Have you ever heard the phrase, "the banality of
evil?" The phrase was coined by a
German-Jewish philosopher named Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) after observing the
trial of Adolf Eichmann. I watched the film, Hannah Arendt
(2012) this past weekend, on Netflix. I had to watch it three times to catch all the nuances. You will not like it. It has no action, sex,
violence, horror, intrigue, comedy, or special effects.
Hannah Arendt studied philosophy under the most prominent continental
philosopher of the time, Martin Heidegger, at the University of Marburg. The film shows a young Martin Heidegger giving
a dramatic lecture on the importance of thinking. It also shows a young and adoring Hannah Arendt
going to his office and asking him to teach her to think.
As teacher and student, Martin and Hannah had a long and
stormy romantic relationship. Hannah had
to leave him to earn her Phd under another major German thinker, Karl Jaspers.
(Curiously, the topic of Hannah's Phd thesis was the concept of Love in
Saint Augustine. I wonder what Hannah's conscience told her about her
relationship with Heidegger and her other many affairs. Saint Augustine would not be pleased!) After Hannah received her Phd in
1929, she was denied a professorship because she was Jewish. It was in 1933 that the Nazis decreed by law that Jews could not teach in universities. Subsequently, Hannah did research into
anti-Semitism, which resulted in her being arrested and interrogated by the
Gestapo. She was only released from jail because of a sympathetic jailer (1933).
Within weeks of Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of
Germany (1933), Martin Heidegger was appointed rector of the University of
Freiburg and became an unwavering supporter of Nazism. Heidegger
had nothing personal against Jews. He supported Nazism merely for careerist
reasons--he felt it was necessary in order to support the university and
philosophy.
After her release from jail in 1933, Hannah fled to Paris,
where she worked to help other Jewish refugees.
But with the German occupation of northern France, she was sent to an
internment camp at Gurs, in Southern France, in 1940. Initially the camp was
run by French who were friendly to the Allies, but once the Germans took full
control, it became a transitional concentration camp, where the inhabitants
were shipped to Auschwitz. With outside help, Hannah and her husband escaped
and arrived in New York in 1941.
In New York, Hannah lived the life of a public intellectual. She was active in the German-Jewish community and was part of the circle of
intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review. She joined the faculty of The New School for
Social Research (joining numerous other ex-patriot refugees from Hitler). She had a large network of friends and colleagues, both Jewish and not, American and European.
Besides The New School, she taught at many other American
universities, including Bard, the University of Chicago, Berkeley, and
Princeton, where she was the first woman to become a full professor.
In 1951, her book, The
Origins of Totalitarianism, was published.
It was the first book to examine the rise of Nazism and Stalinism and their meaning, implications, and consequences, including for antisemitism. The book made her an intellectual celebrity.
In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was arrested in Argentina by agents
from the Israeli Mossad and flown to Israel to be put on trail. With the
arrest, Hannah Ardent sought and received an assignment from The New Yorker magazine to cover the trial as a
journalist. This is where the real drama begins.
The world thought of Eichmann as a monster--the personification
of evil, as close to being the devil himself as humanly possible. But after observing him at the trial, the
Jewish Hannah thought differently. She saw that he was not a monster but a
completely ordinary and mediocre human being. He was not a fanatic or a sociopath, but just a
stupid man who relied on cliches and conventional thinking rather than think for
himself. Hannah stated that personally, Eichmann was not even antisemitic. Her conclusion that the nature of evil is banal does not
rest on the fact that he was ordinary or that we are all potential Eichmann's, which we are, but that his stupidity and lack of conscience--his unwillingness to think--was unexceptional.
Eichmann of course claimed that he was only following orders. He claimed that he did not directly harm
or intend for harm to come to anyone. He
only made sure that the Jews were put on the trains. He even said that he did
not harbor any personal malice against any Jews.
In the film, Hannah (her character) says that in Western Civilization,
we think of evil as originating from selfishness. But she concludes no, that mass evil is not monstrous
or exceptional but results from people who simply refuse to think. She meant the
ability to decide right from wrong.
This claim by Hannah about Eichmann became hugely
controversial and is the central conflict in the film. But she made one
other claim that was even more controversial, that Jewish leaders in Europe had
cooperated with the Nazis, including with Eichmann's office itself.
Hannah lost many friends because of her
stand. She was called vile names by
countless people. The editors at the New Yorker magazine became very frightened about the
consequences of publishing her reportage. One person accused her of turning the
trial of Eichmann into a philosophical seminar. Another accused her of acting like a
superior German intellectual looking down on us Jews. The Israeli government sent four agents to
America to try and persuade her from publishing. When reason failed, they threatened
her. To her face, one former colleague sneeringly called
her, "Heidegger's favorite student." Hannah never backed down or yielded even an inch.
In the film, whenever Hannah is shown in public or having an
intellectual argument, she is portrayed as ice cold intellectual without human
feelings and is frequently accused of being such. Many times, when her
colleagues disagree with her and fail to persuade her to their point of view,
they call her arrogant to her face, to which she never flinches. Yet in
private, she is portrayed as human and affectionate, whether with men or women.
Through it all, Hannah Arendt refused to yield. She insisted on thinking. Indeed, the dramatic high point of the film is a scene where Hannah gives a fiery lecture to a class at, The New School of Social Research, on the importance and ability of a person to think.
As for Martin Heidegger, essentially, he was another Eichmann. With the Nazis in power, the towering genius of continental philosophy who had inspired
Hannah Arendt to learn to think chose not to think. But his student Hannah Arendt had learned her
lessons well.
