The Importance of Being Hannah Arendt - The Daily Beast

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The Importance of Being Hannah Arendt

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A brilliant new film presents Hannah Arendt in the midst of the Eich-

mann trial and the controversy around her reporting. Daphne Merkin on

that unlikeliest of films, one about thinkingand revisiting the banality

of evil.

by Daphne Merkin | June 4, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

I have never been sure what to make of the phrase the banality of evil"whether it

is, in fact, a revelatory concept or a catchy but psychologically tone-deaf one-liner.

The mediocrity of evil might have been truer to what Hannah Arendt was trying to

get at in her utter incredulity about Adolf Eichmanns lack of, well, charisma, but it

lacks the contemptuous pizzazz of the actual wording. Then again, it was impossible

to grow up in a Jewish-identified household in the early 60s in America and be un-

aware of Arendt's famousor was it notorious?formulation, even if that was all

you knew of the complex, dense, and not entirely readable account she wrote of theEichmann trial.
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Barbara Sukowa in a scene from the 2012 film "Hannah Arendt." (Zeitgeist

Films/Everett)

Her report appeared first in five installments in February and March 1963 in The New

Yorker, where it was eagerly (and, I would imagine, somewhat horrifiedly) devoured

by people like my parents, though I was way too young to actually recall its impactother than as a vague impression of some kind of intellectual stir. My parents were

both German Jews, like Arendt, although, very unlike Arendt, they were both reli-

giously observant and ardently Zionist. (My uncle on my mother's side was in fact an

assistant to Attorney General Gideon Hausner, who aroused Arendts disdain from

the start.) In later years, I would hear about Arendt from William Jovanovich, her

publisher and mine, who was very fond of Arendtfond enough to fly her up to his

summer home in La Malbaie, Canada. Bill's wife, Martha, also seemed to like Arendt,

far more than she did Mary McCarthy, another summer guest, of whom she once ob-

served to me: "She ate up all of the fresh raspberries from the garden, leaving none

for Bill."

Arendt's reputation as a philosopher of high genius and even higher probity, which

rested on writings such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, essays on political thought

and her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, never quite recovered from the New Yorker

publication or the book which followed in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on theBanality of Evil. She quickly came under attack, particularly from American Jewish

critics like Lionel Abel, Norman Podhoretz, and such once close friends as the

philosopher Gershom Scholem, for her strangely, almost effusively dispassionate ob-

servations about Eichmann (including her admiration for the stoic way in which he

went to his death, declining, as a good Gottglubiger (disbeliever), to say prayers with

a Protestant minister or to wear the black hood that was offered him before his hang-

ing) and for her casting some of the blame for the satanic effectiveness of the Nazi

genocide on the Jews themselves in the form of the Judenrte, the Nazi-appointed of-

ficials of the ghettos and other beleaguered Jewish communities. How could the

Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction? and Why did

they go to their death like lambs to slaughter? were rhetorical questions she posed

almost as an aside a mere three pages into her essay, subtly setting the stage for a cal-

lous blame-the-victim line of inquiry, although she only fully took up the issue of

what she termed Jewish cooperation a third of the way into a 300-page document.

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, al-most without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another,
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with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorga-

nized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total

number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million

people.

As we watch the colorless Eichmann dodge responsibility for being any-thing other than a bureaucratic functionary following orders, it is as though

we have been transported back more than half a century and are being

asked to draw our own conclusions along with Arendt.

All these long-gone but still festering mattersArendt herself, who died in 1975, pro-

fessed to be unperturbed by the raging controversy, referring to it as "a tempest in a

teapot"are up again for reconsideration with the recent appearance of Margarethe

von Trottas (Rosa Luxemburg, Rosenstrasse) extraordinary film, called, with pleasinglyeponymous simplicity, Hannah Arendt. (Such is the media synchronicity of the times

we live in that Penguin, which issued a 2006 paperback version of the Eichmann

book with a clumsily written and overtly apologist introduction by the estranged

Zionist Amos Elon, has managed to rush out copies with incongruous See the Major

Motion Picture HANNAH ARENDT stickers affixed to them.)

