Hannah Arendt the Film

Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, released in 2012, dramatises the period in 1961 to 1963 during which the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt reported on the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker and produced the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The film treats the writing of the book, its publication in 1963, and the public storm that followed. Barbara Sukowa plays Arendt; the supporting cast includes Janet McTeer as the novelist Mary McCarthy and Klaus Pohl as Martin Heidegger.

Arendt and the Eichmann trial

Hannah Arendt had been one of the major political philosophers of mid-twentieth-century Europe. Born in Hannover in 1906, she had studied with Martin Heidegger at Marburg and with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, taken her doctorate in 1929 on the concept of love in Augustine, fled Germany in 1933 to Paris, fled France in 1941 to New York, and produced in 1951 her major work The Origins of Totalitarianism. By 1961 she was a professor at the University of Chicago and was widely regarded as one of the foremost political thinkers of the post-war Anglophone academy.

Arendt approached The New Yorker in 1960 with the proposal to cover the impending trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been captured by Israeli intelligence in Argentina in May 1960 and would be tried in Jerusalem from April 1961. The New Yorker editor William Shawn agreed and Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem in April and May 1961. The five articles she filed were published in The New Yorker in February and March 1963. They were collected and expanded as a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, published by Viking Press in May 1963.

The book’s argument

The book made two arguments that produced sustained controversy. The first was the central thesis indicated by the subtitle: that Eichmann was a banal figure rather than a demonic one, an unimaginative bureaucrat who had carried out the murder of European Jewry without a developed ideological conviction or any pronounced cruelty, and whose evil consisted in his thoughtless consent to the genocidal logic of the regime he served. Arendt’s term for the phenomenon was the banality of evil. The argument was, on Arendt’s view, an attempt to understand a kind of large-scale criminality that the existing Western philosophical tradition had not been built to handle.

The second argument was a sharply critical assessment of the Jewish councils, the Judenräte, in the German-occupied territories. Arendt argued that the cooperation of the councils with the German occupation administration, in particular their compilation of lists for the deportations, had made the murder of European Jewry more efficient than it would otherwise have been; she argued that without the councils’ cooperation perhaps fewer Jews would have died. The argument was made in a few paragraphs but caused most of the public reaction.

The reaction

The book was attacked from its publication. The most influential single response was Norman Podhoretz’s review in Commentary in September 1963, which described Arendt as having attacked Jewish leadership in a way that softened the case against the regime. Gershom Scholem, the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and Arendt’s friend, broke with her in a public exchange of letters in which he argued that the book lacked Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people. The Anti-Defamation League and other major American Jewish organisations criticised the book in similar terms. Many of Arendt’s friends and former colleagues stopped speaking to her. Hans Jonas, her oldest friend, was an exception who maintained the friendship despite his own disagreement with the book.

The historiographical reception of the book has been more divided than the immediate public reception. The banality of evil thesis has been examined and partially confirmed and partially refuted by subsequent historians. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), based on the records of Reserve Police Battalion 101, broadly supports a version of Arendt’s view (most of the perpetrators were not ideological fanatics). David Cesarani’s Becoming Eichmann (2004) and Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014) have both argued, on the basis of newly available source material including Eichmann’s own writings before his capture, that Eichmann himself was much more ideologically committed than Arendt had concluded; the Sassen interviews conducted with Eichmann in Argentina in 1957 and 1958 record him as an unrepentant ideological antisemite. Arendt had not had access to those materials. The historians’ position in 2026 is that Arendt’s larger thesis about the role of ordinary people in industrialised murder retains its force, and that her specific characterisation of Eichmann as banal does not.

The Judenrat argument has been more decisively rejected by subsequent historiography. Raul Hilberg, who was, and is, the most-cited single historian of the Holocaust, argued that the Judenräte were forced into impossible positions and that no comparable population under occupation produced systematically different outcomes; the argument that without the councils fewer Jews would have died is not supported by the comparative record. Arendt’s argument here was based on partial reading of the literature available in 1961 and 1962 and has not survived the subsequent expansion of that literature.

The film’s choices

Von Trotta’s film treats the period of writing and the public storm that followed publication. It interleaves contemporary scenes (Arendt at her desk, in her New York apartment, lecturing at the New School) with flashbacks to her relationship with Heidegger in the 1920s, the German occupation of France in 1940, and her own internment at Gurs in southern France in 1940 from which she escaped. The film’s most-discussed sequence is the long single-take lecture Arendt delivers towards the end of the film at the New School, in which Sukowa speaks for around eight minutes the case for thinking as a defence against the kind of consent that Eichmann had given.

The film does not take an explicit position on the truth or falsity of the banality thesis. It treats Arendt as a thinker who had advanced an argument, taken the public consequences, and continued working. Sukowa’s performance was widely praised; the film won the German Film Award for best film and was widely shown internationally. It is now the principal cinematic introduction to Arendt for a non-academic public.

See also

Sources

  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking Press, 1963 (revised editions through 1965)
  • Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, 1982 (the standard biography)
  • Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf, 2014
  • David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”, Da Capo Press, 2004
  • Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken Books, 2011
  • Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
  • Margarethe von Trotta (dir), Hannah Arendt, Heimatfilm/Amour Fou Filmproduktion, 2012
  • USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu