Film Review: ‘Hannah Arendt’ is a love letter, eulogy and elegy to the prophetic voice

If we do not recognize ourselves watching Hannah Arendt, we should. There is still time to find the prophetic within each one of us.

Hannah Arendt is about a woman taking a stand. It is about defying injustice and the difficult experiences that come with it.

Hannah Arendt is about the solitude one feels in the midst of a battle where the stakes are a history of a people and the betterment of humankind.

Hannah Arendt is about the conscience of humanity.

Hannah Arendt is about thinking after Western civilization has collapsed and unmasking those who manage and mystify thought.

Hannah Arendt is about getting to the bottom of evil so that the passions such evil arouse enhance rather than cripple our capacity to fight the evil coming around history’s bend.

If the prophetic and compassion often seem distant from one another, watch Hannah Arendt. Better yet, watch the film to encounter its heroine – as a person you are or, in your own way, can become.

For Hannah Arendt, the challenge to embody the prophetic and compassion requires thinking and acting without borders. It also involves love for others and the world. Within the calling and the solitude it brought her, Arendt embraced both.

The genius of Hannah Arendt is that for the first time in her controversial public life, we see Hannah and Arendt together. We see both as one. We also encounter Hannah, beautiful Hannah, as herself.

Those opposed to Arendt’s prophetic understandings found her compassion lacking. Their assumption is telling. Since Arendt’s thought was relentless and disturbed them profoundly, she must be without feeling.

Yet Hannah Arendt shows this to be a profound misjudgment. The film is a primer on how practicing the prophetic is impossible without a deep compassion for others. Hannah Arendt’s life shows the difficulties involved and how it is worth the effort.

Watching Hannah Arendt, I thought of how voyeuristic our public life has become. We watch others grapple with the issues of our day. Arendt was in the arena, when it was in her self-interest and when it wasn’t.

Hannah Arendt is splendid on a variety of levels. The portrayals of the people involved in Arendt’s life are, for the most part, full and expressive. Arendt’s often assertive and defiant character is memorably enacted. In the end, though, Hannah Arendt is a film about a woman who refused to be a bystander. Arendt was a one woman dynamo of investigation and confrontation. What others advised her to let pass, she took on as an opportunity.

Arendt in Jerusalem

Such was the drama Arendt was drawn to in the person of Adolf Eichmann. Friends of Arendt had difficulty understanding why she chose to revisit the horrors she recently escaped from. As a German Jew now safely entrenched in America and having written a widely acclaimed scholarly book on totalitarianism, why return to the terrible terrain of mass death, as a journalist no less, in a courtroom, at a trial of a Nazi war criminal, in Jerusalem?

What the film makes clear is that Arendt wanted to encounter Eichmann in order to see what Eichmann, the mass murderer, was like in person. Was her encounter a way of testing how close her scholarly treatise on totalitarianism was to reality?

Arendt could be incredibly abstract in her writing. She could be remarkably direct. In the end, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem must be read together.

In that Jerusalem courtroom, Arendt found a rather ordinary man, a faceless bureaucrat longing to obey orders and thereby rise in his career. What she did not find in Eichmann was hate, the motive of motives, or a viral anti-Semitism that would justify an eternity of thoughtless Jewish grandstanding.

The Jewish establishment never forgave Arendt for the banality she found in Eichmann’s evil. Hannah Arendt does.

Arendt never thought that the Nazi crimes were banal. When such an interpretation was suggested, Arendt became livid. What she saw in the Nazi crimes was humanity’s future, a future we were unprepared for, a future where crimes were committed by the state and where logical crime replaced crimes of passion.

Arendt found Eichmann and the Nazis to be thoroughly modern. Or rather their barbarism was modernized. The Nazi machine at least was beyond emotion and beyond good and evil. No courtroom, least of all one organized by the people that such horrific crimes were committed against, had the capacity to judge such crimes. Nonetheless, Arendt agreed that Eichmann should hang.

There are scholars today who think Arendt was wrong on Eichmann. Far from removed and passionless – a cog in the Nazi bureaucratic wheel – Eichmann was a relentless and involved anti-Semite. Indeed scholars have argued with Arendt’s interpretation of every significant historical and philosophical idea she wrote so assuredly about. But, then, we are all still talking about and arguing with Arendt as if she were alive almost forty years after her death.

