It seems Hannah Arendt has become a mainstream figure, at least one worthy of the financial risk of a biopic. She has also become increasingly popular among leftist writers and thinkers, who at the very least will concede the novelty and originality of her writing. But in this film, she has become something she never really was: a martyr.
She has always been an enigma to those on the left. Some condemn her to be an arrogant elitist, while others see in her writings an underappreciated and deeply original defense of radical democracy. Regardless, Arendt confounds most attempts at categorization. Her condemnation of liberalism, for its reduction of the political to the negotiations of interest and welfare, and for its attempt to bureaucratize the political sphere, echoes a faith in radical political change. Equally as biting, however, is her critique of those communitarian theories of democracy (that tend to accompany radical political change), for their reliance on virtue and their romantic sentimentality. The former expels independent thought from politics, while the latter enslaves independent thought to politics. Margarethe Von Trotta captures this tension in her new biopic, portraying Arendt as a singular and complicated figure—but she perhaps grants her unwarranted sympathy. The film begins with a focus on Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel responsible for coordinating the deportation of European Jews, then follows the controversy surrounding the report, published in the New Yorker in 1963, and the immense back lash Arendt received, especially among members from her own intellectual circles.
Hannah Arendt is a film that focuses almost exclusively on the subject of thinking, or rather on the subject of thinking while smoking cigarettes. And while it is brave to risk making a movie that could easily become an overt lesson on political philosophy, it is also, no doubt, treacherous. Indeed, it is brave, treacherous thinking that serves as the demonstrated moral of this film. If we learn anything from Arendt it is that we must think rigorously, in spite of our personal connections to all those orthodoxies that might regulate our ideas, be they identitarian or ideological. After all it was Eichmann’s inability to think that, for Arendt, explained his ability to commit heinous acts.
Arendt’s book Eichmann and Jerusalem was controversial for several reasons. Arendt argued that the “evil” demonstrated by Eichmann’s actions was beyond what modern institutions of judgment and responsibility were capable of confronting. Arendt appreciated the professionalism of many of the judges, but ultimately she observed that the trial was primarily concerned with the appearance of justice, and the popular desire to see justice served. This, for Arendt, was perhaps more upsetting than the failure of justice entirely. Only this could explain how a man so mediocre and so unable to think for himself would be able commit such great and horrible deeds without feeling responsible for them. It is this phenomenon that Arendt titled, “the banality of evil.” For attempting to understand Eichmann as he appeared to be, Arendt concludes that while he does deserve to die, this specific trial did not have the capacity or the legitimacy to justly convict and condemn him. Consequently Arendt was accused of defending Eichmann.
My impulse is to defend Arendt, especially in the context of the Eichmann trial, but I wonder if she does not too easily dismiss the desire to see justice served, and the legitimacy of that desire. Most recently, the calls for justice made by communities of color on behalf of Trayvon Martin have attempted to call attention to the guilt, not just of George Zimmerman but of the entire system. Still, to then dismiss the desire to see Zimmerman tried by the federal government would be arrogant and misguided, and would only serve as further reason to dismiss people of color. Arendt understood, however, the potential consequences of allowing this desire to go unquestioned by those very communities whose rights are already questioned everyday by the more privileged classes. Perhaps, for Arendt, this is bravery.
Arendt observed that the Eichmann trial was bigger than the judgment of Eichmann himself. She describes the trial not as the rectification of a great evil, but at best as a misguided attempt to redeem the Jewish people from their victimization and dehumanization. At worst she sees the trial as a platform for nationalist propaganda, a vindication of the Israeli state. Neither is concerned with the actions or ethical consciousness of individuals, but rather with the needs of corporate entities, such as the Jewish people or the Jewish state. Ultimately, it is this conviction that alienates her from many of her closest friends and colleagues. “I can have no love for peoples,” says Barbara Sukowa, the actress portraying Arendt, “only individuals.”
Consequently, Arendt does not shy away from evidence of the complicity of the Jewish councils, the supposed leadership of European Jewish communities, with Nazi war crimes, a fact that has lead many to condemn Arendt as a “self-hating Jew.” Nor does she shy away from jabs at the ideological posturing and political grandstanding of the Israeli prosecutor or of Israeli president David Ben Gurion, who she referred to as the “invisible stage manager of the proceedings.”
