Ahead of the US Academy Awards, critical acclaim for Stephen Daldry's film adaptation of The Reader (''a masterpiece'') is competing for airspace with denunciations of the film's portrayal of a former Auschwitz guard.
Historian Ron Rosenbaum argues that it ''asks us to empathise with an unrepentant mass murderer''.
Empathise? Sure it does, if by empathise you mean portraying Nazis as human.
Is that bad? Let's see.
Described by Jewish commentators as ''revisionist'', and ''the worst Holocaust film ever made'', the film depicts a Nazi war criminal At Home: the domestic routine, so to speak, of a mass murderer; glimpses of her underwear, her half-formed motivations, the stained yellow walls of a lonely flat hosting erotic encounters with a teenage ''Michael'' who will not, for years, judge better.
In contrast to denial, which disputes historical facts and has a tendency to leave certain members of the Catholic clergy red-faced and unrepentant, revisionist history asks its students to re-interpret orthodoxy: motivations, causal relationships, and cultural contexts are reconfigured in the search for a coherent account and meaning.
In the field of genocide study, as elsewhere, this search is driven by a desire to prevent the recurrence of human atrocity.
In short, revisionism is what indigenous Australians have asked of modern historians in their insistence that the place of their children and their culture be recast in the modern historical account.
The race was not dying; and Aboriginal mothers lamented the loss of their children.
In this context, assertions about an unfinished national confrontation with the mixed truth of colonialist motivations are fast becoming unremarkable.
Last year's National Apology decisively shifted the historical consensus (and it was never uniform) that Aboriginal Australians are not equals in either legal or cultural terms.
The Apology, therefore, was an act of dramatic revisionism, in which the economic as well as the cultural causes of genocidal child removals were laid bare.
It has became possible to suggest in mainstream circles that thirst for land shaped the way white people saw Aboriginal culture (they're savages, and not like us) and the way the effects on that culture of European settlement were ''disappeared''.
In turn, The Reader, and the book by German lawyer Bernhard Schlink on which this film is based, challenge the orthodoxy that the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust should arouse a uniform condemnation: those Germans were bad, bad, bad; and we are not like them. Mere decades have elapsed since the end of WWII.
For some, imagining an Auschwitz guard called Hannah Schmitz as sympathetic inhaler of epic poems, as illiterate collector of streetcar tickets, as river nymph and beautiful nude, amounts to entering a dark and revisionist zone of ''Nazi porn'' that rules out any meaningful examination of the past or allocation of responsibility.
Or, you could just say that The Reader consciously withholds condemnation from the unrepentant, and urges its audience to do the same.
You might also say that the mothers of small children, or partners to the average marriage, or populations in the face of betrayal by their elected representatives, or nations delivering development aid to regions decimated by natural disaster and official corruption, are called on to do the same.
You might say that we all do this every day; and don't where it's too hard or where the reward for trying isn't immediately apparent.
Condemnation signals the end of engagement. It's useful as a strategy to sell the tabloid news, but its psychological and political valence rises where its use declines.
And make no mistake: Hannah is unrepentant. In both the film and the book, reading operates as a metaphor for understanding, and the fact that Hannah can't sets up the deepest truth of her character and perhaps the collective character of wartime Germany.
She'd rather have been seen as the perpetrator of wartime atrocities than as an illiterate. She lacks the capacity to learn from her mistakes and cannot confront the consequences of her actions.
She is, therefore, truly to be pitied. Whether agents of genocide are to be despised, however, is a question of choice, and not of ethics; and we know by now where the choice to despise will get us, especially when it's justified.
The foundational premise of this work is moral discipline: restraint both from judgment and from absolution. In The Reader's moral universe, no one escapes from the struggle with the daily business of being flawed and human.
No perpetrator and no victim lacks the capacity for cruelty, ignorance and violence; and if we can begin to imagine ourselves in the place of others, as long as the struggle to understand is embraced as a political and ethical means, genocide is not possible.
The Reader argues in every beautifully-rendered frame that human beings are more like, even on opposite sides of war or culture, than unlike.
This insistence on restraint from judgment in the face of our universal human frailty accounts for its creative and historical importance on one hand, and for the controversy it has aroused on the other.
Jacqueline Jago is a Canberra writer, lawyer, public servant and memoirist with an interest in culture and race.
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