By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO –Fifty years after its publication, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to polarize public discourse. Margarethe von Trotta’s thought provoking but flawed film rekindles the fiery debates over Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as a dutiful bureaucrat and her charge that the Jewish Councils abetted the Holocaust by complying with German orders to police the ghettos, allocate scarce food, housing, and jobs, and prepare deportation lists. Based on the reviews I’ve been reading, the movie has been panned or praised largely on the grounds of whether critics agree with von Trotta’s sympathetic portrait of Arendt and her analysis of the Eichmann Trial or whether they share the consternation that her interpretations provoked.
Arendt perfectly fits the qualities of a typical von Trotta protagonist. Her best films like Marianne and Juliane (1981), Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Rosenstrasse (2003), and Vision (2009) feature strong women who followed the dictates of their conscience regardless of the repression and risks this entailed. In all but Rosenstrasse, she cast actress Barbara Sukowa in a lead role. Sukowa gives another bravura performance in Hannah Arendt by simultaneously projecting Arendt’s public persona as a cerebral and haughty figure while revealing her private warmth towards her husband Heinrich Blücher played by Axel Milberg, her closest friend, the author Mary McCarthy played by Janet McTeer, and other members of her coterie. Who knew that Heinrich occasionally gave his wife an affectionate pat on the ass or that Hannah enjoyed a game of pool with Mary?
Despite these intimate moments, the movie focuses on the controversies surrounding Arendt’s New Yorker articles and subsequent book on the Eichmann Trial. It opens with the Mossad’s kidnapping of Eichmann. From the time she decides to cover the trial through the furor raised by her commentary on it, Arendt intellectually spars with her prewar German Jewish confidantes, the pro-Israeli philosopher Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), and the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael Degen) over the thorny issues the proceedings raised: Was Israel justified in trying Eichmann even though it did not exist as a state until after World War Two? Would justice have been better served by an international tribunal? Did the prosecution exploit the case to document the Holocaust and survivor testimony in general? Was Eichmann criminally culpable as a subordinate who implemented but did not formulate policy? Did the compliance of European Jewish leaders facilitate the extermination of their fellow Jews?
The movie is at its most effective when Arendt articulates her ideas in informal conversations, classroom lectures, and a tour de force defense of them before her rapt students and skeptical colleagues. Snippets of discussions do not do justice to the nuances of her analysis. As primarily a visual medium, film often sacrifices complexity for comprehensibility. Indeed, scenes of Arendt thinking recur as silent shots of her smoking a cigarette alone. Her insights into the demoralization concentration camp inmates and the capacity of totalitarian regimes to divide the labor and diffuse the responsibility for liquidating their class, political, or racial enemies are brilliant.
The criticisms leveled at Arendt by her adversaries, however, get reduced to sound bites and ad hominem attacks on her arrogance, lack of empathy, and alleged Jewish self-hatred. While she endured such vitriolic attacks, substantive rebuttals were and are still being made against her findings. She misconstrued Eichmann’s legal strategy of painting himself as a tiny cog in the machinery of death who did not personally hate Jews as the truth. Yet he joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party and the SS years before the Anschluss. He garnered acclaim for devising a system to expedite the expatriation, expropriation, and immigration of Austrian Jews in 1938. He prepared the population census of Jews by country for the Wannsee Conference where government and party agencies were allocated roles in the deportation of Jews to death camps in Poland. Eichmann emerged as a key figure in the decimation of Hungarian Jewry and disobeyed orders from Himmler to desist temporarily while the possibility of concluding a separate peace with Great Britain and the United States was being explored. During the 1950s, Eichmann granted a series of interviews to a Dutch Nazi and bragged about his genocidal accomplishments. He did not embody the “banality of evil,” the term Arendt coined to account for his complicity. Nevertheless, her concept does explain the motivations of many careerists and opportunists who were accomplices in the “Final Solution.”
Arendt’s sweeping indictment of the Jewish leadership is equally problematic. She assumed that if the Jews had been totally unorganized, their death toll would have been lower. During their occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, the Soviets dismantled Jewish communal organizations. When Germany invaded the USSR, the Jews there were just as vulnerable to the mass executions by shooting as they would be in the ghettos where the Jewish Councils and Jewish Police enforced Nazi policies. Jewish Councils cooperated to alleviate German demands, buy time in hopes the Red Army would liberate them sooner than later, demonstrate the utility of Jewish laborers for the German war effort, and maintain somesemblance of Jewish civil society rather place the ghettoes entirely under the control of the Germans. Arendt overlooked their diverse motivations and that some Jewish Councils covertly aided the resistance or set limits on what orders they would obey.
Even on this point, Arendt was a voice in the wilderness denouncing the wartime leaders of Europe’s Jewish communities. The accusation of collaboration was first raised by Jewish resistance groups trying to discredit the survival strategy of the Jewish Councils. The Kastner Trials rocked Israel in the 1950s over whether this Hungarian Jewish leader had collaborated with the SS in saving a his family and political allies, but abandoning their less fortunate brethren. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) expressed a similar assessment of Jewish passivity and compliance to the Third Reich’s policy of extermination.
Von Trotta fails to provide sufficient biographical material on Arendt’s life before the trial. Cursory flashbacks imply that Arendt’s affair with her mentor Martin Heidegger personified her disillusionment with Germany since he delivered an infamous pro-Nazi inaugural address as the newly elected rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. In a fabricated scene that parallels the kidnapping of Eichmann, Mossad agents track Arendt down on an isolated road and try to intimidate her to not publish her book in Israel. She recognizes one of the agents as her old friend from the Zionist movement, Siegfried Moses. Moses did not work for the Mossad, and met by mutual consent with Arendt in Switzerland to discuss the matter. In the movie Moses remarks that he can’t believe that a former Zionist like Arendt could author such a defamatory book, and Arendt replies that her attraction to Zionism was merely a youthful interlude.
Yet Arendt had been conducting research on anti-Semitism for Blumenfeld’s group when she was detained by the Gestapo in 1933. She fled to Paris and worked for Youth Aliyah during the remainder of the 1930s. She was interned by the Vichy French because she was a foreign national and not because she was Jewish. She managed to escape Gurs with Blücher and obtained a visa to the United States in 1941. Although she advocated that Jews should have armed to fight Hitler, she rejected the call for a Jewish state, preferring Jews constitute themselves as a nationality within the British Empire, a multi-state European federation, or a bi-national state with the Palestinian Arabs. Her version of Zionism clarifies her condemnation of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and of Israel’s right to try Eichmann for “crimes against the Jewish people.” She thought the charge should be for “crimes against humanity” and adjudicated by an international court.
Despite its shortcomings, Hannah Arendt should come as a welcome relief among mature audiences who are tired of watching aliens, the devil, robots, and Zombies wreak havoc on humankind. As the clips from the Eichmann Trial indicate, the innocuous looking defendant was a far more disturbing monster than any of those CGI creatures ever could be. Whether he was sinister because he was ordinary as Arendt contended, or because he enthusiastically endorsed and operationalized the racist ideology whose logical conclusion was Auschwitz as most historians now believe, a movie that considers Arendt’s understanding of the Holocaust and the opposition it engendered merits our attention.
Hannah Arendt is currently playing at the Gaslamp Stadium, 701 Fifth Avenue in downtown San Diego.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com