Overall I found Von Trotta’s film to be well intentioned but misguided and disappointingly executed. I was happily surprised by Barbara Sukowa’s performance, and her ability to masterfully translate Arendt’s principles as well as her legacy onto the screen. Sukowa as Arendt was perhaps not as gripping as say, Daniel Day Lewis’ recent blockbuster portrayal of president Lincoln. However, Ms. Sukowa admirably demonstrates her desire for distinctiveness, and the brave if not arrogant refusal to compromise the pursuit of distinction for the sake of one’s private obligations to ideology or identity. Sukowa explains to her partner at the time, philosopher Heinrich Blucher, that it is her responsibility to go not as a Jew, but as a political philosopher. Ironically, the film continuously makes gestures to personalize Arendt in an attempt to humanize her, and to make her ideas both understandable and relatable. In the film, Arendt bravely fights off attempts to unmask some ulterior psychological motive behind her report on Eichmann—that she is ashamed of her own people; that she is unable to truly accept the reality of Eichmann’s crimes; that she was never able to get over her love for her former teacher, Martin Heidegger. These claims are never fully dismissed by the film, but they are delivered by its least believable and least likeable characters. The fact that both Sukowa’s performance and Arendt’s character so clearly outshines the actors playing her opponents (one reviewer accurately described their performances as “starchy”), cheapens the portrayal of her attempt to triumph over character assassination without having to pander to her detractors. Ultimately constructing the film so as to avoid erudition and therefore, presumably, better relate Arendt’s legacy to a wide audience, clashes against an essential characteristic of that legacy: the fierce (and very Greek) assertion of the distinction between the public and the private selves.
It is less interesting to say that the film “failed” in its duties to Arendt’s thought and legacy than to say that the film’s attempt to celebrate Arendt mars its capacity to practice what she preaches. This could be Von Trotta’s fault, or it could be the fault of the genre. Biopics have become “banal”; they exceptionalize and lend too much agency to canonical individuals, and in doing so they rely on hackneyed tropes that personalize and sentimentalize the actions of those individuals. Our political judgment is staked on our capacity to relate to them. These films have become a sort of mock trial, which attempts to settle all existing controversies by reconstructing the individual being behind the celebrated actions. Yes, Abraham Lincoln and Hannah Arendt were historically significant figures, but would you want to have them over for dinner? Do they love themselves? These attempts at psychologization do not really get at the relationship between the ethical consciousness of individuals and their actions, at least that is what Arendt believes.
I am not the first person to feel weird about the personalization of politics. I didn’t want to have a beer with the president 5 years ago and I still don’t. And so I find it frustrating that this film invites its audience to celebrate, or at least respect, Arendt for being a nonconforming, a brave and visionary thinker, but only insofar as we are interested in her personal flaws, love affairs, and brand of cigarettes.
Regardless one cannot deny the importance of understanding Arendt’s actions and ideas, and of disseminating them to a mass audience. Certainly in the context of Zimmerman’s acquittal, Arendt’s relationship to the Eichmann trial makes for an interesting, albeit flawed, analogy. Both cases bring up an interesting question: when lawlessness becomes an extension of the law and when the “exception” becomes the norm, how does one appeal to justice, and to what does one appeal? Arendt’s answer is bleak and too easily abstracts from the necessity of justice to be served, in whatever imperfect form. Arendt’s actions imply that one must choose between indicting a system that normalizes acts of lawlessness, and indicting those individuals that perpetuate acts of lawlessness in the name of the law. The history of white vigilantism in this country, only most recently demonstrated by the effects of the “stand your ground” law, would perhaps pose a similar problem for Arendt. And here is where I do disagree, and would caution against a blind devotion to her legacy. The call for independent thinking, and of thinking against the obligations of one’s own identity in the name of truth, justice etc., obfuscates how identity is linked to the precarity of marginalized communities. It does not recognize the effectiveness of ideology when it comes to raising political consciousness. Indeed, there is always a risk that such ideologies and identities will become obstacles to justice, but it is in many cases an unfair and unwarranted demand to place on the oppressed. But I do think that in Arendt’s case, where the demand for vindication obfuscated those injustices that were enacted in the name of the Jewish people, such a critique was necessary. She was a visionary insofar as she recognized the kind of unthinking politics that were already underway in the post-war period, when justice became secondary to Jewish identity and Zionist ideology.
But before I diverge too far, I’ll end this piece where it started. Arendt is a risky thinker, and a confounding one for many. Ms. Von Trotta turned Arendt into a martyr for all those who have ever been called a self-hating Jew (myself included), and for all of those who have ever felt the need to alienate themselves in order to stay true to their principles. But Arendt is not a martyr, and conceiving of her or depicting her as one only obscures what is both novel and problematic about her thought and her legacy.
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