He sends the cassette tapes and a recorder to Hanna. Retrieving his books from the time of the affair with Hanna, he begins reading them into a tape recorder. Michael (Ralph Fiennes) meanwhile marries, has a daughter, and divorces. Hanna receives a life sentence for her admitted leadership role in the church deaths while the other defendants are sentenced to four years and three months each. Michael arranges a visit with Hanna in prison, but once there he leaves without seeing her. Michael informs the professor that he has information favourable to one of the defendants but is not sure what to do since the defendant herself chose not to disclose the information. The other guards who claim she wrote the report are lying to place responsibility on Hanna. Michael realizes Hanna's secret: she is illiterate and has concealed it her whole life. She denies authorship of a report on the church fire, despite pressure from the other defendants, but then admits it rather than complying with a demand to provide a handwriting sample. Hanna, unlike her co-defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that the ten women she chose during each month's Selektion were gassed. She describes how Hanna had women from the camp read to her in the evenings. In the trial the key evidence is the testimony of Ilana Mather (Alexandra Maria Lara), author of a memoir of how she and her mother (Lena Olin), who also testifies, survived. Michael is stunned that Hanna is one of the defendants. As part of a seminar, the students observe a trial (similar to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials) of several women accused of letting 300 Jewish women die in a burning church when they were SS guards on the death march following the 1944 evacuation of a concentration camp near Krakow. In 1966 Michael is at Heidelberg University law school. She abruptly moves without telling Michael. After a bicycling trip, Hanna learns she is being promoted to a clerical job at the tram company. They spend much of their time together having sex in her apartment after she has had Michael read to her from literary works he is studying. The 36-year-old Hanna seduces him and they begin an affair. After he recovers, he visits Hanna with flowers to thank her. Michael, diagnosed with scarlet fever, rests at home for the next three months. Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor, comes in and helps him return home. A 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) gets off because he feels sick and wanders the streets, pausing in the entryway of a nearby apartment building where he vomits. In 1995 Berlin, after a woman who has spent the night leaves his apartment despite his pleas to her to stay for breakfast, Michael Berg watches an U-Bahn pass by, setting up a flashback to a tram in 1958. Post-WWII Germany: Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, law student Michael Berg re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial. The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film.
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