{"id":53407,"date":"2013-05-30T13:36:32","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T17:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=53407"},"modified":"2018-12-04T12:47:05","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T17:47:05","slug":"lonely-thinking-hannah-arendt-on-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/30\/lonely-thinking-hannah-arendt-on-film\/","title":{"rendered":"Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"hannah_large\"<\/a>

Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1963, The New Yorker<\/i> published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of \u201cJewish Affairs.\u201d Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/i>, unleashed what Irving Howe called a \u201ccivil war\u201d among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward<\/em> accusing her of \u201cpolemical vulgarity,\u201d Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a \u201cmasterpiece,\u201d and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against \u201cdehumanizing totalitarianism.\u201d Across the city, Arendt\u2019s friends chose sides. When Dissent<\/em> sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg\u2014then the world\u2019s preeminent Holocaust scholar\u2014for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review<\/em> Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann \u201ccomes off so much better in [Arendt\u2019s] book than do his victims.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years since that fiery time, Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/i> has remained something to condemn or defend rather than a book to be read and understood. I therefore had some fears when I heard that German director Margarethe von Trotta was making a film about Arendt\u2019s coverage of the trial. But Hannah Arendt<\/em> accomplishes something rare in any biopic and unheard of in a half century of critical hyperbole over all things Arendt: it actually brings Arendt\u2019s work back into believable\u2014and accessible\u2014focus.<\/p>\n

The movie opens with two wordless scenes. The first depicts the Mossad\u2019s abduction of Eichmann. The second follows a silent Hannah Arendt as she lights, and then smokes, a cigarette. Around her, all is darkness, and for a full two minutes, we watch her smoke. Played with passionate intensity by Barbara Sukowa (who won a Lola, the German Oscar), Arendt ambles. She lies down. She inhales. But above all, we see the cigarette\u2019s ash flare brilliantly in the dark. Hannah Arendt, we are to understand, is thinking.<\/p>\n

Although Arendt\u2019s work follows numerous byways, one theme is clear: in modern bureaucratic societies, human evil originates from a failure not of goodness but of thinking. When Arendt addresses Eichmann\u2019s claims that he had \u201cnever acted from base motives,\u201d and \u201cnever had any inclination to kill anybody \u2026 had never hated Jews,\u201d she writes that they are \u201cdifficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe.\u201d And yet, Arendt insists \u201cEichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth\u201d\u2014no villain doing evil out of villainy. Eichmann boasted of citizenly action, of conscientiously obeying the law and doing his duty\u2014with excellence recognized by his superiors. On the stand, speaking in clich\u00e9s and bureaucratic jargon, he went so far as to suggest he was a Zionist who \u201chad saved hundreds of thousands of Jews.\u201d Arendt was struck by both the immensity of Eichmann\u2019s crimes and the ordinariness of the man.<\/p>\n

She was astonished that perhaps the most egregious crime in history was administered not by panting sociopaths but by unthinking buffoons. This is what Arendt means by her famous and famously misunderstood dictum, \u201cthe banality of evil.\u201d It is one thing to kill your aunt out of malice; crimes can be committed from barbarous motives. But the distance separating malicious murder from administrative genocide is immeasurable. Arendt\u2019s \u201cbanality\u201d suggests that the sacrifice of common-sense aversion to evil and authoritarian obedience cannot happen absent thoughtless people like Eichmann.<\/p>\n

The Eichmann trial inspired the psychologist Stanley Milgram to famously conduct experiments in which residents of New Haven were asked to assist researchers in teaching students by administering what they thought were painful\u2014and potentially lethal\u2014electric shocks to students who gave wrong answers. The assistants largely did as they were instructed. Milgram concluded that most people will obey authority even when commands violate their deepest convictions; obedience, he argued, does not entail support.<\/p>\n

Arendt did not share this view; she insisted that obedience involves responsibility. She was shocked that her critics assumed that thoughtful people would act as Eichmann had. She worried experiments like Milgram\u2019s would normalize moral weakness. Indeed, she saw the angry reaction to her book\u2014her critics\u2019 insistence on seeing Eichmann as a monster\u2014as proof that they feared that they too lacked the moral independence and the ability to think that would allow them to resist authority.<\/p>\n

Struck by the danger of thoughtlessness, Arendt spent her life thinking about thinking. Could thinking, she asked, save us from the willingness of many, if not most, people to participate in bureaucratically regulated evil like the administrative extermination of six million Jews? Thinking, as Arendt imagines it, erects obstacles to oversimplifications, clich\u00e9s, and conventions. Only thinking, Arendt argued, has the potential to remind us of our human dignity and free us to resist our servility. Such thinking, in Arendt\u2019s view, cannot be taught: it can only be exemplified. We cannot learn thinking through catechism or study. We learn thinking only through experience, when we are inspired by those whose thinking enthralls us\u2014when we encounter someone who stands apart from the crowd.<\/p>\n

