The movie Hannah Arendt presented a complex historical state of affairs for not only Hannah to cut through, but the viewer to cut through as well.
Critiquing the movie is a tricky affair, since the movie itself deals with an incredibly complex historical subject matter which has since generated countless works of scholarship with opinions in constant flux, and a complex personality stuck right into the middle of it all, the personality of Hannah Arendt herself.
The movie has to do with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, who was a major actor in the administration of the Final Solution, with much of the film focused on Hannah's reporting on the trial and her arguments about the nature of the evil she was witnessing, arguments which were informed by her body of work on the subject of Nazism and totalitarianism in general, along with the subsequent effect her position had on her relationships and the general public.
In the linked review, there is a discussion of Primo Levi's - a major historian of the Holocaust - famous admission that there is a great tension between the historian's desire to account for all of the facts and events, and at the same time to pull it all together and render a coherent and effective judgment on the historical matter. This difficulty echoes one of humankind's most serious (and defining) intellectual conflicts: the ultimate impossibility of encapsulating the endless complexity of the universe into a symbolic schema, or an ideology, as well as the never-ending struggle to achieve close approximation in spite of the fact.
This is precisely what Hannah was trying to do with her Eichmann in Jerusalem, which upon being cast into the tumult of the era, was met with violent controversy. In balancing the multiplicity of historical fact and the impact of coherent judgment, Hannah Arendt was attemping a tightrope walk that eventually blew up in her face, costing her reputation and many friends.
The public seized on two distinct points in particular, ripped out of context when it came to the larger argument of course. In her report on the Eichmann trial, Hannah characterized Eichmann as a fool and a clown, as well as a particularly dry and boring species of bureaucrat. His was a banal evil, the banality of a bureaucratic system, which people took as a diminished condemnation of Nazis in general, which it wasn't. The other problem people had with her piece was that she wrote that the story of the Jewish collaborators who worked with Nazi authorities was one of the darkest aspects of the whole affair. Her judgments were based on a greater philosophical argument that she had been developing all her life, in order to understand the nature of evil. Of course, emotions were still hot; the events of the Holocaust were still fresh in the public's mind. The public (and many friends) were having none of this philosophical speculation.
A constant recurring accusation of Hannah was her arrogant coldness in transforming a sensational trial that captured the hearts of millions into a cold and detached philosophical lesson, and a cerebral lesson at that. One is tempted to indict that mass of detractors as fools that simply failed to understand Hannah's ideas, but of course, it is more complicated than that.
Those who wanted an emotional account of the Holocaust and a neat drama which depicted the Nazis as the prototypical monster and the Jews as the prototypical powerless victims were not necessarily wrong in their judgment; it is simply how they saw the world, and it couldn't have been otherwise. After all, there is a very clear conceptual difference between the Nazis and the Jews. The Nazis are the evil genocidal maniacs, the Jews unfortunate scapegoats caught in one of history's perfect storms.
Who was this awful woman who wished to depict Eichmann as a boorish clown, as opposed to the monster they all saw him as, and the Jewish collaborators as one of the darkest aspects of the entire nightmare? On an emotional level it seemed a slap in the face: ostensibly, here was this author trying to downplay the evil of a Nazi and emphasize the darker aspects of the Jewish collaborators. But it is always so much more than that.
Although it turned out later that Eichmann actually was a monstrous and diabolical figure who used bureaucratic language and a feigned air of boorishness to camouflage his true nature (which many other Nazis also relied on) it doesn't necessarily nullify Hannah's argument; it only serves to complicate it. Hannah was trying to understand the nature of this evil, both in its radical and banal nature, as a historical formation that could happen to any population receptive to it.
Hannah mentioned the Jewish collaborators in her piece as a simple acknowledgement of facts: they gave testimony that showed they worked with Nazi authorities in carrying out many of the functions that would eventually send their people to their doom. To condemn these collaborators is a bit more difficult to do however, and I really don't think that's what Hannah was trying to do when she described their historical role as dark. She was trying to understand them as human beings caught within this great historical storm. How did it happen? Why?
Hannah's cold detached view and her determination to find truth is a rare trait tempered by both character and life experience. The general public could not understand what truths she had to express because they were intellectually, psychologically, and even physiologically incapable. This is the great tragedy of humankind as a general organism: through spatial, temporal, and constitutional differences, there arise individuals and groups that, because of their composition, can only see and feel the world a certain way, and thus think in a certain way.
This tragedy, I think, forms the kernel of Hannah's understanding of the nature of evil and the nature of the Nazi regime, its rise, and the total moral collapse that radiated out and infected those caught in the pull of its malevolence.
Hannah's thought, which signaled the coming of a collective consciousness, was not necessarily new, but was novel for its opposition to mainstream political science which sought to isolate individuals and events as discrete historical occurrences, putting them in discrete boxes and affixing discrete characters to them. Hannah's concepts of totalitarianism and the "banality of evil" sought to imagine social states, or conditions for human beings as a group, as opposed to the analysis of the cause and effect of events and individuals, in order to explain the nature of the evil in her time.
For Hannah, totalitarian movements like Nazism have their roots in vast causal chains which extend far back into history: anti-Semitism as an ideology was born out of a marriage of the unique and unfortuante historical position of the Jews as a group, and the birth of racial ideology which was formed in part for the justification of imperialism, a phenomenon which itself was and is responsible for the crushing of whole peoples, within nations and without, which leads to a social pulverization and fragmentation that leaves whole populations vulnerable to totalitarian upswells.
What is the nature of evil? From whence does it come? How do these evil empires form? Why do they form? How did these Jewish collaborators turn against their own people? The same question can be asked today in the face of this global capitalist empire and its ability to turn politically sympathetic minorities in client states against their own people. What is power and why does it concentrate so dependably, and why do even the powerless cling so desperately to what power they can get to, even if it means subjugating their own peers in cooperation with greater evil? This is the same force which perpetuates racist institutions: some powerless whites are happy to dominate powerless blacks if it means being a little higher in the food chain. Why?
The answers to these questions lie in the understanding of human nature on a systemic level, which is an ongoing project, which although is elusive and difficult, is well worth undergoing should we wish to avoid repeating the past.
