A feminist "Hannah Arendt' (3rd review)

I personally wanted to see Hannah Arendt because I had recently studied the life and work of Arendt's first lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and partly because Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was certainly going to be a major theme of the film. But the director, Margarethe Von Trotta, had entirely different reasons for making this film.

She appeared to be striving, perhaps from a feminist perspective, to portray the life of a significant woman, just as she did in the "Sisters" films, Rosa Luxemburg and Vision (based on the life of the 12th-Century German composer/philosopher Hildegard of Bingen). Von Trotta's Hannah Arendt concerns a seeker of truth (formerly the privileged domain of men) who rose to academic distinction at Princeton and The New School for Social Research— at that time bastions of male brilliance— yet who was soon, in the manner of the Salem witch trials, chastised, scapegoated and dethroned in both the American academy and in Israel, all for the use of the word "banal" to describe the horrific evil of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief implementers of the Holocaust.

Although the film includes powerful scenes from Eichmann's 1961 trial, in which von Trotta artfully blends video footage from the actual trial with studio enactments, it's mainly about Arendt as a woman standing for integrity in both her love life and her work. Von Trotta implies, with some validity, that Arendt was unreasonably and horrifically attacked because she was a woman standing firm in a man's world. On this level, the film succeeds in portraying some real-life characters in a serious manner, with a diligence and attention to detail that was exemplified by Arendt's own work as well.

What did she mean?

Despite its feminist emphasis on a woman's life and struggles, the film is dominated by the Eichmann trial and Arendt's reaction to it, much the way that Oedipus's self-blinding upon learning of his incestuous and parricidal deeds grips the story of the King of Thebes in the Sophocles tragedy.

Whether von Trotta intended it that way is hard to know. The trial and the public reaction to Arendt's writings about it were in themselves such powerful events that one couldn't help leaving the theater thinking about them far more than Arendt's personal story. At least that was true for me, a Jew of Eastern European extraction, a college student in Brooklyn at the time of the trial with my own stories of survivor guilt.

I especially wondered how someone like Arendt could come up with a concept like "banality," trumpet it in the New Yorker and a best-selling book, yet think her reports would be reflected upon with calm objectivity and detachment. That led me to ask: "What did she actually write, and what did she mean by it?" I went back to her original writings, as well as secondary sources, to find out.

Death at a distance

It's clear from Arendt's writing that in no way was she exonerating Eichmann from his horrendous acts when she described his evil as "banal." She repeatedly documented the horrors he committed and concluded that he was justly condemned to death. She meant that Eichmann did not carry out the death missions himself but arranged and ordered them from a bureaucratic desk. He was, as he himself said, just following orders.

Arendt was trying to tell us something she learned from her earlier studies of totalitarianism and its "mindless" atrocities— namely, that evil, especially in its institutionalized forms, often comes in the form of bland actions committed by people who are not constitutionally bloodthirsty monsters.

Certainly that message is relevant even today, when our own politicians, bureaucrats and corporate executives, in the name of peace and freedom, instigate wars, destroy the environment, and sanction the development of robotic drones that can kill people at the push of a button a few thousand miles away. A slippage of conscience results from being part of a social machine that takes over and provides rationalizations for countless acts of cruelty and destruction. Arendt was arguing that Eichmann's evil was alienated and, in that respect strangely ordinary— not necessarily malevolent and murderous.

Seduced by Eichmann

Yet at least as it concerned Eichmann himself, Arendt's "banality" theory was only a half-truth. Many unthinking government workers in Nazi Germany were "just following orders," as Arendt contended. But Eichmann wasn't one of them.

Far from being a mindless bureaucrat, Eichmann was an avid SS man who rose from the ranks of the early Nazi movement and wasn't shy about keeping company with thugs and rabble-rousers. He participated in the infamous Wansee conference of 1942, where Hitler's "final solution" for the Jews was crafted. He carried out a horrific agenda that he avidly arranged and pursued.

In my opinion (and that of others more knowledgeable), Arendt was taken in by Eichmann's posture on the witness stand. Fifteen years in hiding in Argentina had taught him how to dissimulate a "banal" persona. It's well known that sociopaths— individuals who commit crimes and murderous acts with out conscience— are especially skilled at simulating normality. Hitler himself did so when it served his interests, persuading many people of his good intentions.

Ironies about men

Generally speaking, the Nazis and storm troopers— Eichmann among them— were vicious sociopaths who gained political power in 1933. When they weren't rounding up people or ordering them to the gas chambers, many of them were very likeable fellows.

The director Liliana Cavani and actor Dirk Bogarde captured this duality of the Nazi persona in the insightful 1974 film, The Night Porter. But neither Arendt nor von Trotta possessed Cavani's sense of irony about men. (All of the men in von Trotta's film, not just Eichmann, are rather bland and "banal.")

Arendt was seduced not only by Eichmann but by her own theory. She theorized that good, compassionate acts came from good thinking, and that Eichmann was incapable of making sound judgments about the terrible consequences of his actions, somewhat like the neglect that led to the recent tragic building collapse at 22nd and Market Streets in Philadelphia.

Heidegger's Nazi lapse

On the contrary, I would contend, goodness and compassion are learned behaviors acquired within a cultural context. They result more from examples, teachings and attitudes than they do from sound reasoning.

Arendt should have realized that reasoning is only one component of moral behavior. Her lover, Heidegger, was one of the great thinkers of human history, yet he joined the Nazi party and caused professional harm to his Jewish colleagues. He never apologized after the war. (Arendt's failure to persuade him to do so was one of her greatest regrets.) For all his brilliance, Heidegger absorbed the attitudes present in Germany at the time, and those attitudes dictated his life decisions and behavior.

By the same token, Eichmann's sadism was perhaps masked by a "civilized" veneer, but it was there. He was not a fool— a man of poor judgment— but a vengeful persecutor without a conscience.

Intellectual legacy

Nevertheless, Arendt's provocative ideas should have been treated with respect and subjected to rational debate rather than victimizing her. Overall, her views played a crucial role in introducing morality into discussions of political and social science.

She brought to American academia and to the Israeli public a profound European philosophical and intellectual legacy of which she was an integral part. Von Trotta's portrayal of her (as well as actor Barbara Sukowa's) as a courageous and loving individual undoubtedly reflects the real Arendt. She should never have been subjected to the hostility inflicted on her.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Gresham Riley, click here.
To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a response by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read other responses, click here.
To read a follow-up by Victor L. Schermer, click here.