is the film with Kate Winslet inspired by a true story?

The Reader is a historical drama film released in 2008. It is the adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling book, released in 1995, which tells the romance between a 15-year-old German teenager in the late 1950s with a woman older with a troubled past, Hanna Schmitz. As an adult, the man who became a lawyer finds her in court, accused of war crimes as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during the war.

The Reader is a drama which divided critics but which allowed Kate Winslet to win her first Oscar for best actress the year following its release, as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. If the film has a historical feel, anchored in the Berlin of the 1950s and 1990s, and the concentration camps did indeed have guards who were tried for war crimes (as during the Auschwitz trial, November 24 to December 22, 1947, or more recently the trial of a 94-year-old former camp guard in 2021), it would not, however, really be a true story.

Often described as semi-autobiographical, it is however difficult to find information on what would have been real (apart from historical elements) or invented in this novel. The author, Bernhard Schlink, would have thought of it more as a parable to show how the post-war generation sometimes had difficulty comprehending the horrors of the Holocaust and the previous generation, who were able to witness or even participate in the war crimes. The character of Hannah, if we do not really know if she existed or not, can in any case be analyzed as a metaphor for “moral illiteracy” and the ignorance which allowed her generation to commit such atrocities or turning a blind eye during the Second World War.

Synopsis – West Germany, following the Second World War. A teenager, Michael Berg, meets Hanna by chance, a thirty-five-year-old woman with whom he becomes her lover. Then begins a secret and passionate affair. For several months, Michael joined Hanna at her house every day, and one of their games consisted of him reading to her. But one day she disappears. Eight years later, as a law student, Michael attends the Nazi war crimes trials. He finds Hanna in the dock…