Hannah Arendt poses an intriguing question without providing an answer. What makes Hannah Arendt as compelling today as she was when she was alive?

Hannah and Arendt together

What few understood – and what the film captures well – is that Arendt was at her best as a commentator on unfolding events. It is in her role as a commentator, rather than in her scholarly books, that Arendt’s best writing is found. Her commentaries are strong and deep, well-reasoned and forceful. Whether Arendt was right or wrong, she makes you think.

Arendt was a thinking writer. We feel her thinking as we read her words.

Arendt paid a tremendous price for her commitments. That price, too, is fully rendered in Hannah Arendt. In the film, those who oppose Arendt come off as unthinking obstructionists. They are willing enablers of thoughtless thought.

Whether at the New School for Social Research where she taught after she arrived in America or her old German friends in Jerusalem and New York, functionaries and thinkers alike are taken aback by Arendt’s boldness. To the opponents unknown to her personally, Arendt leaves them to lick their wounds. When her friends turn away, she grieves.

A grieving Hannah is foreign to those who delight in thrashing Arendt for their own political agendas. Nonetheless, the film brings this side of Hannah Arendt to light. There are times in the film when you want to console Hannah. There are times when you are sure she would console you.

Hannah Arendt handles the two sides of Arendt well: Arendt as a take-no-prisoner gladiator; Hannah as a delightful and loving person. We see Hannah in love and more than once, with flashbacks to her teacher and lover, the great philosopher and Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger.

In her private life, Hannah was as faithful to her past and present lovers as she was to her thinking. Hannah was way beyond the political correctness of our present academic climate that is guarded so assiduously by often corrupt male and female imposters. Hannah never regretted her love for her teacher or made herself a victim of the encounter she welcomed. No doubt she would see our present political correctness on this and other issues as a dumbing down of thought.

Hannah never abandoned the loves of her life. Against great odds and without fear of the consequences on her career, Hannah sought out the people she loved and, when necessary, pursued reconciliation with them. The film’s short scene of Hannah with Heidegger after the war shows this clearly, though we are left to imagine the outcome.

Nor did Hannah’s love for teacher diminish the other great love of her life, Heinrich Blucher. Even when, painfully for her, Blucher spent time with other women, Hannah remains clear in her commitment. Hannah Arendt only hints at these affairs and Hannah’s response in fleeting moments. Again, political correctness eludes Hannah in her private life as it does in her public life. She acknowledges the broad arc of her life and the life of her lovers.

The Jewish establishment figures of her time opposed Arendt, deriding her as arrogant, unable to love herself as a Jew or show compassion for her own recently martyred people. As the film accurately portrays, however, Arendt is thinking through the ramifications of worldly events. This takes courage, though for Arendt courage is the least of it. Thinking is Arendt’s appointed task. It is essential to her being. What does courage have to do with thinking?

Arendt’s Jewishness and Jewish politics

Everything one admires about Hannah Arendt, we lack. This makes our American and Jewish politics shameful and those who practice it shameless. It has led us to dark corners of an imperialism so deep we have become unrecognizable to ourselves. But these are only examples of the deeper rot Hannah Arendt exposes.

Of the Jewish rot, Arendt was clear. What she exposed from her first writings in the 1930s, the film explores through the Eichmann trial and the controversy that followed. The film thus compresses Arendt’s life and contribution to the Eichmann years. Nonetheless, it is true to Arendt’s overall vision.

Part of the rot Arendt found was in Jewish leadership. Or did the failure of Jewish leadership expose a deeper Jewish fault line?

For Arendt, the failure of Jewish life was evident in Israel. She also found it in Europe during the Nazi years. In the film much of this is fast forwarded into the 1960s. In the controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann trial reporting we see it through a prism of sensationalism that views anti-Semitism as eternal rather than political. Hence the loyalty the Jewish establishment demanded to a romanticized and militarized Jewishness. Arendt refused these demands.

Of the Jewish Councils who governed the European ghettos created by the Nazis, Arendt was scathing. In one of the longest and most dramatic scenes of the film, William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker, who published Arendt’s report in his magazine, visits Arendt in her apartment. His mission is to query Arendt about a statement in her Eichmann reporting that is sure to be controversial. It may have significant negative consequences for her down the line. Is she sure it should stay as is?

