The Spoils of War

Winslet & Fiennes in The Reader

 Holocaust education groups are staging a last-ditch bid to stop Kate Winslet winning an Oscar for playing a Nazi concentration camp guard in The Reader. Mark Weitzman, head of Jewish human rights and Holocaust teaching organization The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has slammed the film for its “revisionism”. 

He said: “Essentially it takes a woman who serves in, is responsible for, is complicit in, you pick the words, in the deaths of at least 300 Jews – and her big secret shame is that she’s illiterate.” 

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/film/article2257810.ece

~Looks as if Winslet will not make ‘Oskar’s List’, but she did get an Oscar nomination for her role in The Reader, in which she plays an illiterate Nazi guard who takes up with a young man who reads to her. Reads to her because she can’t read. The jews are up in arms because they consider The Reader to be one among many recent films protraying Nazis as sympathetic- flawed, human- and having painful secrets that might trump the Only Acceptable and All-Important Main Theme: victim jews, evil Nazis and that Nazis may never Suffer . Ever. Incapable.

 They are always in the power position, never show weakness,  are always Evil and Cruel. Always One Dimensional.  Anything that gets away from that Approved Schematic is verboten , dangerous-maybe even a threat . This is only one article that echoes the sentiments of many others, the heresy of showing any vulnerability and what is probably perceived as Official Neglect for not covering the  WW2 event  in any way except the obligatory fashion. Winslet’s character has more than one thing going- or not going- for her- and that’s the problem. ~~~

Recently saw  The Lives of Others, a dystopian drama in German with subtitles, revolving around the lives of a  writer and his actress lover, ( Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck) who are being monitored by the Stasi . An interesting twist , which is related to the theme in The Reader  but takes it a step further- is that the man sent to live in the flat above them, to bug  their apartment, spend hours listening to them and follow their movements- becomes sympathetic to them, and possibly to their cause, thus prompting ever-more plot twists-  While it is not officially based on a true story, wiki states that

 At the same time the screenplay was published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Donnersmarck and Ulrich Mühe were successfully sued for libel for an interview in which Mühe asserted that his former wife informed on him while they were East German citizens through the six years of their marriage-

http://www.sonyclassics.com/thelivesofothers/swf/index.html