Hannah Arendt
I am a huge fan of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, to the extent that I find myself yearning to quote it in unrelated papers - because nothing is really unrelated to Arendt! all human questions ultimately return to the nature of evil! - so when I heard that the university cinema was showing the new Arendt biopic, of course I had to go.
And it was great! I thought they did a brilliant job showing the complicated tangle of friendships and romances in Arendt’s social circle, making it possible to follow without spelling everything out. I think often social groups operate in a sort of fog - not only because often things happen in secret, but also because often people don’t know what they feel for each other as it’s happening, because their feelings fluctuate.
Some of these friendships have more than forty years of history behind them, and some of them have been fantastically stressed by war and differing political opinions. The film manages to explain or imply all the backstory we need without ever info-dumping, which is so impressive.
(Also, Mary McCarthy <3 <3 <3. I should finally get around to reading that book of hers that I own...)
The film focuses mainly on the process and aftermath of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem - in fact, I think the few flashbacks they scattered in may have been the movie’s only mistake; I can see why they wanted to include Arendt’s affair with Heidegger, but the flashbacks interrupted the flow of the film. I think they could have included some of the emotional fallout of the affair - Heidegger later became a Nazi - without the flashbacks.
Just as the film did a wonderful job communicating this very complicated social milieu, it also did a wonderful job distilling out the main ideas of the book without simplifying them too much - and of portraying the controversy around the book. Eichman in Jerusalem caused a huge firestorm when it was published because, among other reasons, many people argued that she all but exonerated Eichmann.
Given that the book ends with Arendt writing her own version of Eichmann’s death sentence, this is clearly wrong. She thought he deserved to hang, but believed that the court had done a poor job demonstrating why, because they didn’t understand the nature of his crime because they held to an old-fashioned understanding of evil that couldn’t explain Nazi crimes.
That is, they believed that to commit great evil, one needs some grand motivation, that a sin like greed or lust or hatred or selfishness must be at the root of it. But Arendt argues that evil sometimes has nothing behind it - no motivation beyond an unwillingness or inability to think. A contemporary writer might say an unwillingness to empathize: the inability to see things from the perspectives of others, to see others as human beings, and to realize and take responsibility for our actions and not hide behind superior orders or rules or policy.
(I bet Arendt would have loathed zero-tolerance policies.)
That’s the banality of evil that the subtitle made so famous: the fact that it requires no greatness to do monstrously evil things, and that therefore perfectly ordinary - even mediocre - people can create absolute horrors, simply by not thinking about what they’re doing. The road to hell is paved in absence of mind.
And it was great! I thought they did a brilliant job showing the complicated tangle of friendships and romances in Arendt’s social circle, making it possible to follow without spelling everything out. I think often social groups operate in a sort of fog - not only because often things happen in secret, but also because often people don’t know what they feel for each other as it’s happening, because their feelings fluctuate.
Some of these friendships have more than forty years of history behind them, and some of them have been fantastically stressed by war and differing political opinions. The film manages to explain or imply all the backstory we need without ever info-dumping, which is so impressive.
(Also, Mary McCarthy <3 <3 <3. I should finally get around to reading that book of hers that I own...)
The film focuses mainly on the process and aftermath of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem - in fact, I think the few flashbacks they scattered in may have been the movie’s only mistake; I can see why they wanted to include Arendt’s affair with Heidegger, but the flashbacks interrupted the flow of the film. I think they could have included some of the emotional fallout of the affair - Heidegger later became a Nazi - without the flashbacks.
Just as the film did a wonderful job communicating this very complicated social milieu, it also did a wonderful job distilling out the main ideas of the book without simplifying them too much - and of portraying the controversy around the book. Eichman in Jerusalem caused a huge firestorm when it was published because, among other reasons, many people argued that she all but exonerated Eichmann.
Given that the book ends with Arendt writing her own version of Eichmann’s death sentence, this is clearly wrong. She thought he deserved to hang, but believed that the court had done a poor job demonstrating why, because they didn’t understand the nature of his crime because they held to an old-fashioned understanding of evil that couldn’t explain Nazi crimes.
That is, they believed that to commit great evil, one needs some grand motivation, that a sin like greed or lust or hatred or selfishness must be at the root of it. But Arendt argues that evil sometimes has nothing behind it - no motivation beyond an unwillingness or inability to think. A contemporary writer might say an unwillingness to empathize: the inability to see things from the perspectives of others, to see others as human beings, and to realize and take responsibility for our actions and not hide behind superior orders or rules or policy.
(I bet Arendt would have loathed zero-tolerance policies.)
That’s the banality of evil that the subtitle made so famous: the fact that it requires no greatness to do monstrously evil things, and that therefore perfectly ordinary - even mediocre - people can create absolute horrors, simply by not thinking about what they’re doing. The road to hell is paved in absence of mind.