7/11/13
Hannah Arendt.
Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. German and Hebrew with subtitles. At the
Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Hannah Arendt
When Hannah Arendt approached New Yorker editor William Shawn
with her offer to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann shortly to begin in Jerusalem,
she had no way of knowing that the result — published as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963),
after serialization in the magazine — would arouse undying controversy. Nor could
the famously — even fiercely? — placid Shawn have foreseen that Arendt’s reporting
would put The New Yorker at the center of a debate about the Holocaust, though,
if truth be told, Shawn had prior warning: the magazine’s publication of Phillip
Roth’s story, “Defender of the Faith” in 1959, had attracted its fair share of ire.
Roth’s story focused on a Jewish conscript’s effort to avoid
combat in World War II by appealing to his sergeant’s Jewishness. The story does
not, in the end, exonerate this sort of appeal to Jewish solidarity, Auschwitz or
no Auschwitz. Nor, of course, did Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem exonerate all Jewish
behavior; it accused the Jewish leadership of Eastern European communities of, in
effect, smoothing the way to the death camps. As she saw it, chaos would have worked
better for Jewish survival than the efficient, top down organization imposed by
Jewish communal leadership.
The best critique of Arendt’s approach is Deborah Lipstadt’s
The Eichmann Trial.
Though Lipstadt defends Arendt against many who have tried to savage her, she adds
a telling charge of her own: Arendt simply absented herself from key proceedings
at the trial, choosing, instead, despite her brief for the New Yorker, to vacation,
when it suited her, in Switzerland. The proceedings Arendt missed, according to
Lipstadt, happen to have been the very ones when Eichmann bared his teeth, sloughed
off his disguise, showed he didn’t merely follow orders, as he often averred during
the trial, but was a vehement Nazi, a true Jew-hater and a committed genocidaire.
Hannah Arendt
doesn’t follow Lipstadt’s lead in this matter, but the film is nevertheless substantial
and worthwhile. It depicts Arendt’s milieu in New York City, when she taught at
the New School and was acclaimed, as well she deserved to be, as author of The Origins
Of Totalitarianism. The critique Arendt mounts in that book of the leadership of
French Jewry in regard to the Dreyfuss Affair prefigures her critique of Jewish
leadership during World War II, and repays study.
The movie also gets some atmospherics right — the fact that most
every intellectual, and most everybody else, including Arendt, smoked cigarettes,
endlessly, in that era; the view however foggy, of the Hudson, as seen, putatively,
from Arendt’s Upper West Side apartment, where she conducted what was in effect,
a salon, a salon with roots in enlightenment Europe, and with connections to the
world she depicted marvelously in Rachel Varnhagen, her portrait of a German Jewish
salonier. (It might have been a nice touch if the movie had shown Robert Lowell,
for instance, attending Arendt’s Upper West Side salon, as he often appreciatively
did. But Margarethe von Trotta is a German filmmaker and that aspect of the Arendt
milieu might well have escaped her, though it raises the questions of what von Trotta’s
German audience has made of this movie, about Jewish-German emigres, and Jews.)
And above all there is the opposition the film, to its credit,
puts forward, but perhaps also to its credit, does not push more forcefully, the
opposition, that is, between Eichmann, in his glass cage at the trial — “to protect
him from us”, according to one of Arendt’s Israeli friends — and Martin Heidegger,
Arendt’s lover during her student days and her mentor in the art of “thinking.”
The film portrays Heidegger saying — I both paraphrase and fill
in — that to think, to think philosophically, or better yet, ontologically, is not
practical or ambitious. It has nothing to do with technology or progress. It is
carried out in solitude, leads nowhere and is therefore all the more fundamental.
Mystical as this may seem, it had resonance for Arendt, and even
after it was well-established that Heidegger had allied himself in craven ways with
Nazism, it resonated for European philosophical “thinking.”
The movie presents Eichmann, for Arendt, as the anti-Heidegger.
He has no thought at all. That, at any rate, is what she accuses him of, utter,
shrecklich — terrifying — thoughtlessness.
Through flashbacks, the movie suggests that Heidegger is her anti-Eichmann. Arendt
met with her ex-lover and mentor after the war but never forgave and perhaps never
got over his Nazism. It is Heidegger she wants to see on the stand, in the glass
cage in Jerusalem, refuting the charges laid against him, standing up, ontologically,
for the right of Hitler and the Nazis to murder the Jews.
Arendt, this movie suggests, hungered for that high dialectic.
Instead she got only someone incapable of anything approaching it — Eichmann. And
so sojourned in Basel.
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