Hanna's Final Shame example essay topic

Sebastian Hinds Mr. La Bonne E HRS / pd 0 4/8 Guilt and Shame in The Reader The Holocaust was a tragic event in history which took the lives of many people, and deeply affected those who witnessed the tragedy. Not only did this affect the people who lived through it, it also affected everyone who was connected to it. The survivors were lucky to have made it but there are times when their memories and flashbacks have made them wish they were the ones who died instead of living with the horrible aftermath. This is called survivors guilt. The psychological effects of the Holocaust on people from different sides such as soldiers and German citizens and survivors of the ghettos and camps vary in many ways yet in others are profoundly similar. Many contrasting opinions have been published about the victims and survivors of the Holocaust based on the writers' different cultural backgrounds, personal experiences and intellectual traditions.

However this had not only an effect on the victims but also on the people who were responsible for the atrocities. An aspect of the Holocaust that is tapped in to very rarely is the psychological effect that their participation had on people like the concentration camp employees. Did the horrors of what they had done haunt them forever How could they live with the guilt and shame Even Heroes who did everything they possibly could have, felt extreme guilt about not having done enough. In the scene in "Schindler's List" when he is saying good bye to all the people he's saved, he breaks down and expresses the anguish he felt for having three people pinned to his shirt (the golden pin), another two on his finger (his ring) and another five lives wasted in the metal next to him (his car). In another interest in movie I saw "The Young Lions", Marlon Brandon plays a "good" German soldier. Even though he is ordered to, on several occasions he refuses to obey orders, such as beating up a teenager in the French resistance, like shooting a unarmed British soldier, and other atrocities.

At the end of the war he walks into a concentration camp and refuses to help the commandant slaughter the remaining prisoners. Ironically, When he finally smashes his rifle representing German aggression and his part in the war, he gets shot almost by mistake by a Jewish American soldier. In Germany still today people who lived through the war; and the younger generations too are dealing with German guilt. It is almost impossible to comprehend how so many normal people could have gotten involved in such inhumane acts. Bernard Sch link's book The Reader written in 1995 by virtue of its moral force and artistic quality, brings something entirely new and profoundly original to the never-ending labor of grief for Germany's past. -Jorge Sempron, Le Journal du Dimanche The Reader is about two people who had a very taboo and uncommon relationship.

Michael, the narrator, is only fifteen when he meets and falls in love with Hanna who is more than twice his age. Hanna seduces him after seeing his interest in her. Their relationship becomes a love affair with very strict habits. Every time they would meet they would do the same things. First Michael would read to Hanna, afterwards they would make love and sleep. There were one or two occasions in the book in which this strict schedule is not followed.

What leads Hanna to participate in this relationship Hannah was illiterate. She feels extreme shame for this. It is top priority to her to keep this a secret from the world. But like every Human Hanna was curious about the world and books in particular. When she saw Michael she realized that he would be a perfect means of transmitting this information to her without revealing her secret. She knew that Michael was too young and naive to ask questions.

She could do with him what she wanted without having to worry about being found out. She seduced him into becoming her story teller. To do something like this one most have some very serious feelings. Hannah had an incredible amount of shame for the fact that she could not read or write. Her shame went so far as to quit and turn down great jobs, live a lonely life with out opening up to anyone, and even to go to jail for the rest of her life, taking the blame for a crime she didn t commit. She would rather go through all of this than be found out as an illiterate.

It is amazing the determination she had to keep this a secret from the world. Now many people may believe that Hanna was kind of a pervert or something along those lines as she was engaging in sex with someone much younger than herself. In essence this is true except for the fact that Hanna was most likely haunted by her memories from her duty as prison guard. As witnessed in books such as "Night" by Elie Wiesel many people associated with the holocaust became very ill minded and did inhumane things to each other. Also witnessed is that when the need to survive is strong enough that a human will do almost whatever it takes to fulfill this need no matter the embarrassment to ones self or the welfare of others. A witness from the camps in the play The Investigation by Peter Weiss says: "And already we had started to live with a new set of values and adjust to this world which for anyone who wanted to survive in it became a normal world I stuck close to those who were too week to eat their rations so I could take their food at the first opportunity it was normal that all around us people were dying Our feelings grew numb and we looked at corpses with complete indifference and that was normal only the cunning survived only those who everyday with unrelenting alertness took and held their bit of ground " (5th Witness) I don t believe anyone could actually say that they would be able to act like this.

Just imagining something like this can make you sick. Imagine being there. But people's senses and minds got numb, and things didn t register correctly. Not only was this the case with the prisoners but also the guards. They were able to kill the prisoners as if they were ants or flies, with no regard for the person at all. Only the most disturbed person would be able to do things like this with total consciousness.

This numbness affected everybody, the will to survive, our survival instinct took over. You could say that everyone's minds were zombie fied. After the war everyone's reactions were the same: "But I only did what I had to do why should I have to pay now for what I did then everybody else did it too" (Accused #7) When Hanna was a prison guard she had "special prisoners in the camp, young girls, first one for a period, then another one (her) favorites". The other prison guards on trial for war crimes accused her viciously, assuming that she used these young girls for sexual purposes and then sent them to the gas chambers when she was tired of them. However the survivor who was testifying at the trial remembered that one of the girls finally talked and told them that she read out loud to Hanna evening after evening after evening "That was better if than if they and better than working themselves to death on the building site". This is the moment in The Reader when Michael realizes that Hanna was illiterate and was so embarrassed by the fact that she was willing to take responsibility for or all those women in the church who burned to death because the guards wouldn t open the doors and let them out, just to keep her secret a secret.

During the trial: "Hanna wanted to do the right thing. When she thought she was being done an injustice she contradicted it, and when something was rightly claimed or alleged she acknowledged it. She contradicted vigorously and admitted willingly as though her admissions gave her the right to her contradictions, or as though along with her contradictions she took on a responsibility to admit what she could not deny". Hanna was the only prisoner who seemed to be honest and not make a scapegoat of the others, and who seemed to be prepared to tell the truth no matter what the cost.

In all seriousness she asked the judge "What would you have done" at which point the judge dodged the question by saying that there are things in which one must not get involved in. There is a kind of simplicity and innocence about her and her character. Did she really choose the weaker girls to save them from being overworked Or was it just chance This kind of simplicity is also seen in Primo Levi's "Surviving Auschwitz" when he describes the luck that saved his life: "An Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked not accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward". Was Hanna a good person or bad person When she was serving her life sentence "She was greatly respected by the other women to whom she was friendly yet reserved. More than that, she had authority, she was asked for her advice when there were problems, and when she intervened in an argument, her decision was accepted" The first thing she does in the book is to help Michael when he falls ill in the street.

That was an act of kindness portraying her character through out the book. Actually their relationship is very sweet and tender until he get's involved with his friends and "betrays" her, and she dissapears. Hanna's final shame is after learning to read from the tapes that Michael sends her, when she realizes that he's not going to write to her and she gives up. She stops bathing and keeping herself in shape, and get's fat and smelly.

When she finally sees him she realizes that he is no longer attracted to her and that she cannot live with him, making them even more distant. So she decides that life isn t worth living anymore and takes her life because of her shame. Michael's guilt was due to the fact that he believed he betrayed her. He blamed himself for many of the events that occurred.

After he realizes that it wasn t his fault when Hanna ran away, he claims he is guilty again: "And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of loving a criminal" Was shame Hanna's Crime Michael was guilty of nothing, because Hanna was no criminal, but just a Woman with a secret.