Now we have the movie. How does it, and then again how could it, differ from the ur-tale? The anecdote is, in the expected event, little changed; not because some core of essential truth, or of narrative originality, or of ingenious plotting, but because it is so tackily composed of moral matchwood that no significant element could be altered without the whole thing collapsing. A myth of substance can be rendered in a variety of ways, some of which - Euripides's Helen offers a somewhat apposite case - may deconstruct a "classic" character and show her to be quite other than orthodox solemnity depicts her. Could one imagine a writer of moral independence, or salacious wit, who supplied a Hanna whose abruptly revealed secret self would subvert Schlink's innocent picture of her and then of himself? Might such a Hanna be shown to have used Michael's adolescent appetites to furnish her with sexual pleasure that doubled for evidence of the vacuousness of post-war, post-moral Europe? Such a Hanna could have stood for the whited sepulchre of Germany's - and even of Europe's - conscience. And then, when the grown-up Michael discovers what she really did in the war, might his imagination be furnished with uncomfortable fantasies, his innocent pleasure being revised in the light of having shafted a murderess? Might he now discover responses in himself, concerning the epoch in which his somewhat Nazi father was involved, of which indifference might be the most embarrassing and a kind of erotic complicity the most delicious? Nothing of this kind happens because, of course, imagination - in the sense of accurate recreation - is entirely beyond Schlink's advocating skill. Michael mopes, but he doesn't change, doesn't think back or forward or sideways: he neither resumes a (perhaps) angry, thus delicious, relationship with his wife nor does anything that means a dangerous turn in his view of life.
A novelist of some daring, or decadence, might fold in an ironic play on the theme of the innocence (not to say mindlessness) of the eternal female. Hanna's innocence might then be unmasked to show the duplicity of The Quintessential Frau, who is by definition without moral knowledge and hence without moral scruple. Such a view of women is entirely consistent with a certain strain of the higher nuttiness to be found in a solemn tradition that stretches from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to the point where genius and crackpottery meet in Otto Weininger's 1903 pseudo-masterpiece Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). It then rolls on into the "philosophy" that armed National Socialism (Carl Schmitt is the grandest example; Alfred Rosenberg the most fatuous). The metaphysics of Germanic vanity (which others might read for insecurity) regularly postulated polarities of natural good and evil: male/female, Aryan/Semite. The pity which Schlink seems to advertise for Hanna is furtively derisive: somewhere along the line she is the sister of Nell Dunn's Poor Cow, of which Ken Loach made a movie in 1967.
