"Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily"
Movie - The Reader
When we label someone as the protagonist or antagonist we see character through a very narrow lens. Well through that lens Hanna will be labelled as an antagonist undoubtedly. A middle aged women who seduces and gets into an affair with a teenager twenty one years younger than her. She as a Nazi guard in the concentration camp who had to choose six women every day and lead them to die in order to make room for the new Jew prisoners. She is a women hard to decipher and ofcourse in no way can be justified to be outrightly correct. But she carries within herself an innocence and veracity which is so captivating. Despite doing what she did she never lied about anything in trial against her with sheer righteousness. She loved with all passion and candour and did her job with full honesty though it wouldn't stand the given standards of law and morality. But who defines morality afterall? Can't what we know as morality be the collective immorality of people in better position and time.Even if she was incarcerated for life as per the law but justice was never done to her. She had always liked been read to and was ashamed of her illiteracy. She was inquisitive to start learn how to read in her late forty. But she was imbued with helplessness and remorse for those lives which couldn't now be reverted back to life and a pain and longing for her long lost love. Her journey is disturbing, intriguing, heartwrenching and the fact that you may even sympathise with a character like that is unsettling. Now whether she was an antagonist, criminal or was it a poignant account of just another individual depends upon the kaleidoscope through which you see her story, a slight change and the patterns will be altered.
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