Most of us would agree that if a fugitive came to our house
begging for help – a Jew being chased by the Gestapo, for example – we’d let
him in and hide him. And when the
Gestapo came to the door we would lie and say he wasn’t there. At least we hope we would behave this way,
lie to protect a life. No matter how
ardent our commitment to principles may be, we would prioritize those
principles, and justify deceit when under intimidation.
Now imagine yourself in the shoes of Israeli leaders in 1960
when they learn that Nazi hunters have uncovered Adolph Eichmann hiding in
Argentina. Your principles say
kidnapping is wrong. But this is
Eichmann, the man who ran the system that led to the extermination of millions
of European Jews under the most abject conditions imaginable. Of course you override your commitment to
the rule of law, overlook the national sovereignty of Argentina. You bring this monster to trial in
Jerusalem. Not to do so would mean
missing the opportunity of the century to bring justice and restore some
dignity to the survivors of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps of
World War II.
Declaring Eichmann a monster is not the goal; it’s the
starting place for you and countless others.
One wants a fair trial, but the conclusion, like the conclusion of the
Nuremburg Trials, is not in doubt. The
monster must be found guilty and be done away with.
That was the plan.
But in that plan was a potential hitch.
Her name was Hannah Arendt.
When Arendt learned of the trial she talked the New Yorker into giving her the job of
covering it. Her report appeared in five
installments in 1963 and was later published as a book, entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem.
It’s hard for many today to understand the fuss that book
raised, because we are so familiar with the concept of the banality of evil that came from her analysis. Eichmann wasn’t a monster, she said. He was a stupid man who didn’t know how to
think. She believed him, in other words,
when he insisted he was just following orders.
Not a mastermind, she said. A
clerk. A bureaucrat. But more importantly, a joiner, somebody who
joins an organization because it relieves one of the personal responsibility
for thinking for oneself.
German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta found her
inspiration in Ingmar Bergman, and went on to make a number of films dealing
with the inner struggles of women to match their personal lives with the way
they presented themselves in public. Hannah Arendt is her fourth such
collaboration on feminist themes with Barbara Sukowa (in addition to several
with other actors), following Marianne
and Juliane (Die
bleierne Zeit) in 1981, Rosa
Luxemburg in 1986, and Vision,
the story of the medieval woman before her times, Hildegard von Bingen, in 2009.
Sukowa
makes a powerfully convincing Hannah Arendt, the brilliant and courageous political theorist who
eschews the label philosopher, but fits the stereotype of a chain-smoking
partisan of truth-finding and truth-telling to a T. Von Trotta has decided to limit this biopic
insight into the author of The Origins of
Totalitarianism and The Human
Condition to the event that made her world-famous and, to many, an object
of scorn – the publication of her view not only that Eichmann was not a
monster, but that many more Jews might have escaped the Nazis if their own
Jewish leaders had not cooperated so willingly in their demise.
And here’s where the moral dilemma comes in. To many survivors of the Holocaust, the crime
was so monumental and so unforgivable that any suggestion of complicity by the
victims is also unforgivable. Truth be
damned, in other words. How could a Jew,
any Jew, even suggest such a thing, the line goes. This is not a time and a place for rational
thinking; it is a condition, this post-Holocaust world we live in, in which
even the suggestion of neutrality, a philosopher’s neutrality, is an insult to
the victims of the genocide.
Anybody who reads Arendt carefully discovers that, as is
often the case when people attack an author without actually reading their
work, misunderstanding abounds. She did
not defend Eichmann, as some charge. She
never wavered in her conviction that the man had done enough wrong to warrant
the death penalty. She did not “blame the
victims,” she blamed the barbarism of the system that dehumanized not only the
perpetrators of Nazi cruelty, but the victims as well, as they found
themselves, some of them, giving up all traces of dignity to survive, and
rationalizing, as many leaders of the Jewish Councils did, that cooperation
with the Nazis might be the lesser evil in the long run.
Those who take the time to follow these distinctions still
fault her for her tone. Too much irony,
they say. Too much distance. Arendt escaped the Nazis by emigrating to
America before they even came to power.
Some claim she never actually assumed a Jewish identity. She was secular, she loved the German language,
she is quoted as saying she never felt any love for a people – a “Volk” – but
only for individual persons.
Political scientist Roger Berkowitz makes the point that the film doesn’t settle the
controversy over whether Arendt was right in her conclusions of fifty years
ago, but stirs it up again. We now know
more about Eichmann than she did, for example, and there is reason to believe
she was naïve and missed just how committed he actually was to anti-Semitism. The consensus seems to be she was right in
her philosophical conclusion that evil is more often done by nobodies than by
monsters, but wrong in her historical assessment of Eichmann. He was, in fact, a monster.
That, however, should not interfere with an appreciation of
the film and of your inclination to walk with her to her conclusions at the
time she reaches them. One does not need
to know the destination while enjoying the journey.
The film is slow getting started. At first you find yourself fearing this might
be just another long-winded, slow-paced German film of talking heads. But soon you are caught up in Arendt’s drive
for understanding. Above all, she said,
she wanted to comprehend, and the film, even when it shows her lying with her
eyes closed on a couch, brings you into her head and helps you see the journey
she undertook toward understanding. You
also get a good feel for the consequences, the hate mail, the loss of life-long
friendships, that such a commitment to truth would come to cost her.
Whether you end up becoming a Hannah Arendt fan (if you were
not one already), or whether you come to share with many the suspicion that her
self-certainty would have made her a difficult person to be around, I think the
film will surprise you by how well the moral questions it takes up are made
accessible. You leave the movie theater
the way you leave a good play or concert, reliving the experience for hours or
for days. Two hours very well-spent.
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