When I was a fresh faced undergrad at Die Universität Bonn, a German student asked me how Americans could live with the blot of slavery in our past.  I asked her, "How can Germans live with the Holocaust?"  I'm not remotely proud of that rejoinder. Our mutual mud drubbing accomplished nothing.

This film, The Reader, invokes a far more meaningful discourse. So, when a fellow movie goer recently explained Hanna Schmitz's choices with, 'She was just being a Good German,' I flinched.  Isn't our willingness to paint a person or a culture with broad strokes, after all, called into question by the entire film?

I'm sure you'll want to draw your own conclusions from The Reader.  But one scene, early on, seems to give this German story a universal context.  Michael Berg, by now an accomplished lawyer, fixes breakfast - a boiled egg and coffee, served up on fine china - for the woman emerging from the bedroom.  When she alludes to his indifference, he says, 'Look, I've made you breakfast.  How could I not care about you?'  For all his intellect and education, Michael Berg manages to deny his demons by delivering black coffee in a white cup.  Through the unfolding drama he begins to peel away the skins that contain his emotional vacancy.

He is also a 'Good German.'  Good to his house guest, responsible to his job and incrementally more yoked to self-awareness as time passes.  Because most of us can see ourselves in Michael's uncertainties and denials, his story becomes our own.  In this place, where we try to be 'good people,' we stumble, we fail, we succeed, we rail against destiny and, in the end, if all goes well, we emerge with a hint of insight and a boatload of humility. 

The Reader leaves me less willing to judge Schmitz, her fellow Germans, my fellow Americans, or even myself, with absolutes.

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
Albert Camus