Hannah Arendt

+Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, +Hannah Arendt (Germany, 2011, 119 min), was arguably the bravest film at the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival. It was a film about thinking. Moreover, it was in favour of it. It so valued thinking that it offered some elegant speeches and debate, sans computer generated spectaculars. 

Barbara +Sukowa portrays the German Jewish philosopher during the period she covered the Adolf +Eichmann trial in Israel for The New Yorker. The film confronts the controversy Arendt raised when (i) she redefined Eichmann not as a monster but as an ordinary nobody, exemplifying “the banality of evil,” (ii) she reported that some Jews collaborated with the Nazis, resulting in more deaths than chaos would have caused, and (iii) she said she loves her friends but not any “people,” in this case, the Jews. On all three counts she was condemned for abandoning her people. Today, at a remove from the heat of that moment, she was clearly correct on all counts.

Not loving the Jews was not being anti-Semitic but refusing to emotionalize her consideration of the issues. Arendt was opposed to the blanket love of any group of people, not based on personal engagement, because such nationalist or other group identification precluded the thoughtful consideration of any issues around them. She most valued a rational, thoughtful approach that was not prejudged or proscribed by any -ism or convention. As for some Jews‘ collaboration, she simply reported facts that arose at the trial. (Indeed, Rudolf van den Berg's Suskind, also at Palm Springs, detailed precisely that collaboration.) Nor was that observation anti-Semitic, for the possibly well-intentioned collaboration in the face of horrid danger is a plausible response among any people. Arendt was pilloried for facing the facts and for rejecting myths. That’s what historians are required to do and apparently what philosophers periodically have to remind them to do.

The documentary footage of Eichmann in his glass cage confirms Arendt’s description of his bathetic representivity. As she realized, it was even more shocking and alarming to see Eichmann as an ordinary, banal citizen than as an abnormal monster. She saw him as a bureaucratic tool who expedited the monstrous genocide because he didn’t think about what he was doing. As he argued, he only followed orders so he could not be held responsible for anything.  

As the film reveals, Arendt’s principled, logical and essential argument caused her the loss of some very dear friendships. The film counters the claims she was cold and unemotional by revealing her ardour in her friendships and the passion in her marriage. Her happy unconcern about her husband’s philandering only confirms her commitment to a rationality that transcends social convention and guards against self-destruction.

Of course, any historic film is more about the time the film is made than about the time in which it is set. Why make a film about the Hannah Arendt story now? The most obvious explanation is that Europe and North America are yet again facing  a dramatic increase in systematic anti-Semitism and -- especially in the conflict between Israel and her surrounding Arab enemies -- an unthinking obscuring of historic realities. That Gordian knot is too often complicated by the adoption of one or the other of the two major parties -- another problematic “love of the people” -- at the cost of demonizing the other and preventing a rational solution to the problem.