What must be said right off is that von Trottas biopic, whatever its shortcomings

(which for me have mainly to do with its somewhat idealizing approach to Arendt)

and whatever details it gets wrong (almost everything to do with the portrait of The

New Yorker), has managed to make thrilling cinematic drama out of its protagonists

lifelong engagement with ideas. Rarely have I seen a film in which the image of a

woman, thinking, steadily holds the camera the way it does herewhether she is

thinking and smoking, thinking and staring into space, thinking and cutting up veg-

etables, thinking and conversing, or thinking and tapping typewriter keyswithout

producing restlessness in the viewer. (In a piece by Mary McCarthy called SayingGoodbye to Hannah that appeared in The New York Review of Books after Arendts

death, McCarthy lovingly recalls: Hannah is the only person I have ever watched

think. She lay motionless on a sofa or a day bed, arms folded behind her head, eyes

shut but occasionally opening to stare upward. This lastedI dont knowfrom ten

minutes to half an hour. Everyone tiptoed past if we had to come into the room in

which she lay oblivious.)

Thanks to a mostly first-rate script by von Trotta and co-writer Pamela Katz, superb
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTQNWgZVctM


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direction (von Trotta is particularly gifted at giving vivid life to interior spaces and

how people inhabit them), and a virtuoso performance by Barbara Sukowa as

Arendt, we experience the evolution of Arendts theories about the Eichmann trial as

they occurred in sparkling and sometimes heated discussions with her doting hus-

band, Heinrich Blcher (persuasively acted by Axel Milberg), and with friends such

as McCarthy (a stylish performance by Janet McTeer), the German-Jewish philoso-pher Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), and the Zionist activist Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael

Degen). I might only add that, given this triumph of characterization, it seems a

slight pity to me that, in her effort to humanize Arendtor, perhaps, to feature the

Woman behind the Brainvon Trotta found it necessary to depict Arendt as so re-

lentlessly love-struck a wife. It may even have been true that Arendt felt this way

about Blcher, whom she nicknamed Stups (he in return called her Klaps), despite

his infidelitiescertainly her letters to him point to an unusually impassioned union(Stups, for the love of God, you are my four walls)but I found it wearying.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect ofHannah Arendt is the extensive amount of on-

screen time von Trotta has decided to devote to archival material from the Eichmann

trial and the artful use she has made of it. With the fidgety, grimacing, bespectacled

figure of the former Nazi higher-up at its center, seated inside a glass booth, the

black-and-white courtroom footage seamlessly unfolds almost as a film within a film,

capturing our attention as much as it did Arendts. (Who, as it turns out, followedlarge parts of the trial in the pressroom, so as to be able to smoke.)

As we watch the colorless Eichmann (although he was capable, as Arendt noted, of

sudden flights of fancycomparing himself under questioning to a steak being

grilled and describing the futility of resistance to the Nazi enterprise as akin to a

drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success) dodge responsibili-

ty for being anything other than a bureaucratic functionary following orders, it is as

though we have been transported back more than half a century and are being asked

to draw our own conclusions along with Arendt.

I, for one, was less struck by Eichmanns bloodlessness and inability to think, which

so disturbed Arendt, than by his infrequent but all the same quite unexpected at-

tempts at self-reflection, howsoever limited. Who would have thought him capable,

for instance, when questioned about the conflict between duty and conscience, of re-

ferring to a state of being split, where one could flee from one side to the other? Lis-tening to him, I wondered for a moment what kind of narrative Arendt would have


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produced had she been more aware of her own personal conflicts (her status as a de-

racinated Jew, for one, and unwilling refugee, for another) and less in thrall to her

German intellectual heritage, one which emphasized a ruthless and ultimately dan-

gerous purity of thought as epitomized by her teacher and lover, the philosopher

Martin Heidegger? Needless to say, Arendt had nothing but scorn for psychoanaly-

sis.

Von Trottas less deft touches have mostly to do with her depictions ofThe New York-

er and its ambience. Nicholas Woodesons William Shawn seems more like a fast-talk-

ing deli owner than the painfully shy, recessive editor I remember from my days of

working at the magazines typing pool, and his office looks more like a pawnshop

than is warranted. I cant figure out, either, whom the snarky character of Frances is

based on, or what her role is supposed to be; I would have pegged her for an assist-

ant, except that in between snapping out lines like philosophers dont make dead-

lines in an unplaceable accent, she allows Shawn to make his own phone calls.

But then again, one might ask, who has ever gotten The New Yorker right on film? Per-

haps one day someone will. Meanwhile, we have a movie that reminds us of a time

before tweeting and blogging, one in which the old-fashioned life of the mindthe

life of significant contention, as the critic Diana Trilling once called ithas been

given a fresh and illuminating purview.

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