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An excellent sequence has Ralph Fiennes questioning Kate Winslet's SS guard in prison, 20 years after she left Jewish 'prisoners' to burn in a church. Asked about her rehabilitation, she says that the dead are dead and questions if her personal life lessons even matter. When asked what she's learned, the formerly illiterate SS guard coldly replies that she's learned to read, implying this is all she has learned from prison.

This is mirrored later when Fiennes's character questions the lone survivor from the church burning incident. He asks, in a roundabout way, what she has learned. Her response is that there was nothing to learn from the camp. Her experiences were not therapy.

I think the film relies upon a piece of cinematic slight of hand. Most people seem to take the film to be about the suggestion that Winslett's character being illiterate somehow clears her of her guilt. To be fair, the film encourages this view by making Winslett's character sympathetic in an odd kind of way and by stressing so much on the fact that she learns to read.

However, I think that the real focus of the film is not upon Winslett's character, but upon her lover. I think the entire film revolves around the scene where the students come home from their field trip to the trials and they discuss what the point of the trials is and one of the students basically suggests that the professor should shoot himself along with everyone else who was around but did nothing to prevent the Holocaust.

This introduces the concept of collective guilt and the idea that even if you weren't in the SS or a Nazi, because you partook of the trappings of the Nazi state and the institutions that formed it, you are guilty because you gave Hitler tacit consent to do what he did.

The male character has a chance to get Winslett's character off by revealing that she can't read but he refuses to partly out of shame for having shagged a nazi and partly out of a desire to protect her shame. I don't think there's any question of his pardoning her or explaining away her actions. Instead he teaches her to read because HE feels guilty. He feels guilty for having had sex with her and simply because he's a German who, like the millions of Germans who did nothing but knew nothing about the death camps, benefited from the institutions of the german state such as the school buildings and the classes full of gorgeous aryan girls with pigtails.

I think the film is about the idea that Germans are, as a people, culpable (if not responsible) for the holocaust and how every single German has to come to terms with that cultural guilt. Winslett's character's lover does that by helping an idiotic illiterate woman to read. His act is symbollic, this is why he is so reticent to talk to her, write to her or even see her when she gets out of prison.

So far from excusing Germans from their part in the holocaust, I think the film actually takes a harder line than Rosenbaum in suggesting that even Germans born after the war have to atone for their action. Why else would that character be so happy at the Jewish woman's weird decision to keep a tin box?

So I thought the film was fundamentally dishonest, emotionally stunted and actually horrifically right wing.