There is a film about Hannah Arendt titled Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt is played by an actress who speaks only lines written for her by others but not by Hannah Arendt herself. There are episodes in the film which are clearly invented just as all of the dialogue has had to be. It is not the actual Hannah Arendt we see but a confection designed for an audience who will typically know almost nothing about her life other than what is found on the screen. Part one that follows was written a few hours after I had seen the film. The second part was written a day later. The third part was written a few days after that.

First Part

In the end I couldn’t tell if Hannah Arendt the film was a perfect portrayal of an evil woman and that everyone could see what a wicked person she was, or that it was a defence of her views in which most people would sympathise with what she had written and the beliefs she had.

But by the end I was in a boiling rage, at what or at whom I cannot exactly say. If I try to separate out the strands it may be rage at a world in which some third party will feel perfectly content to comment from a distance on the suffering of others, will be indifferent to the horrors that come into their lives and rather than merely say nothing at all because it isn’t their life and there is nothing that can be said, will prattle on in some high plane and abstract philosophical tone that only adds deep insult to those who have survived and seen their lives and everyone they have loved murdered in the name of some other high plane and abstract philosophy. And that applies to the producers of the film just as much as it does to Arendt herself. And if you see the film and you side with Arendt, then it applies to you as well.

Arendt is now associated with the phrase “banality of evil”, where the actual monsters who organised the murders of Jews are portrayed as a mere cog in a large bureaucratic entity for which their own responsibility is nil. That in most instances there is no revenge to be had, nothing that can be done to make anything better, no thing that can be done to make the wounds heal, only makes our lives so potentially filled with suffering. And whether Eichmann was a dedicated Nazi, anti-Semitic to the core, or was merely a desk clerk carrying out the orders of others, he knew perfectly well that what he had done would be seen by others as wrong and evil. He did know that and that is why he took the trouble to escape at the end of the War. And that he fought for his own life at the trial in Jerusalem meant he too knew how much our own lives mean to each of us. He knew all that and while he may have been that mere cog, he also knew that if he were caught he would be punished for what he had done.

Nor did he go into that courtroom in Jerusalem and say that yes, certainly I did all that, so what? He didn’t try to defend his actions by defending what he had done as the virtuous acts of an innocent man. He went in to try to save his own life because it was precious to him just as the lives of the six million was precious to those he had caused to be killed.

As for the film, my disgust focuses on Arendt herself but that is not the reaction I think was intended. I don’t think the intention was to show her as an evil woman morally without compass. The intent was to show that she and the New Yorker editor, William Shawn, were wrongly accused by those who were revolted by the original publication of her articles and subsequent book. The aim of the film was to show that with the detachment of time, that in today’s far more anti-Semitic world, that it is Hannah Arendt and her philosophy that have endured and those who sought justice against a mass murderer, however infinitesimally meagre it might be, were wrong and themselves evil.

But the film did show both sides; I will not deny the film that much virtue. And if its intention was to make visible the banality of philosophers, then I am all for it. I don’t think that was the intention but it would be nice if it were but I doubt it.

Her final defence was pathetic. In her speech at the end of the film to a room full of students, who applaud her warmly when she is done, she says that of course she cared about the Jews because they were humans and since she cares about humans, as a subset of all humanity she must obviously care about the Jews.

If that struck anyone as an answer to the accusations against her that she was cold, merciless and morally evil then they can join with her in pretending to themselves that they have any concern for raw humanity. But other than Nazi war criminals who we cannot put on trial because there was no law at the time making illegal the things the Nazis did, Arendt and her cohort actually show no concern for any actual flesh and blood human beings.

The events of the film take place in the early 1960s. They are a marker for the death of philosophy because from this woman and the thousands of pages that she wrote, there is not a scrap of a thought about how anyone should live and how evil should be judged. Hers is the same Nazi ideology that exists just as much on the totalitarian left as it did on the totalitarian right, shown here in all its grime and filth. That we can now make films praising women such as Arendt shows how far our own culture has fallen from where it had once previously been, however low it was even then.

