Hannah Arendt

Margarethe von Trotta's film is a magnificent example of a movie about someone who thinks, a not-common subject these days.  The subject is of particular interest to me because I was in my first year at Exeter when Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem came out in The New Yorker (1963) and everyone there was talking about it.  This was intellectually exciting to me, coming as I did from a small town where people read little and seldom discussed ethics or history, and led me to start reading The New Yorker when it was still elegantly edited by William Shawn, who is represented sympathetically in the film.  Arendt herself is beautifully played by Barbara Sukowa and the film is in a widescreen format that captures the width and depth of Arendt's thinking.  Not surprisingly this film has once again brought out Arendt's critics.  Sol Stern wrote The Lies of Hannah Arendt in Commentary in which he attacked Arendt for not being sufficiently Zionist and for criticizing "the co-operation of Jewish leaders and organization with the Nazi hierarchy," as Mark Lilla says in his intelligent article about the film in The New York Review of Books.  Von Trotta's films have always been effectively didactic and this one is no exception in the way it includes composite characters and invented confrontations as well as scenes with Martin Heidegger, once Arendt's lover and later a Nazi. For an intelligent perspective on Arendt's fascinating work fifty years after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem  I recommend Deborah Lipstadt's The Eichmann Trial (Schocken Books, 2011), where she discusses what Arendt got right and what she got wrong and how "the banality of evil" is a valid concept that can easily be misapplied.