'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

in an effort to help, Lene quickly closes the blinds and urges Hanne back to bed. Hanne
tells her sister that she is hard-hearted.
Critics have commented on Lene‟s lack of resistance to the abduction of her
Jewish neighbour. Hyams and Smith feel that Lene is a passive and silent accomplice in
the crimes of the Nazi regime in that she does nothing to prevent the persecution of Jews
(Hyams 47, Smith 246). Smith also suggests that Lene‟s unwillingness to help Rahel is
representative of ordinary non-Jewish Germans‟ passivity to Nazi crimes against Jews.
She feels that such passivity facilitated the Nazis‟ persecution of Jews and that witnesses
like Lene simultaneously protected and incriminated themselves by means of silent
complicity (247). Angelika Bammer goes further, criticizing Lene for “ignor[ing] the
atmosphere of horror” which surrounds her (108). In fact, Bammer suggests that Rahel‟s
abduction and a later scene depicting Lene‟s theft of thread from a boarded-up
haberdashery shop whose Jewish owners have been deported, seem intended to beg
“Lene‟s innocence (she is guiltless because she is ignorant)” (108). Instead, Bammer
feels that these two scenes, “beg the essential questions of guilt and responsibility” (108).
However, questions of culpability, implication, and blame are more difficult to
answer than Bammer infers. Sanders-Brahms avoids providing any simplistic answers.
In my opinion, Lene‟s passive complicity with Nazi crimes was necessary for her
personal survival. To view Lene‟s historical myopia as merely a moral issue is to
disregard the milieu of political terror, fear, and persecution which typified the Nazi
dictatorship of the “Third Reich” (Naughton n. pag.).
Likewise, to consider the miller‟s daughter‟s lack of intervention in the Other
bride‟s murder simply from a moral perspective would be to ignore the danger in which
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