Shawn quotes the statement back to her: “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.” Arendt stands by her statement. For her it is a matter of fact.

Arendt abhorred patriotism of all kinds. How could she think what needed to be thought if she was busy saluting a flag? That included the Jewish flag, with and without a state, and before, during and after the Holocaust.

Watching Hannah Arendt I wondered about the focus on this statement. Is it given such prominence because historically this is the jumping off place for Arendt’s vilification? Or is the film suggesting we ponder its relevance to contemporary Jewish leadership? After all, Israel can be seen as a nuclearized ghetto in the Middle East or, as Arendt preferred, the new Sparta. More than a few Jews believe Israel is becoming the “darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”

Did the abhorrence to patriotism diminish Arendt’s Jewishness or enhance it? The German director, Margarethe Von Trotta, deserves our admiration for her film but on the issue of Arendt’s Jewishness she is out of her league. With the history of Nazi Germany at her back, she steps gingerly here as she does on Israel. Though she doesn’t shy away from Arendt’s Jewishness, Hannah Arendt has little idea of what to do with it.

Most reviewers don’t know what to do with Arendt’s Jewishness either. Though reviews of the film have been excellent, few understand Hannah Arendt as a film about a committed Jewish thinker in a time where crucial decisions about the Jewish future are being made. This lacuna is of tremendous importance.

There are many ways to view Hannah Arendt. She can be seen as a European intellectual, as a philosopher, as a historian of thought, as a commentator. She was all these and more. At her base though, Arendt should be thought as a Jew negotiating her Jewishness through the two formative events of contemporary Jewish history, the Holocaust and formation of the state of Israel.

Without her Jewishness and her attention to Jewish history, Hannah Arendt would merit little discussion today. The bulk of her writing revolved around Jews and Jewish history. Moreover, it was her Jewishness that grounded Arendt. It was the way she reached out to the world.

The avoidance of Arendt’s Jewishness is therefore fascinating. It could be that Arendt’s Jewishness is too complex and controversial to be dealt with. Or Arendt’s Jewishness is no longer available to us. Arendt’s Jewishness may be like an ancient species that we can identify as having existed but cannot place in the evolutionary biology of our time.

Arendt’s Jewishness is anachronistic – to our detriment.

All of which testifies to how much our concept of Jewishness has changed since Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann was published fifty years ago. Arendt’s Jewishness was buried under the avalanche we know as the Holocaust and Israel.

Unbeknownst to itself, Hannah Arendt is an excavation of Jewishness. Does Arendt’s Jewishness have any ground to take root?

Because Arendt is compelling as a committed Jewish thinker, it is sad that Arendt’s Jewishness has become fossilized. Yet this is where we have arrived. Hannah Arendt may be our occasion to say goodbye to Hannah Arendt and the Jewishness she embodied.

Hannah Arendt is a love letter, a eulogy and an elegy, combined into one. The film is a requiem tribute to a Jewish woman who lived a life of fully committed thought in the dark times she lived through and the dark times she predicted to come.

That dark time to come she also experienced, though the film leaves the consequences to her lifetime.

What Arendt lived and predicted was the shutting down of the Jewish tradition of dissent in exchange for status and empire success in America and Israel.

What Arendt announced in secular language was the end of the Jewish prophetic.

For a time the end of the Jewish prophetic seemed assured. Arendt’s prediction was coming true. Now we are experiencing the explosion of the Jewish prophetic. Arendt would have been pleased.

Even as Jews can take pride that Hannah Arendt thought defiantly until the end, the film is tinged with sadness. The Holocaust years are replayed through the Eichmann trial and the refugees Arendt lived among. With Arendt, we witness the flowering of European Jewish history – and its end.

At the conclusion of Hannah Arendt, we are left dangling with the Jewish American and Israeli leaders that Arendt battled with – and the downward spiral we experience today.

We are left with Arendt’s prophetic voice gone silent.

To practice the prophetic in exile, we must walk the path of deep compassion. Arendt was that voice, thinking until the end.

For what is compassion without thought? And what is thought unless we are willing to stand up and be counted?