Von Trotta manages to make that apartness manifest in Hannah Arendt<\/em>. In the pressroom, Arendt watches witness after witness testify to the horrors of the Holocaust, von Trotta using powerful footage from the real trial. Arendt is visually moved, eyes wide, chin set on her hands, transfixed in tearless empathy. After one witness faints\u2014a Mr. Dinoor who was upset after he was asked to stop speaking about his own theories concerning astrology and crucifixion\u2014Arendt leaves the courtroom and weaves through Israelis frozen, rapt to their radios, carried away by emotional stories that, as Arendt will charge, have nothing to do with the effort to do justice to the man on trial. What others call aloofness and coldness is here evidence of Arendt\u2019s moral courage, her freedom from convention, and her intensely philosophical focus.<\/p>\n

The importance of Arendt\u2019s Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/em> is not to be found simply in the rightness or wrongness of her conclusions about Adolf Eichmann. Her book has power because of the original force of Arendt\u2019s thinking. The book is a work of judgment in connection to a trial\u2014the process by which we come to terms with one man\u2019s evil deeds. And that focus on process\u2014the German for trial is der Process<\/em>\u2014is the daring gambit of Hannah Arendt<\/em>, co-written by von Trotta and Pam Katz: to engage head-on the impossible task of putting thinking onscreen.<\/p>\n

In one flashback with her teacher and former lover Martin Heidegger, Heidegger tells Arendt, \u201cthinking is a lonely business.\u201d Outside of a few intimates, Arendt is alone throughout the film, accompanied by nothing and no one but her thoughts and her ever-present cigarette. There is a danger that Arendt\u2019s cigarette could become an empty cipher, an obvious symbol. Instead, it lingers there, pulsing with Arendt\u2019s breath, as she remains silent, listening. It is her silent intensity, throughout the film, that strikes the viewer, propels us to think with Arendt about what she is observing and its implications. The audience is thus transformed, moving from observing Arendt to thinking with her. And when Arendt at the end becomes a speaker, her deliberations done, the film climaxes in her speech to students at a small liberal arts college. The seven-minute long monologue, a sort of closing argument in this film\u2019s long accumulation of evidence, is gripping. Arendt concludes: \u201cThis inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.\u201d The full speech is likely the greatest articulation of the importance of thinking that will ever be presented in a film.<\/p>\n

The thinking Arendt demands requires pride, a feeling of difference between oneself and others\u2014even a kind of arrogance, an arrogance that von Trotta seizes on screen. The film honestly addresses this characteristic of Arendt and of thinking itself, and does not shirk from Arendt\u2019s belief that a confidence in one\u2019s own distinctiveness is necessary for character. Like Emerson\u2019s, Arendt\u2019s writing celebrates self-reliance. For her, our democratic desire for equality\u2014to be the same as others and to not judge them\u2014compounds the problem of thoughtlessness.<\/p>\n

Of course, given the complexities of the factual record, there are fictions and oversights one can complain about in the film. Words written by Gershom Scholem are spoken by Kurt Blumenfeld. More problematic is the fact that not one Jewish character in the film defends Arendt, which gives the false impression that all Jewish intellectuals were blinded to her insights. Most startling, perhaps, is von Trotta\u2019s re-imagining of the visit by Siegfried Moses, a friend of Arendt\u2019s from her days working in the German Zionist Organization and a member of the Israeli government, who visited her in Switzerland to ask her to withhold publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/em> in Israel. This request is presented as a threatening ambush instead of the arranged meeting between friends that it was, suggesting a significantly more organized animus by the Israeli state than was the case.<\/p>\n

The dramatic liberties von Trotta takes are easily forgivable considering her overall success in dramatizing the activity of thinking. To make a film about a thinker is a challenge; to do so in a way that is accessible and gripping is a triumph. Hannah Arendt herself might have been surprised to learn that after fifty years of deadening controversy, it is a film that promises to provoke the serious public debate she sought in publishing her book. Although originally entitled The Controversy<\/em>, von Trotta\u2019s Hannah Arendt<\/em> would be more appropriately (if less commercially) entitled The Most Sophisticated Reading Yet of Arendt\u2019s Philosophy to Reach the Mainstream<\/em>\u2014an astonishing thought indeed.<\/p>\n

Roger Berkowitz is academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is associate professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights. He is editor of <\/em>HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, and his books include the edited volume <\/em>Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of \u201cJewish Affairs.\u201d Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a \u201ccivil war\u201d among New 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