The unrelenting nemesis of journalists and editors is a twined one: Space and time.
Time means deadlines, space dominated by journalism’s commercial engine, advertisements, determines how long a story can be. August 4, a discussion here about the cultural and emotional cost of illiteracy in modern societies, used the eye-opening German novel, and film, “The Reader” — and got its tail cropped by space considerations. This lead some readers to believe that in both novel and film forms, “The Reader” attempts to defend an illiterate woman who became a SS guard during World War II. If that were the case, “The Reader” wouldn’t have found a home here.
The issue of the illiteracy tends to revolve around not merely the two handicaps it represents, but the deeper cognitive amputation that results, and the emotional wrinkles it plants for life. Locally, there are many Mexicans whose childhoods called for full-time work beginning when they were five or six. And an another gee-I-didn’t-know-that side of things is represented by the female protagonist, Hanna Schmitz (acted superbly in the film by Kate Winslet), of “The Reader.” That absence of understanding is mostly global. Germany, unsurprisingly, has been noticeably silent — like other venues — regarding the interior lives of such people as an SS camp guard. (Exception: Steven Spielberg’s marvelously conceived 1993 film, “Schindler’s List,” with Fiennes as a savage SS officer.)
I employ Mexicans who are illiterate, and on a ranch, work with others who can’t read or write. A female North American reader this week reported that her gardener, who has worked for her three years, recently showed her a piece of printed paper. He asked her to translate the words for him, since they were in English. She examined the paper and saw that the words were in Spanish. Being both thoughtful and wise, as well as bilingual, she roughly “translated” the words, without noting what language was used.
My wife and I have always used lists as organizing tools, both for organizing our work, and as memory checks for sorting out the saltos of details that fill our days. Therefore, we are constantly handing and posting lists for our employees. I work with a man whom I’ve known since he was a kid who does not read nor write. I always read off the day’s tasks from a list I’ve made. And each time, when I’ve finished, and he’s repeated the list and asked questions that make everything clear, he asks for the list. Even though he can’t read it, having that piece of paper with his apodo (nickname), Memo, at the top, and his day’s responsibilities enumerated below makes him equal to his educated fellow workers.
In reality, he is carefully re-categorizing them in his “memory palace,” in an effective, admirable way. He seldom misplaces any item within his memory. Besides that, he has become accustomed to the reasoning habits of different educated classes of Mexicans. Also, he’s familiar with what many Mexicans consider the “peculiar” reasoning of “gringos” — in this case meaning all foreigners.When it came time for him to marry, he chose a literate woman, whom he readily described as fea, (unattractive). His own becoming attributes seemed to include little more than her attraction to him, even though he was illiterate...and poor. Thus, one assumed, she must have sensed that their future would be challenging.
Today he has advantages in working for my wife and me: 1) We’d long known his parents well, and thus we knew him as a youngster, watched him in most stages of growth, and, 2) we had seen him through his time of being constantly frustrated — and therefore angry — as the difficulties of his handicap, mentally and emotionally, became devastatingly apparent.
As an illiterate 19-year-old, he hit the “age of recognition,” when he was trying his accept his personal limitations while barely staying afloat in a swirl of confusion. Despite this turmoil, he would not accept tutoring. For many, accompanying this gradual awakening is a sense that this predicament will be life-long. “Adult-learning” classes did not yet exist in a usefully available way for Memo. Besides, he believed his burden of feeling that he was tonto, would be confirmed if he took special classes to learn to read and write.
Yet today, Memo’s marriage, his eight kids and the hard jobs he’s coped with have all matured him. His methodical manner of reasoning is quite good for someone with his handicap. Good enough to fool people who don’t know him well. And he’s developed the skill of memorizing the cognitive habits of even foreigners.
Much of the time, he seems to have dodged much of the damage dealt to reasoning by illiteracy, the kind of damage that Bernard Schlink’s trim, concise novel notes with a finely measured thread of mystery and revelation. Which is why both the book and the film were so applauded, especially in Europe, where the subject has not been adequately addressed — for numerous painful reasons.
Hanna Schmitz, a streetcar conductor, finds 15-year-old student, Michael Berg (played as a boy by David Kross), throwing up at the entry way of her apartment — he is coming down with scarlet fever. She helps him clean up, then assists him home. When Michael is well, he takes Hanna a thank-you bouquet of flowers. One of the things the 36-year-old Hanna asks Michael when she seduces him, is what he’s studying. He pulls several books from his book bag and hands one to her She let it fall from her hand onto the bed, saying she‘d prefer that he read to her. Michael’s reading of “The Odyssey,” Chekov’s “The Lady with the little Dog,” scenes from Schiller becomes a regular prelude to their love making. Michael falls in love with Hanna, despite her moments of harsh rudeness and her secrecy.
Then Hanna, at work, gets a promotion to an office job. In haste, she moves out of her apartment, and disappears. The next time Michael sees her, he is a Heidelberg law student chosen by a veteran professor for a small seminar. The professor takes his select students to a trial of several former female SS guards accused of allowing 300 Jewish women to die in a church set afire during a bombing raid near at end of the war.
To Michael’s disbelief, one of them is Hanna. She is indicted, singled out by the judge, and her fellow guards as the person who signed the order to lock the women inside the church. Hanna is shown the order the prosecution says she signed. She is given paper and pencil and asked to provide the court a specimen of her handwriting. Michael is alert to her obvious distress, her withdrawal from this test of her literacy. Agitated and ashamed, she pushes the pencil and paper away, and admits to a crime she did not commit, afraid her “ignorance” will be discovered.
She is sentenced to life in prison. The other guards get much lesser sentences. With her one-time lover’s aid, she learns over the years to read. But she never fully fathoms what she’s done. When the German government decides to release her, Hanna commits suicide. As both book and film make plain, Hanna’s illiteracy-primed inability does not exonerate her.