THE READER BOOK HOW TO
THE READER BOOK TRIAL

His life is orderly, very clean, crisp and cold. How could he love someone who was now accused of such atrocities? How could he be so intimate with someone he apparently never truly knew? And yet, now that he knows her past, does he really know how her past came to be? After all, what is the face of evil? Is it Hanna Schmitz or is it something incredibly bigger than her? Ralph Fiennes is the future of Germany. Berg's memory of his first love would now become a question of his own morality.

THE READER BOOK TRIAL

Schmitz is on trial for crimes against humanity for her time as an officer in the Nazi party during the Second World War. Their latest chance encounter is far less exciting though as he sees her on a class outing to a courthouse. Berg has grown some and is a college man, studying to be a lawyer, when he catches sight of Hanna Schmitz again.

Just when it would seem that the two would never meet again, life steps in to ensure that past decisions, perhaps made in haste, can come to see their consequences. The summer ends and so does the affair, as one would expect. Berg is just happy to be in love and having sex but Schmitz is washing herself clean with the youthful vigor of Germany's tomorrow. So when the two come together, naked in each other's arms, the meeting is as redemptive as it is passionate. What he knows, he has read in books, been taught in school. She is a good fifteen years older than the young Berg and she knows much better than he of her country's history. Winslet strikes the perfect balance between directness and desire in Schmitz, making her complexities part of her appeal. Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a compassionate woman but also abrasive and stern.

THE READER BOOK HOW TO

This is a Germany that is uncertain how to proceed, how to be its new self in the eyes of the world and the eyes of its very own future generations. This is especially true in West Germany of 1958. How could he know that when he pulled into an alley to be sick that he would meet the woman who would shape his entire life? How could he know that getting close to her would pull him the furthest he's ever been from himself? Of course, when you're a sixteen-year-old boy and a woman who looks like Kate Winslet disrobes in front of you in the privacy of her bathroom, how much thought really goes into the decision that has presented itself? However little it is, it is certainly less than is warranted. One such experience was had by a young Michael Berg (David Kross) and is chronicled in Stephen Daldry's THE READER. Staying to see them through though can bring incredible bliss but also tormented turmoil.

Some experiences are life altering and we can run from them or embrace them. We can't be certain how we got there or where we will be when everything settles but we do know that we are alive. We make decisions or sometimes decisions are made for us but we think we've made them.

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