Hannah Arendt Biopic Offers Rare Onscreen View of Political Philosophy

[rug]

Movie Paints Vivid Picture of German-Jewish Émigrés

By Beate Sissenich
Published May 26, 2013, issue of June 07, 2013.

Biopics about philosophers are rare, and they favor activists over ivory-tower thinkers. The life of the mind, unless it directly shapes social action, is not easily captured in film.

Hence, Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi” exposed the Indian independence leader’s ideas on nonviolent struggle through his political activism, not through his writings. Likewise, Margarethe von Trotta’s cinematic portrayal of the Marxist dissident writer Rosa Luxemburg wasted little time on the latter’s considerable written output and instead explored Luxemburg’s role in the founding of organized social democracy in Poland, and later in the founding of the Communist Party in Germany, in opposition both to Russian Bolsheviks and German social democrats.

Given the challenge of translating philosophy into drama, it is understandable that Von Trotta’s latest film, about the German Jewish writer Hannah Arendt, has little to say about the political theorist’s extensive oeuvre on the nature of political action or her analysis of totalitarianism.

Instead, the film concentrates on a turbulent period in Arendt’s life, during which she came under severe attack for her reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial. First published as a series of essays in The New Yorker, the report was later expanded into a book under the title “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

http://forward.com/articles/177134/hannah-arendt-biopic-offers-rare-onscreen-view-of/

[ismnotwasm]

1. Very interesting

Thank you

[struggle4progress]

2. She did get hammered at the time for "Eichmann in Jerusalem"

Controversy was perhaps inevitable: during the Shoah, and in its aftermath, there was (and perhaps still remains) considerable historical and ideological disagreement about who should have done what to stop the machinery of death or to save people from vanishing into that machinery. A single example may suffice. Rezso Kasztner in Budapest negotiated with Eichmann the safe passage from Hungary of a number of potential victims, in exchange for cash, much of which was raised from the would-be emigrants themselves.. About 2000 subsequently left by train and survived -- but a number who had paid were not actually allowed to leave. Kasztner moved to Israel after the war, and in the late 1950s was accused of being a Nazi collaborateur; Kasztner sued for libel, lost and appealed. His appeal ultimately succeeded and cleared his name -- but a week before that happened, Kasztner was assassinated

IMO her book is well worth the read and sheds real light on Eichmann's character (and thus presumably on many of those involved in the WWII era crimes). His internal contradictions are real: Eichmann describes himself as a friend of the Jews, who happened to be charged with their complete extermination, and explains it was his humane duty to carry out his task efficiently. I expect such talk need not be taken too seriously: perhaps what Eichmann said often depended on what he thought his listeners might want to hear, since that habit would have served him well in the Third Reich

The portrait Arendt paints is terrifying in an unexpected way: Eichmann is not driven by a monstrous hatred; he is not a man seduced by a fascinating evil vision. He is rather a somewhat flat individual, with little or no ability to empathize with others -- and willing to defer all responsibility for moral judgments to his superiors. His ambition is constantly disappointed, so he does what he thinks he is expected to do as well as he can, hiding his contradictions from himself by appealing to little slogans