Review of Hannah Arendt (2012) by Robert S — 07 Jul 2013

I saw this movie yesterday. Hannah Arendt was a brilliant, if highly controversial, German Jewish philosopher who escaped National Socialism in Berlin to France, only to be imprisoned in a detention camp there. She escaped and made her way to New York where she became a highly-acclaimed lecturer at some of the most prestigious universities in the country. She also wrote some clasic political analysis books, including "The Origins of Totalitarianism.".

The movie's about Arendt's most controversial writings, the five New Yorker articles she wrote after covering the Alfred Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. It's a powerful real-life drama, but what struck me the most was how rigorously honest she was. She read the thousands of pages of trial transcripts and related documents and concluded that Eichmann was an ordinary man who refused to think for himself, but simply to obey orders, however murderous they were. She coined the now-famous phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenen of ordinary Germans being responsible for the Holocaust.

In the articles, Arendt was also critical of the behavior of some of the Jewish leaders during that dark period, which cost her the long-term friendships of several noted Jewish intellectuals and scholars. Even the Israeli Mossad sent a delegation to threaten her not to publish the book she wrote based on the New Yorker articles, but she refused to even bow to that pressure.

An amazing woman and a movie on her life is long overdue.