“What surprises and shocks me most of all is the tremendous amount of hatred and hostility lying around and waiting only for the chance to break out,” Hannah Arendt confided to her friend, the writer Mary McCarthy, in the fall of 1963. At the time, she was caught in the middle of a backlash against her ideas concerning the “banality of evil,” a term Arendt coined in relation to Adolf Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the Nazi Party and a main organizational force in the logistics of Hitler’s Final Solution. Arendt’s confrontations with the personal and political past would last throughout the rest of her life, crisscrossing the career of Margarethe von Trotta, a pioneer of the German New Wave film movement, whose members were preoccupied with dealing with post-war confusion, and delusion, in their home country. So it makes sense that Von Trotta, whose films have been dominated by strong female lead roles, would tackle the divisive legacy of Arendt.
In February 1963, The New Yorker published the first part of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt’s report from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was captured by the U.S. Army following World War II but managed to escape custody under an alias and, after more than a decade on the run, was found in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He was captured by Mossad agents as he came off a bus and was quickly smuggled out of the country. A year later, Eichmann would appear before the Jerusalem District Court, indicted on 15 criminal charges including crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against the Jewish people. The chilling image of Eichmann in a glass cage was broadcast for viewers all over the world. In December 1961, Eichmann was convicted on all counts and in May of 1962, was hanged shortly before midnight, refusing a final meal.
Arendt, a German Jew, was already intellectually revered for “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” her book-length study tracing the deep-seeded roots of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Although not a trained reporter and, as a member of the social circle surrounding The Partisan Review, skeptical of The New Yorker, which many thought of as light and frivolous, Arendt suggested to editor William Shawn that he send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. From most reports, he was more than happy to have a thinker of her renown writing for the magazine, and was even excited about the exchange of ideas that would spread in response.
Arendt’s report from the trial, published in five parts, immediately caused a firestorm across the intellectual community. Her widely misunderstood thoughts on the banality of evil, and her condemnation of Jewish councils that collaborated with Nazis, struck many as a denial of innocence of the Jewish people. Arendt steadfastly claimed she was simply presenting facts and couldn’t understand the uproar, despite factual errors that have been documented since. Reporting on a public forum concerning Arendt, presented by Dissent Magazine, the poet Robert Lowell described the intense atmosphere in the New York Review of Books. “The meeting was like a trial, the stoning of an outcast member of the family,” Lowell wrote. “Any sneering overemphasis on Hannah, who had been invited but was away teaching in Chicago, was greeted with divisive clapping or savage sighs of amazement.” The intellectual community that once praised her now looked at her as a pariah.
Although Von Trotta sets “Hannah Arendt” during this period of strife, she is less interested in the specifics of the controversy surrounding Arendt’s work than how it manifests itself. Much of the focus in the film is on the relationship between Arendt and McCarthy, who, though this is only hinted at in the film, was going through an equally painful controversy surrounding her novel, “The Group.” In the film, the friends are surrounded by domineering men who circle around them like vultures: spouses, mentors, and intellectual counterparts who only treat them as contemporaries when necessary. Arendt refused to conform to the ideas of the men around her, unwilling to be a spokesperson for any group or trapped by a set way of looking at the world. The intense scorn, Von Trotta seems to say, has more to do with Arendt being female than her ideas.
The film becomes muddled when it draws connections between the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s affair with her former professor, Martin Heidegger, who she (temporarily) broke contact with after he embraced the Nazi Party. Presented in flashbacks, the brief interactions with Heidegger are supposed to convey the troubled nature of the trial, the war, and the complex questions Arendt was trying to answer, but these scenes ultimately feel like they exist in a different film. The full story of Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, equally as interesting as the story told in Von Trotta’s film, is worthy of its own space.
“Hannah Arendt,” currently screening at New York’s Film Forum, is more than an interesting historical document or gossipy intellectual footnote, though it works very well as both. In her refusal to back down from exploring forms of evil, and our culpability within those forms, Arendt was a prescient and inspiring thinker who deserves to be reexamined and used as a model for how we investigate the past and question the present.
Related: Margarethe von Trotta on Filming Hannah Arendt’s Public Ordeal.