Into the Woods: Eichmann, Heidegger, and Margarethe von Trotta’s <em>Hannah Arendt</em>

Abstract

Into Woods Eichmann, Heidegger, and Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt (2012). Directed by Margarethe von Trotta; screenplay by von Trotta and Pam Katz. Produced by Heimatfilm (Germany), Amour Fou (Luxembourg), Sophie Dulac Productions (France), co-producer, Metro Communications, ARD Deneto Film (Germany), co-production; Bayerische Rundfunk (Germany), co-production; Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Germany), co-production. 113 minutes.I shall never be able to possess you, but from now on you will belong to my life, which shall increase through you. . . . The path your young life will take is hidden. We will submit to it.-Martin Heidegger, letter to Hannah Arendt, November 10, 19251Hannah Arendt was one of great political thinkers of twentieth century. A German Jewish refugee, briefly interned in Gurs, France, by pro-Nazi Vichy regime in 1940, she escaped to United States in 1941. Living in New York City, she wrote major studies of, among other subjects, totalitarianism, revolution, and violence-how people use and abuse power at a mass level. When, in 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped and brought to Israel for trial infamous Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann-then living under an assumed name in Argentina-Arendt covered trial for New Yorker, and her writing later became basis for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on Banality of Evil.2 Her experience on this assignment and in its aftermath are now subject of a strikingly chiaroscuro film, Hannah Arendt, by renowned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta.Arendt (here ably played by Barbara Sukowa, who perhaps best resembles portrait of Arendt issued on a German postage stamp in 19883), advanced two painful ideas that made her target of fierce criticism and controversy, chiefly among many fellow Jews: first, that Eichmann was not, as Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner alleged, a monster or psychopath but rather a frighteningly normal individual who had surrendered capacity for critical judgment and for understanding human consequences of his actions; and second (in context, a miniscule digression by Arendt), that logistics of mass murder (Eichmann's special domain of expertise) was helped along significantly by a problematic cooperation of Judenrate, Jewish ghetto councils Nazis had appointed to supply victims for deportation to death camps. (Many a Judenrat member, it must be remembered, had acted in a well-meaning and sometimes successful attempt to save lives.)That Arendt's argument would raise hackles was unavoidable. That its force and significance would be misunderstood was equally so. Arendt was careful to point out that she wasn't blaming European Jews for their fate, nor finding any moral equivalence between their acts under duress and Eichmann's crimes. Nor, in finding in Eichmann what she famously termed the banality of evil, was she mitigating in any way depth of his guilt. On contrary, it was only in such terms that guilt could be assigned altogether. Only if Nazis are human, Arendt insisted, can they properly stand for judgment in a court of law; only then does judgment, with any credible measure of moral or civil certainty, make sense. In Arendt's words:[I]t would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though, if he had been, Israel's case against him would have collapsed, or, at very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon whole world and gather correspondents from four corners of earth in order to display Bluebeard in dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were terribly and terrifyingly normal.4We of course want Eichmann to be less like us. By removing sanitary line between ourselves and malignant mass consequences of thoughtlessness, Arendt justly made readers uncomfortable. …