollywood controversy over the film since Weinstein's co-producer Scott Rudin had his name removed from it—officially because of a dispute over the release date and whether the film was "ready," although once I saw it, I wondered whether there was more to it than that.

The word was this screening was part of a multipronged Weinstein Oscar offensive on behalf of poor Oscar-less Kate Winslet, who was up for nomination for two pictures, Revolutionary Road (a non-Weinstein production) and The Reader.

Which was why I got an angry call from the publicist the next morning after the scene I (indirectly) caused at a Q&A with the director, Stephen Daldry, held after the screening. Since my girlfriend was out of town, I brought a friend who turned out to be both outraged and outspoken about the film (and he wasn't even Jewish).

Most of the questions to the British director were polite and deferential to the point of insipidness. After all, he was a British director and the screenplay was by a famous British playwright, David Hare. Still, there was one question that turned up something interesting that few reviewers seemed to have noticed.

Daldry said he'd had a big fight with the author of The Reader, Bernhard Schlink. In the novel, when Kate's mass murderer learns to read, one of the things she reads about is—guess what?—the Holocaust. We're led to believe that she's learning about it, or at least the extent of it, for the first time, from reading Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Hannah Arendt, and is suitably horrified. You get the idea: Reading can develop a moral sense, a path toward redemption. (This candy-coated moral is probably what attracted Oprah when she selected The Reader for her book club and made the otherwise obscure German novel an American best-seller a decade ago.)

But Daldry said he and Hare eliminated the Holocaust education aspect of the novel (over the strong objections of Schlink) because he didn't want the film to seem to be about redemption; too many Holocaust films offer a kind of false redemptiveness, he said.

Well, good for him, but without that, he's made a film in which all the techniques of Hollywood are used to evoke empathy for an unrepentant mass murderer of Jews. The elimination of the Primo Levi reading list in the novel—however meretricious a gambit it is—deprives the literacy she achieves of any relationship to the Holocaust, which eliminates the fraudulent moral redemptiveness but also makes the film incoherent as a response to the Holocaust. Why should we care that she can read Chekhov's "Lady With Lapdog"?

Meanwhile, I could tell my friend was fuming. I was in a kind of state of numbed disbelief and rarely like to attract attention to myself by asking questions in forums such as these. My friend had no such qualms. He was outraged by the film, not just by its exculpatory thrust but by the way it achieved its end of evoking empathy for Kate Winslet with what he called "manipulative" nudity. (If you haven't seen the film, the first half-hour is devoted to Kate—in the postwar years before her arrest—seducing a teenage boy, whom she persuades to read to her before sex. There's a lot more sex than reading and a fairly shocking amount of nude close-ups of Kate's body. The teenager later becomes a law student who watches her eventual prosecution and helps her learn to read in prison. Literacy is sexy! Or something.)

The nudity, which I've had cause to reference before in a column on the irresistible (to culture-makers) attraction between Nazis and sex, gives new meaning to the word gratuitous. To my friend, it was a manipulative tool used to create intimacy with and thus empathy for an unrepentant mass murderer. And what's more—to shocked gasps, he said exactly that to the director in the Q&A session. And didn't stop there, calling The Reader a "dishonest and mediocre" film that used nudity to disguise its thematic nakedness.

There was consternation in the room, especially among the publicists, whose minions made sure to take our names after the screening. This resulted in a high-decibel call to me the next morning from the chief publicist, telling me she'd gotten "50 calls" from people at the screening saying how "rude" my outspoken friend was, upbraiding me for bringing an impolite interloper into the screening, telling me how important it was to "the industry" that films like this succeed in the hard times we were going through, and accusing me of everything but putting a horse's head in Harvey Weinstein's bed.

"You mean you're saying I could be the death of Hollywood?" I said, incredulously unaware of my secret superpowers. I tried to explain to her my view: that it wasn't me or my friend who was the problem, it was the movie. (She later called back somewhat contritely.)

In any case, I had thought that those voting for Oscar nominations would see the problems in this incoherent, exculpatory film. But I was wrong. Kate got her Oscar nomination for Harvey's film, not the other one. The Reader got one, too.

Please, Hollywood, don't compound the error by giving the Oscar to The Reader.

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

"The Reader": crítico vs. guionista

En "The Guardian", el crítico Peter Bradshaw destrozó la película de Stephen Daldry "The Reader", cuyo guión fue escrito por el reconocido autor David Hare. El propio Hare le respondió brutalmente a Bradshaw. Y ahora es Bradshaw el que recoge el guante y sigue la discusión, que me parece interesante. En la nota de Bradsaw hay links tanto a su crítica como a otras críticas, y también a la respuesta de Hare. En inglés, claro...

By Peter Bradhsaw

Some weeks ago, I wrote about Stephen Daldry's movie The Reader, the story of Michael, a teenage boy in 1950s Germany, who has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, who likes him to read aloud to her. He discovers in later adulthood that this woman had kept from him a terrible secret. She was a camp guard at Auschwitz.

