Hanna Arendt gets the smart, nuanced biopic she deserves, says the the advertising blurb, but diving in deeper its fascinating how the unhappy German-Jewish New York-based author reached her incendiary conclusions about Eichmann and the ‘banality of evil’.
Margaretha Von Trotta’s film of Arendt is based on the premise that we- the People of the Book– have a desire, a need, an expectation to see an issue from all sides. For example, to take a passage from the Talmud and to be able to argue either side, is no mean feat—it is a mark of a dexterous mind and a voracious intellectual capacity which is at the core of Jewish tradition. HANNAH ARENDT is a spotlight on an intellectual and a writer who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker magazine, and who came back with something other than the expected narrative.
In actuality, Arendt left Germany, without seeing the Nazis first hand, though she did spend time in a French detention camp. She escaped to America due to a combination of connection and luck. It is to Von Trotta’s credit that the Eichmann trial concludes at around the 40 minute mark of this two-hour movie. The remainder is set back in New York City where Arendt thinks, smokes and argues with her friends and evades the deadline of her editors. (Try slamming the phone down on the New Yorker today and see where that will get you). After much internal and external discussion, Arendt presents her conclusions and the work contains two explosive doozies.The first is, Eichmann was not a blood-thirsty, Jew-hating monster. He was a cog in a machine. He kept the trains running on time. He was a bureaucrat, an efficient but simple-minded individual. Its from Arendt’s observations on Eichmann that we get the now ubiquitous phrase, ‘the banality of evil’.
The other major point of contention– one that is not a central premise of her work, but undeniably important– it is the disconcerting notion that the Shoah could not have been so comprehensive without some measure of collaboration from Jewish leaders, “something between resistance and cooperation ” as she puts it in a gripping third act lecture.
For 1962, this is too much for the New York Jewish intellectual class to bear. Frankly, it doesn’t go down easier in 2026, either. Her work made her a persona non grata at the university where she taught, as well as at the dinner parties she attended. She’s even paid a visit by old Zionist friends who suggest she rescind further publication.
It’s here that the director’s film is more than just a reproduction of fact. With Barbara Kukowa playing the lead, there is a notable sadness behind Arendt’s fierce intellect. It comes in flashes as soon as she starts watching the trial.
Arendt isn’t happy to have these beliefs. She doesn’t want to bring her opinion to the world but her intellectual quest for truth, demands that she not censor herself. There is also interpersonal dynamics at play, suggesting that she isn’t so much trying to mute Eichmann’s culpability as much as she is searching for a way to forgive her former lover and prominent philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Whether or not Heidegger was a full-blooded Nazi is a debate, that will probably never be solved, but some of his actions don’t speak well to his character.
As heavy as it sounds, HANNAH ARENDT is a superb movie. Stimulating, smoke-filled conversations around the tiny Upper West Side apartments and everyone delivers brilliant bon mots with aplomb. Its not hard to play ‘spot the mid-century intellectual’ with Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Calvin Trillan and others popping up behind a curtain of cigarette haze uttering phrases like, “the perversity of brilliance.” Janet McTeen’s portrayal of McCarthy, offers a bit of comic relief and an observer to all the Mittel-European weightings. McCarthy even challenges Arendt to a game of pool.
Much has been written about the Eichmann trial which was an absolute necessity for the nascent State of Israel to find closure to the Holocaust. It is to Israel ‘s great strength, however, that it came not in the form of a anonymous revenge killing, but with giving witness, no matter how painful. Moreover, Arendt ‘s dispassionate commentary, even if unpleasant, made the experience even more profound.
The Jewish people had their day of reckoning and reconciliation in front of the entire world. And then they argued about it.
