The ordeal of "Hannah Arendt' (1st review)

When Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem in 1961 for his major role in organizing the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt— herself a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s— attended the trial on assignment from The New Yorker. She went there not as a judge or juror, nor as a prosecutor or defense attorney, nor as a spokesperson for any particular constituency or viewpoint, but simply as an individual political theorist who was curious about the origins and causes of evil.

After her coverage was published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, I read it avidly. I was fascinated by Arendt's novel impression of Eichmann: that far from being an anti-Semitic monster, he was a nobody, a pathetic bureaucrat who hungered above all for a sense of belonging, and who joined organizations and carried out their programs not so much out of devotion to their goals as to bring meaning to his otherwise insignificant life. The lesson, Arendt suggested, was that "the greatest evil in the world is the evil created by nobodies."

This notion flew in the face of conventional wisdom at the time, which characterized the German killing machine as the work of rabidly ideological, anti-Semitic, goose-stepping Nazi fanatics. (Arendt noted that before the trial no fewer than six Israeli psychologists had examined Eichmann and found no trace of mental illness or any evidence of abnormal personality.)

"'Self-hating Jew'

As a Jew who lost more than 50 relatives in the Holocaust, I had good reason to hate Nazis, Germans and anyone who collaborated with them. I didn't necessarily agree with Arendt's conclusions. But I welcomed her willingness to delve deeper into the causes of the Holocaust than simply denouncing its perpetrators. By raising questions and defying conventional notions, she added value to an important conversation: How best to cope with evil.

Surely Arendt did me no harm by writing: I was a grownup, free to make up my own mind about her arguments. Whether she was right or wrong struck me as beside the point. I was grateful to Arendt and her publishers for sharing her honest insights with me and thereby giving me the opportunity to think further about the Holocaust.

Not until I saw Hannah Arendt this week did I appreciate the magnitude of the firestorm that Arendt suffered back then for the crime of trying to understand what made Eichmann tick. She was widely denounced as a Nazi apologist, a self-hating Jew and an anti-Zionist, often by people who hadn't read her book. She was accused of blaming Jewish communal leaders for abetting the Holocaust. Jewish public figures charged her with lack of sympathy for Holocaust victims.

She and The New Yorker were bombarded with hate mail and phone calls. She lost teaching assignments. Some lifelong friends— notably Gershom Scholem, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism— broke off relations with her. Eichmann in Jerusalem was virtually banned in Israel (a Hebrew edition wasn't published until 2007).

Real Eichmann footage

And for what? What great sin by Arendt caused the State of Israel, in its infinite wisdom, to deny its citizens the same opportunity to read her that I enjoyed back in 1963? Arendt surely exercised no coercive power, nor did she send anyone to the gallows or the gas chambers. All she did was exercise her right as an individual to think independently about public issues and ask unpopular questions.

Margarethe Von Trotta's 2012 German film, Hannah Arendt, confronts the daunting challenge of dramatizing what are essentially philosophical issues. At first it's slow going, as we're exposed to a string of expository dialogue, introductory name-dropping and contrived conflicts. "Philosophers don't make deadlines!" a New Yorker editor objects when her boss, William Shawn, gives Arendt the assignment— the sort of facile quip that you hear often in the movies but never, I suspect, at Mr. Shawn's gentlemanly New Yorker.

But once the Eichmann trial actually begins, I was riveted by this film. The sight of Eichmann, a functionary of the Third Reich, sitting in the dock of a civilized nation he tried to destroy never ceases to boggle the mind. Instead of embellishing the scene with an actor playing Eichmann, Von Trotta wisely chooses to use footage from the actual 1961 trial, so we can see for ourselves the banal defendant who, as Arendt puts it, is "so different than I imagined."

My similar ordeal

Barbara Sukowa in the title role makes a compelling and mostly sympathetic chain-smoking protagonist, even if— movies being movies— she's more physically attractive than Arendt was in real life. When, at the end, Arendt insists that she would do it all over again because "It is profoundly important to ask these questions," it's hard to disagree with her or empathize with the college administrators who stomp out of her lecture hall in presumed protest.

Young Jews "refuse to confront the dark times," Arendt remarks earlier in the film. "They're ashamed of their parents who refused to strike back." Yet it's striking that, at the end, she finds her most sympathetic audience not among her own fellow German-Jewish exiles but among college students. And as Martin Beck Matustik, a child of Holocaust survivors, recently noted in BSR, children of survivors are actually more eager to confront the Holocaust than their traumatized parents ever were. (Click here.) In that respect, time, as well as the curiosity of youth, are allies in the quest for truth.

Perhaps Hannah Arendt especially resonated with me because, two years ago, I endured a similar ordeal myself. For raising some questions in BSR about whether women could expect the legal system to protect them from rape, I was similarly attacked as a rape apologist and victim-blamer. In a matter of days I was subjected to a global Internet petition drive in which 35,000 signers— most of whom hadn't read my column— demanded my dismissal; I was bombarded with anonymous hate phone calls, banned from two Philadelphia theaters and subjected to various Internet suggestions that my office should be trashed and I should be pushed off a 20-story building.

No doubt my experience was small potatoes compared to Arendt's. On the other hand, Hannah Arendt never had to contend with the Internet's viral capacity for anonymous instant vituperation.

Her recent critics

Like a relic of the past, Eichmann in Jerusalem remains an interesting read today. Its validity has largely been superseded by more recent books on the Eichmann trial, such as Becoming Eichmann, by David Cesareni (2006), and Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (2011). These works point out, among other things, that Eichmann was highly anti-Semitic, and that Arendt attended Eichmann's trial for only a few days and based her writing mostly on recordings and trial transcripts, which may not have adequately reflected his character.

That's how the search for truth is supposed to work. Arendt wasn't writing the last word on the Eichmann trial or the Holocaust— more like the first word. She asked unpleasant questions and, in doing so, forced others to refine their own arguments.

"It is not upon thee to finish the work," the Talmud says. "Neither art thou free to desist from it." Hannah Arendt didn't find the truth, but she didn't desist from seeking it, and we are her beneficiaries.♦


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