Second Part

But this is not where this review must end. This is a movie about Hannah Arendt not by Hannah Arendt. This is about a film constructed in the second decade of the twenty-first century, not an article written in the early 1960s. It is a film with a different audience in mind than the one that Hannah Arendt was writing for. We know less history, have different sensibilities and no one reads Arendt any more the way they once used to. Even I who read what she wrote back when she was writing it am a different person whose politics have changed as have the perspectives of those who are interested. A film audience will know less than one percent of what she wrote and will have almost no relevant knowledge of the philosophical tradition in which she worked. This is a film in pop philosophy for the more adolescent audiences of our own day.

Every film of this type has a core and a message. This is a story being told by the film maker using Hannah Arendt as the vehicle. Given the thousands of pages that she wrote – given her magnum opus On the Origins of Totalitarianism – it is safe to say no one is going to troll back and re-read what she wrote then. More to the point was the message that was conveyed by those who made the film built on the pretentions that they were articulating Arendt’s philosophy. It is what audiences are being told and are accepting today that is the actual issue. Arendt has gone to God, but we still live and this is the message we must deal with.

And while by now, a day later, the intensity of the rage has gone the reason for the outrage has not. The film is about the good philosopher who was shunned by the Jews, who would not listen, who are this stiff-necked people who did not fight back against the Nazis and who deserve no sympathy for their views and values and should be condemned for their persecution of Arendt. A big part of the film centres on the outrage caused at the time of publication about the role of the leaders in the ghettoes in conspiring with the Nazis. Infuriating for anyone to say it then or now but she would have had a more subtle point than we see on screen. I am disgusted by her saying it if she did, but I am repulsed by it being thrown up today in a film about the Holocaust.

But the point made by Arendt in what I assume was a fake lecture which had never occurred was to shift the Holocaust away from what it was, the most horrific anti-Semitic act of modern times (the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE was worse) and have made it a general issue about the inhumanity of man to man. Everyone now seems to want to take a piece of the victim action. Why should the Jews have title to the the worst genocide in history? Why do the Jews get everything and the rest of us get only the crumbs?

What is therefore at the centre of the film is the attempt to universalise what had been a particular. The Holocaust was the product of anti-Semitism. The central lesson from it is what the hatred of Jews can cause. There are no end of other kinds of political horrors, from Stalin’s Russia, through Mao’s China and onto the Cambodia of Pol Pot. And there are also many lessons about socialist tyrannies where a people’s party gains absolute power to try to mould society into some desired shape. And there are other similar kinds of events in which religious wars lead to deaths of large numbers of those who seek either to maintain the faith against encroachment by others or attempt to bring converts to their side through the threat of annihilation.

But anti-Semitism has had a lethal quality all its own and has been a near constant through the ages. It is its own thing and it a form of hatred that has never been directed at any other people during the whole of history. This is not a contest over territory or political power. It is not about countering some threat of some kind. It is not about removing some proselytizing group who wishes to supplant the ruling religious belief. It is about the hatred directed towards an identifiable but powerless group in their midst who are blamed for troubles they did not cause and are in no way responsible for.

The attempt by the film makers to take an explicit hatred of Jews that became a campaign of mass murder which was pursued relentlessly until the Nazi regime was finally brought to an end and turn this historical event into a universal story of man’s inhumanity to man and the need for tolerance, is to deny the Jewish people their right to the solace of recognition by the world that Jews are often hated until death by others. The longest hatred it has been called and so it seems to be with no evident end looking forward into the future. That this is now a common theme in Europe where this film originated from is heightened in my mind in this article, titled Holocaust Remembrance: New Tool for Anti-Semitism? which is about the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The following is from the article:

The Anne Frank Museum, writes Meotti, has ‘sanitized Anne Frank’s story of almost all its Jewish references … The result is that the public is now completely desensitized to the unique catastrophe that was the destruction of European Jewry. The Museum has also turned into a powerful source of criticism of Israel in Europe.’ ‘Israel,’ the Anne Frank Foundation wrote in a report, ‘pushes Palestinians economically into a corner and humiliates them psychologically.’

In 2004, an exhibition in the Anne Frank Museum compared former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler. The former Soviet dissident, Natan Sharansky, then a Israeli government minister, reacted indignantly, saying the museum was ‘showing contempt for the memory of the six million who were murdered in the Holocaust.’

My anger at the film was in part directed at the portrayal of Hannah Arendt for the distance she seemed to show for the suffering of others (which as near as I can tell is absolutely and completely wrong so far as the real person is concerned) but even more am I outraged by the film itself which attempts to rob the Jewish people of their own history and tries to turn their story into a supposed lesson for all peoples at all times and in all places with only minimal relevance to the Jewish people themselves. Anne Frank was not murdered because she was a human being; she was murdered because she was a Jew.

