Defending the banality theory

The Hannah Arendt movie explores the notion that great evil can be caused by ordinary people who choose to follow orders blindly

By RENEE GHERT-ZAND
Bus Jerusalem Post old521 (photo credit: ZEITGEIST FILMS)
Bus Jerusalem Post old521
(photo credit: ZEITGEIST FILMS)
Toward the end of noted German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta’s new feature film, “Hannah Arendt,” we see the famous philosopher and political theorist speaking to a lecture hall full of students at New York’s The New School.
It is 1964, and she has just been asked by her colleagues to relinquish her teaching post following publication of a series of highly controversial articles she wrote for The New Yorker about the Adolf Eichmann trial (the basis for her 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”).
Dressed like she means business, in a tailored navy suit, pumps and pearls, Arendt, played by famous leading German actress Barbara Sukowa, lights a cigarette and launches into a passionate defense of her famous theory on the banality of evil.
“The greatest evil in the world is the evil committed by nobodies – evil committed by men without motives, without convictions, without wicked hearts or demonic wills, by human beings who refuse to be persons,” she says in her heavily accented English, using language pulled directly from Arendt’s various writings by von Trotta and collaborator Pam Katz. “I wrote no defense of Eichmann, but I did try to reconcile the shocking mediocrity of the man with the staggering deeds. Trying to understand is not the same as forgiving.”
She also addresses the outcry against her reporting on testimony from the trial about instances of Jewish leaders’ cooperation with the Nazis, and her observation that, “to a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”
“I never blamed the Jewish people!” she exclaims from the podium. “Perhaps there is something in between resistance and cooperation, and only in that sense do I say that some of the Jewish leaders might have behaved differently.
“It is profoundly important to ask these questions, because the role of the Jewish leaders gives the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse that the Nazis caused in respectable European society, and not only in Germany but in almost all countries – not only among the persecutors, but also among the victims.”
Fifty years on, it would be unusual to find a room full of young adults utterly amazed at what Arendt is saying. By now, the notion that great evil can be caused by ordinary people who willingly abrogate their ability to think morally, who choose to follow orders blindly, is widely accepted. Similarly, incidents of the cooperation of Judenrats with the Nazis have been well documented and studied.
But Arendt’s reporting and ideas were explosive at the time, and that is what von Trotta aims to explore in her film, which had its world premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in New York and Los Angeles in early summer. It was screened last November at the International Women’s Film Festival in Rehovot, and at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival last December.
The filmmaker was equally interested in portraying how covering the Eichmann trial affected Arendt personally, including how it took a fatal toll on many of her closest friendships, most of them with fellow German-Jewish refugees.
“When I finished work on “Rosenstrasse” [her 2003 feature on the 1943 non-violent protest in Berlin by non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men arrested for deportation], someone who worked on it with me suggested that I make a film about Hannah Arendt,” von Trotta, 71, recalls in a phone conversation with The Jerusalem Report. “But how does one make a film about a philosopher, I wondered?” The key turned out to be the casting of the right actress, one who could make watching someone merely thinking on screen highly engaging. Von Trotta knew that the right woman for the job was the highly talented Sukowa, who won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986 for her title role in von Trotta’s “Rosa Luxemburg,” about the Polish- Jewish revolutionary socialist.
The fact that the blond Sukowa, even when wearing a wig resembling Arendt’s short dark hair, does not closely resemble Arendt does not concern the director.
“Where could I have found a face like Hannah Arendt’s who speaks German and English? Besides, it would have been too distracting to have a look-alike,” she says. “Barbara is so intelligent and gives the impression of intelligence. I knew she could make me believe she is really thinking.”
When it came to casting Eichmann, von FILM Since I was making a film about Arendt, I wasn’t questioning her Trotta decided that no one could play him other than the SS-Obersturmbannführer himself. So, she used the authentic blackand- white close-up footage and the audio track from the actual 1961 trial. “It was important for the audience to see what Hannah herself was seeing,” the director explains. This was especially so, given that she had expected to encounter a monster inside the class cage, and instead saw a very ordinary man.
“An actor could have been brilliant, and then we would not have seen the mediocrity,” von Trotta says. “If you know German, when you hear Eichmann speaking, you see that he can’t get a sentence grammatically correct. He speaks in clichés, in bureaucratese. He doesn’t seem to have his own thoughts.”
It was also important to von Trotta, as a German, to really look at Eichmann herself for the first time. In addition, it was a new experience for her to delve deeply into Arendt’s life and psyche. “As leftists after 1968, we didn’t want to touch her too much,” she says, referring to her participation in Europe’s radical student movement, and to Arendt’s viewing Communism, like Nazism, as a form of totalitarianism.