In my review, I absented myself from the broad critical consensus that this film was a good thing. Despite the supremely high calibre of its contributors - and with Kate Winslet as star, Stephen Daldry as director and David Hare as writer, this surely is a triple-A-team we're talking about - I felt it was a glib, facile film in which the Holocaust is questionably invoked to lend depth to a tale of titillation and sentimentality.

This view was contested in our letters page by Professor Julian Dodd of the University of Manchester and in today's paper you can read the transcript of an onstage discussion with David Hare himself, the film's screenwriter who adapted the original novel by Bernhard Schlink, hosted by my colleague Michael Billington. In this, Hare gives my review a withering response, which I confess, on first reading, put me in mind of the maxim of the author, comedian and Palestinian activist Jeremy Hardy: sarcasm is the highest form of wit - I don't think.

As far as The Reader goes, I am certainly in a minority, but not a minority of one. Here you can read Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Admirers of the film raise what they see as the film's central issue. In Germany, ordinary people with ordinary lives, people who did not have devil-horns and a tail - ordinary, decent people like you and me, in fact - were effectively complicit under various levels of coercion in various levels of evil. I agree with what I take to be David Hare's point that this is a profoundly important question in European history; it is, in part, the question that Hanna flings at her judge: "What would you have done?"

But The Reader does not seriously engage with the question. In invoking the Holocaust, it bites off much more than it has any intention of chewing. Hanna's sympathetic ordinariness is lavishly established, but what exactly she is supposed to have done at Auschwitz and how exactly she feels about it later is cloudy. In fact, the issue becomes hardly more than a tragi-historical style accessory to a sexy and sad love story - allegedly made more poignant by Hanna's illiteracy - and whose ultimate importance turns out to be Michael's own personal journey of emotional healing in middle age.

Hanna, tremendously played by Winslet, is apparently guilty of monstrous acts, and the discovery of this guilt initally appears to supercharge the film with drama and importance. But we never get to see what exactly these monstrous acts were; she never shows any clear sign of understanding or repentance, and her silence on the subject of anti-Semitism is not challenged or even noticed. She is ashamed of her illiteracy - but not, it appears, particularly ashamed of having been a Nazi camp-guard. Even her final devastating act doesn't make her feelings entirely clear.

Now, Hanna's behaviour may have been entirely typical of those guilty of lower-level war-crimes. Like Hanna in the movie's trial-scene, they might have maintained a manner of bafflement and pain and defensiveness. Hanna was, after all, obeying orders. People like Hanna might well gone into a kind of denial, a willed amnesia - but there is no reason for a cinema audience to share that condition, however gallantly they sympathise with her illiteracy or need for love. I am here incidentally sticking to the idea that Hanna Schmitz is a fictional creation, entire of herself, despite reports that in Bernhard Schlink's original novel she may have been based on the real-life Buchenwald guard Ilse Koch. Reading about Koch is certainly a bracing lesson in historical reality after watching The Reader.

Of course, I wouldn't want Kate Winslet to play the part like a snarling Nazi, goosestepping back and forth across her apartment like Freddie Starr. The subtlety and clarity of her technique is a marvel. It always is. And this role, along with her performance in Revolutionary Road, lands a mighty double-whammy. But I couldn't sit still for the way her character's guilt-free vulnerability was romanticised and permitted to loom larger on screen than her (sketchily conceived) involvement in Auschwitz.

Professor Dodd, in his interesting and measured letter, says that the film's point "lies in demonstrating that vulnerability can play a part in leading one - anyone, perhaps - to commit acts of barely comprehensible wickedness." Perhaps so. But if by "vulnerability" we mean Hanna's illiteracy, well, it does not appear to be that which led her to acts of wickedness. It is rather that her continuing shame at this illiteracy leads her to confess, in court, to a specific wickedness of which she is in fact innocent. So as well as being beautiful and possessed of a pathetic yearning for literature, she has been wrongly convicted.

Brooding on The Reader after seeing it, I found myself thinking of CP Taylor's 1981 play Good, now filmed with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs. That is a play about how ordinary, decent people could allow themselves to be gathered up into Nazism, how they could find themselves donating their own reputations and modest achievements to shore up the Nazi power structure. That was a play which wanted to investigate the question of how ordinary people become evil - but unlike The Reader, Taylor's play ultimately wants to look evil in the face. He shows how people's ordinariness does not exempt them from seeing the truth about themselves: that it is the vanity and weakness and smugness that is present in all people - from the highest to the lowest, from the nicest to the nastiest - that makes them eligible for fascism. That is their "vulnerability".

And as it happens, I also can't help remembering David Hare's plays Plenty and Licking Hitler, whose power and subtlety far exceeded the contrived mawkishness of The Reader - plays which show how the past (specifically the past experience of World War Two) lives powerfully and vividly and relevantly in the present.