Third Part

I watched the film as part of the Jewish Film Festival in Melbourne and in the two sessions there were say around 400 people who went along and I would say that no more than ten went home afterwards and took down or looked up the writings of Hannah Arendt. But I am like Hannah Arendt in that I am interested in following ideas, understanding others and in thinking about thinking. I am an historian of ideas and wanted to get to the bottom of things. So I went out and bought a copy of The Jewish Writings of Hannah Arendt edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman (Schocken Books, 2007) which I have been reading ever since. And so while I still think the film is vile and I cannot absolve Hannah Arendt herself she does have a meaning that is worth thinking about. There is a very different person in the essays and articles she wrote, far distant from the woman portrayed on screen.

Let me go to the two major issues that have remained incandescent since she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem and were brought out in the film. The banality of evil applied to Eichmann is the obverse of radical evil as understood by Kant (see p 479) and described by Arendt. This was too precious a distinction to have been put into a magazine article. She distinguishes between radical as in deep in comparison with a superficial unthinking outcome which was evil in its finality but for which there was merely a getting on with life. Schopenhauer once described the different perspective of a lion and a zebra where the lion is eating the zebra. Eichmann was every inch the Nazi and a complete anti-Semite but was above all a careerist who wanted to rise within the Nazi hierarchy. It is his smallness that is the issue. He who caused so much grief and misery is a nothing, an absolute nobody, as cipheric as any cipher could possibly be. You try him, you hang him, you hold him up for all the world to see and there is nothing there worth bothering about. Remove him from the apparatus of the Nazi state and he is a nonentity. Why make him the centre of this show trial? You find him in Argentina, you take him to a safe house, tell him you are from the Mossad and kill him. Doing more than that honours him, makes him far more than he was, and diminishes you. This is Arendt discussing radical evil in 1952, more than a decade before she wrote of its possible banality:

Totalitarianism, unlike all other known modes of tyranny and oppression, has brought into the world a radical [her italics] evil characterised by its divorce from all humanly comprehensible motives of wickedness. (460)

It’s there and in our world but there is no making sense of it.

The second issue was Arendt’s discussion that the holocaust could not have occurred without the organisation provided by the Judenrat, the Jewish Councils in the ghettos. She argues that this was a minor point in the articles and the books and has only endured as an issue to our own time because of all the fuss that was made when they were published. I can see that. And I do not even think she was saying this as an accusation. She was just pointing out that the Jews were a political people with political organisations already in place and that this turned out to be very handy for the Nazis. This may be a complete misunderstanding of what she actually wrote elsewhere and misrepresent what she meant but this seems a reasonable thing to have said and seems to be what she may have meant. The Nazis are elected in Germany in 1933, they conquer Poland in 1939, they take the rest of Europe in 1941, they attack Russia in 1941 and have the Wannsee Conference, which led to the Final Solution, in January 1942. Here let me quote from a review of a book by Leon Poliakov on The Third Reich and the Jews:

Nowhere does Mr. Poliakov’s integrity and objectivity show to better advantage than in his accout of the ghettos and the role of the Jedenrate, or Jewish councils. He neither accuses nor excuses, but reports fully and faithfully what the sources tell him – the growing apathy of the victims as well as their occasional heroism, the terrible dilemma of the Judenrate, their despair as well as their confusion, their complicity and their sometimes pathetically ludicrous ambitions. . . . [The German Jews] served the Nazis as guinea pigs in their investigation of the problems of how to get people to help carry out their own death sentences, the last turn of the screw in the totalitarian scheme of total domination. (458-459)

Everyone has motivations of their own including the desire to live a long life. Inside the ghettoes of Nazi occupied Europe the options were limited and if some stepped forward to run the Judenrate no one should be surprised. But whatever else we can say about those who took the lead in those dark times, not one single member of the Judenrate, not a single one, would not instantly have preferred to return to the way things had been before the war, not one. Whatever positions of power or influence they might have reached, each was trying to make the best of an extremely bad lot and virtually all were trying to make life better for those who were suffering with them at the hands of the Nazis. To imply in any way that members of the Jewish Councils were collaborating with the Nazis is disgusting and historically untrue.