Notably, the filmmaker found she had something very significant in common with her subject. Like Arendt (who managed to escape France in 1941 with her mother and second husband, non-Jewish German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, with American visas, but no passports), von Trotta was stateless for many years. Born in Berlin in 1942 to a Russian aristocrat mother who was stateless, she did not gain German citizenship until she married her first husband, director Volker Schlöndorff, in 1971.
Having conducted research for the good part of a decade into Arendt, von Trotta was well aware of those, like British historian David Cesarani, who dispute the banality of evil theory and maintain that Eichmann was a virulent anti-Semite and a ruthless and calculating mass murderer, and those, like Harold Rosenberg who wrote in Commentary in 1961 that Eichmann was obviously putting on an act while on the stand.
“Since I was making a film about Arendt, I wasn’t questioning her,” von Trotta maintains. “I’m not a historian or documentarian. My objective was to stay true to her and what she was thinking, and true to the time in which she was doing that thinking.”
To do just this, the filmmaker and her writing partner, Pam Katz, scrapped their original plans to cover Arendt’s entire life, from her days as Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, and through to her death at age 69 in 1975. Instead, they decided to zero in on 1960 to 1964, what von Trotta calls “the most dramatic period in Arendt’s life.”
“I remember from my childhood how many arguments she caused,” says Katz, 55, of her subject. The Brooklyn-based screenwriter, who also collaborated with von Trotta on “Rosenstrasse,” is married to a German director of photography and has lived in Germany and worked on many German film and television projects.
During the research and writing process (Katz wrote the English dialogue, von Trotta the German), the women interviewed as many of Arendt’s friends and associates – all of them intellectual and public figures in their own right, and some who appear as characters in the film – as they could. Many, like philosopher Hans Jonas (who refused to talk to Arendt for two years after she published her Eichmann book), writer Mary McCarthy, and Zionist leaders Kurt Blumenfeld and Ziegfried Moses are no longer alive.
However, they did manage to speak with Jonas’s wife, Laura, Arendt’s assistant and executor, Lotte Köhler, and her literary executor, Jerome Cohen. Interviews were also conducted with actor Wallace Shawn, son of New Yorker editor William Shawn, and Arendt biographer Elisabeth Young- Bruehl.
“We read as much of her correspondence as possible, Katz tells The Report. “Her correspondence with her husband, Mary McCarthy, Carl Jaspers, Gershom Scholem and Heidegger – it’s all been published.” The letters she received in reaction to her coverage of the Eichmann trial alone numbered around 1,000.
“Lotte told us that Hannah was a genius at friendship,” von Trotta recalls. “That’s not something we could have got out of her book. It’s something we got from speaking with Lotte and reading the letters. This is the kind of thing that gave us a fuller understanding of her.”
This fierce friendship and loyalty to individuals – but not to any group, people or nation – comes through clearly in the film, as does the confusion and hurt that Arendt’s ironic and distant tone in her New Yorker articles causes those closest to her. Those friends, as well as the public (especially her fellow Jews), misunderstood her, according to Katz. “She used an ironic tone to push her own emotions out of it.
She had to look at it objectively, and that’s where the perceived harsh tone comes in. She was deeply affected by her experiences, but kept it separate from her work,” the screenwriter says. “She was not disengaged.”
“Hannah Arendt” was filmed primarily in Germany, Luxembourg and Israel. Having not returned to Israel since her last visit in the mid-1990s, von Trotta enjoyed coming to the country a handful of times for filming the movie, and for the screenings last fall. The director, her cast and crew spent 10 days in Jerusalem and one in Tel Aviv, at a studio recreated to look like the press room in which Arendt, a heavy smoker, sat for much of the time she was at the trial (smoking was not permitted in the courtroom).
The film ends as it begins, with Sukowa, as Arendt, deep in thought, lying, with a cigarette in hand and eyes closed, on the couch in her New York apartment.
It is not long after she has given her speech defending herself, and following a conversation with her husband in which she says she has no regrets for having gone to Jerusalem or for writing what she wrote.
There is an earlier scene, however, which provides an equally – if not more – poignant ending point to the narrative.
In it, we see not the defiant Arendt selfassuredly explicating her theory of the banality of evil, but rather the exhausted and wounded Hannah experiencing a profound loss that was the price of speaking her truth.
Learning that her old and dear friend Kurt Blumenfeld, her Zionist teacher from Berlin, is terminally ill in Jerusalem, she rushes back there to see him. He tells Arendt she has gone too far this time and asks her if she does not love Israel and her people. He does not answer her profession of love for him. Instead, he literally turns his back on her, as an answer to his having understood that she has figuratively done so to him and all Jews.
“She did go back again to see him when he was sick,” Katz notes. “It is unknown if they ever reconciled.” 


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