Why does hanna schmitz kill herself

But at no point does Hanna show any indication that she was making moral choices with consequences of life and death. She seems obsessed with practical issues without any understanding of the moral context which is why I suggest in my review that she exhibits a form of emotional autism.

So, what do you think? This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, at pm and is filed under Cultural issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2. Both comments and pings are currently closed. NightHawk Roger Darlington's personal blog. Home CommsWatch About. It was the same obliviousness that weighted in her glance and her movements when she was pulling on her stockings.

But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive — a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body. My mother had pushed a chair up close to the stove for me to stand on while she washed and dressed me. I remember the wonderful feeling of warmth, and how good it felt to be washed and dressed in this warmth. I felt as if we were sitting all together for the last time around the round table under the five-armed, five-candled brass chandelier, as if we were eating our last meal off the old plates with the green vine-leaf border, as if we would never talk to each other so intimately again.

I felt as if I were saying goodbye. I was still there and already gone. I was homesick for my mother and father and my brother and sisters, and I longed to be with the woman. I asked her about her life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers. She had grown up in a German community in Rumania, then come to Berlin at the age of sixteen, taken a job at the Siemens factory, and ended up in the army at twenty-one. She was thirty-six.

She told me all this as if it were not her life but somebody else's, someone she didn't know well and who wasn't important to her.

Things I wanted to know more about had vanished completely from her mind, and she didn't understand why I was interested in what had happened to her parents, whether she had had brothers and sisters, how she had lived in Berlin and what she'd done in the army. The trip on the streetcar had been like a bad dream. If I didn't remember its epilogue so vividly, I would actually be tempted to think of it as a bad dream. Standing at the streetcar stop, hearing the birds and watching the sun come up was like an awakening.

But waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror. It is one of the pictures of Hanna that has stayed with me. I have them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed. There are long periods when I don't think about them at all. But they always come back into my head, and then I sometimes have to run them repeatedly through my mental projector and watch them.

She didn't know it was my birthday. When I had asked her about hers, and she had told me it was the twenty-first of October, she hadn't asked me when mine was.

She was also no more bad-tempered than she always was when she was exhausted. But I was annoyed by her bad temper, and I wanted to be somewhere else, at the pool, away with my classmates, swept up in the exuberance of our talk, our banter, our games, and our flirtations.

Then when I proceeded to get bad-tempered myself and we started a fight and Hanna treated me like a nonentity, the fear of losing her returned and I humbled myself and begged her pardon until she took me back. But I was filled with resentment. I never found out what Hanna did when she wasn't working and we weren't together. When I asked, she turned away my questions. We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have.

I had to be content with that. Wanting more, even wanting to know more, was presumption on my part. If we were particularly happy with each other and I asked her something because at that moment it felt as if everything was possible and allowed, then she sometimes ducked my questions, instead of refusing outright to answer them. I know that even if I had said goodbye to my memory of Hanna, I had not overcome it.

Never to let myself be humiliated or humiliate myself after Hanna, never to take guilt upon myself or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose — I didn't formulate any of this as I thought back then, but I know that's how I felt.

I adopted a posture of arrogant superiority. I behaved as if nothing could touch or shake or confuse me. I got involved in nothing, and I remember a teacher who saw through this and spoke to me about it; I was arrogantly dismissive. I mean She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done. I was oddly moved by the discrepancy between what must have been Hanna's actual concerns when she left my hometown and what I had imagined and theorized at the time.

I had been sure that I had driven her away because I had betrayed and denied her, when in fact she had simply been running away from being found out by the streetcar company.

However, the fact that I had not driven her away did not change the fact that I had betrayed her. So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal. I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned.

When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again.

I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks — understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

I don't know if Hanna knew how she looked, or maybe she wanted to look like that. She was wearing a black suit and a white blouse, and the cut of the suit and the tie that went with the blouse made her look as if she were in uniform. I have never seen the uniform of the women who worked for the SS. But I believed, and the spectators all believed, that before us we were seeing that uniform, and the woman who had worked for the SS in it, and all the crimes Hanna was accused of doing.

I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of…. But what other people in my social environment had done, and their guilt, were in any case a lot less bad than what Hanna had done. I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me.

I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her.

I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. I also read books I already knew and loved. For a long time I didn't dare to read poetry, but eventually I really enjoyed it, and I learned many of the poems I read by heart.

I can still say them today. Taken together, the titles in the notebook testify to a great and fundamental confidence in bourgeois culture. I do not ever remember asking myself whether I should go beyond Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann, and Lenz, and read experimental literature, literature in which I did not recognize the story or like any of the characters.

To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting with the reader, and Hanna didn't need that and neither did I. I read the note and was filled with joy and jubilation.

I knew about the helplessness in everyday activities, finding one's way or finding an address or choosing a meal in a restaurant, about how illiterates anxiously stick to prescribed patterns and familiar routines, about how much energy it takes to conceal one's inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living. Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

But why should I have given her a place in my life? I reacted indignantly against my own bad conscience at the thought that I had reduced her to a niche. I mean, didn't you ever think about them when we were together, when I was reading to you? And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account.

But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand even better. Only occasionally, when I was driving my car, or when I was in Hanna's apartment, did thoughts of it get the upper hand and trigger memories. I saw her on the bench, her eyes fixed on me, saw her at the swimming pool, her face turned to me, and again had the feeling that I had betrayed her and owed her something.

And again I rebelled against this feeling; I accused her, and found it both shabby and too easy, the way she had wriggled out of her guilt. In the SS was sufficiently alarmed by the allegations of unauthorised extortion to have the Kochs tried by an SS judge.

Although Ilse Koch was acquitted, her husband was not, and in April - days before the camp was liberated - he was executed by firing squad. His wife had fled, but was arrested by the Americans later that year and tried in Her trial shocked the world. Gellinick claimed that he had seen human skin brought in and processed to make lampshades for presentation to Koch's husband; she was said to have selected prisoners with tattoos to be killed to produce them. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in by the US war crimes tribunal, but it emerged that she was pregnant, probably by a fellow inmate.

Her son, Uwe Kohler, was taken from her at birth and adopted. She was eventually sentenced by the German authorities to a life term and confined to Aichach prison. Uwe Kohler visited her in her Bavarian prison but disappeared after her death. This article is more than 12 years old. Professor unmasks 'Bitch of Buchenwald' as the inspiration for the British star's award-winning role in The Reader.

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