Many of German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta’s movies root themselves in the lives of female characters who are caught in the complex wrangling of a world at odds with the woman’s conviction and sense of self. This is true of the filmmaker’s latest film, Hannah Arendt, about the famed German-Jewish philosopher and the favorite student of Heidegger. The film takes place in the early 1960s. The SS officer Adolf Eichmann has been arrested in Buenos Aires by Israeli secret service and shipped to Jerusalem, where he will stand trial for his crimes and complicity in the Nazi death machine. “I never seen one of these people in the flesh,” Arendt writes The New Yorker, requesting an assignment reporting on the trial. How can the magazine’s editors turn down such an offer?
As it turns out, what Arendt encounters in the courtroom in Jerusalem is not the monster so many people expect Eichmann to be, but rather a mediocre bureaucrat. His crime, as Arendt begins to see it, is intrinsically bound up in the way the Nazi officer forfeited his capacity for thinking in order to become a cog in the war machine. This forfeiture, Arendt argues, is essentially a relinquishing of the most defining human trait, and therefore, Arendt begins to associate the concept of evil with a dehumanization. Most controversially, Arendt takes this line of reasoning one step further. There were Jewish leaders in the ghettos, she argues, that while not complicit with the Nazi Holocaust, were less than resistant. In their actions, Arendt sees a similar forfeiture of intellectual conviction.
As her editors expect, The New Yorker articles spark severe and intense public backlash, and Arendt finds herself a pariah in both the intellectual and Jewish communities. In this latter section of the film, von Trotta hinges her drama and stakes of an intellectual argument. The result is a surprisingly bubbling series of scenes that simultaneously show Arendt making her case, and withstanding the professional and personally pressure that is weighing down on her. As with von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum (1975) or Vision (2009), her heroine is victim of a complex layering of indignation, which seeks to leverage gender and conviction against the character, who must dig from those very same wells to persevere in her resolve.
Hannah Arendt is unique kind of movie, a dramatized philosophical debate for which ideas become the primary agency of a persecution. The movie also resists reduction into a simple homage or hero worship. Each time Arendt’s compelling arguments win us over, we are foiled by the perspective of someone else in her circle, by efforts to expose how arrogance or lack of empathy may – or may not – cloud the philosopher’s thinking. But the real achievement of the film is the way it renders its main character. Barbara Sukowa’s muted, magnetic, and captivating portrayal of Arendt measures the strength, conviction, and reserve of a towering woman. And through Sukowa’s performance, we are subtly prodded to make comparisons to our own day, to the witness of Arendt’s lion-mind and its contribution to understanding a complicated historical moment. We leave yearning for a similar figure for our own complex historical era.
