6/16/2018 Hannah Arendt | Issue 100 | Philosophy Now
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Philosophy Now – Issue 100
https://philosophynow.org/issues/100/Hannah_Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Yasemin Sari on a new film about a courageous thinker and her views on responsibility and the nature of evil.
This movie opens with two scenes. In the first, we see a man walking on a dark road suddenly being kidnapped.
This is Adolf Eichmann, ex-SS officer, Nazi bureaucrat and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, being
captured in Buenos Aires by Mossad agents in 1961. The next scene shows a woman (played by Barbara
Sukowa) staring at the ceiling and smoking a cigarette. This is Arendt, thinking.
Margarethe von Trotta’s recent biopic Hannah Arendt hit the big screen on the fiftieth anniversary of Arendt’s
book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt first published it in The New
Yorker as a series of articles following Eichmann’s trial at the District Court of Jerusalem in 1961. This work
occupies a special place in Arendt’s corpus, as it appeared after her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and
The Human Condition (1958), but before her masterful investigation into how we think, The Life of the Mind
(published posthumously in 1978). In the Origins, Arendt analyzes the conditions that led to the rise of
totalitarianism as a structure of government, while in The Human Condition, she offers her audience the novel
thesis that political action is the freedom-manifesting self-disclosing action of the individual in concert with
others, grounded in conditions of plurality and equality. Both of these works stand at the core of her political
theory. Her Eichmann book is a fact-based report that presents a reflective political judgment about a man and
his deeds, while The Life of the Mind is the culmination of her thinking, where she presents the conditions of the
activities of the mind; that is, of thinking, willing, and judging. The chapter on judging was not completed;
however, we get an insight into how she differentiates thinking and judging and the relationship between them
that is significant for understanding Hannah Arendt the public thinker. And without any reservation, I can say
that von Trotta’s film aims at capturing the relationship between thinking and judging for Hannah Arendt.
Arendt thinking and writing during the Eichmann trial (a still from the movie)
Hannah Arendt still © Zeitgeist Films 2013