Yesterday was a rather lovely day. Babel unexpectedly turned out not to have a shift at work, so came to collect me for lunch. We bravely headed into Birmingham city centre, which was a million times quieter than last time we visited it during the run up to Christmas, and we spent a pleasant hour or so looking around bookshops. My mother had given us some vouchers, and so we made a valiant effort to eat at Pizza Express, but both the outlet in the Bull Ring and the one in Brindley Place had queues pretty much coming out the door, and so we elected to have lunch at our old favourite Walkabout instead. We were very grown up actually, and shared a bottle of wine with lasagne

In walking to Brindley Place, it had caught my attention that the Odeon was showing the film ‘The Reader’. I desperately wanted to see the film, but the timetable at the Odeon was rubbish so I googled it and found that the cinema at the far end of Broad Street had a showing at 5.25. Babel agreed to come along with me and watch, and we just had time to stroll back towards the shops and grab a coffee before the film started.

‘Der Vorleser’, as I prefer to call it because the English translation of the name loses half the significance, is without doubt the best German language book I have ever read. I would go further, and say it is one of the best books I have ever read, punkt. My copy of it is one of my most prized possessions in the world; I won’t go as far as to say I would save it from a burning building, but if I were going to save one book from a burning building, this is the only one I would think of. A Christmas present from someone special in 2002, this is the first book I ever attempted to read in a foreign language. My German at the time was honestly not up to it, but the person who gave it to me had helpfully gone through and added pencil translations of the more difficult words. Nevertheless, I think it must have taken me two months of painful stumbling to get to the end of it. I spent so long on just the first page I think I could almost recite it: “Als ich fuenfzehn war, hatte ich Gelbsucht”, that’s the first sentence and peculiarly one of the relatively few details they changed between the film and the book. Inexplicably, in the film Michael has scarlet fever rather than jaundice.

Having read it once, I was so moved by the story that I proceeded to read it over and over again for several years. My copy is now so well-read that the pages are falling out of the spine, and I don’t dare to read it again for fear it will be completely destroyed. Next time I am in Germany I am going to buy myself a new copy to read and keep the existing one purely for sentimental reasons

It was with some trepidation then that I actually approached the film, worried that like with Bambi, a film crew might have seen fit to change a sad ending into a happy one. It is with no small amount of relief that I can report that this is not the case, and the film was as excellent as an English language film of this story can be. It would undoubtedly be better if the film had been made in German, because in my opinion the English translation of the novel is very poor and not just the beauty, but the significance of much of the language is lost too. I don’t even like ‘kid’ as a translation of ‘Jungchen’.

If you don’t know the story, it starts off in West Germany in the 1960s with a 15 year old boy who becomes involved in an affair with a woman in her 30s. It’s a strange relationship, characterised by the fact that either before or after they make love, she asks him to read aloud to her. One day she randomly disappears and the boy is devastated, for the rest of his life seemingly unable to form normal relationships with women. Nevertheless, time passes and he begins to study law at university. One day, his lecturer takes him along to see a trial of ex-Nazis which is taking place in the local town. Several women are accused of being SS guards and responsible for the death of hundreds of women. Amongst the defendents is his former lover.

I won’t go into the intricacies of what happens next because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. I just want to make the point that this is NOT a novel about the Holocaust and it annoys me when I read comments from critics, be they German or foreign, complaining that the Holocaust is not treated in a serious enough manner or that it is not right that we are made to feel empathy for one of the perpetrators. The novel is about a society struggling to come to terms with what it has done, a generation of children growing up unable to comprehend the acts committed by their close relatives. It’s a novel about guilt, both collective and personal, and how far people are responsible for their actions. It does not ask us to excuse what was done by the SS, but rather than demonise them it makes the point that they too were human and in the same situation, we might not behave any better.

Definitely one of the most moving films I have ever seen; the book makes me cry and the film even more so. I would have cried more were I not sitting next to Babel, who looked a bit bored and tried to go to sleep

Tags: Bernhard Schlink, der Vorleser, the reader

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Books, Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.