The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.
Keywords: 1950s , 1960s , 1990s , based-on-novel-or-book , cautionary , complex , courtroom-drama , cruel , cynical , depressing , disheartening , embarrassed , female-prisoner , frantic , genocidio , germany , law-student , literacy , literatura , love-affair , nazismo , older-woman-younger-man-relationship , reading-aloud , reading-to-someone , secret-lover , seculo-xx , segunda-guerra-mundial , shame , teenage-sexuality , tragic , trial , tribunal , war-crimes , west-germany , women-s-prison , world-war-ii