汉娜

这是一部看到片名就决定必须看的电影，所以认真地写下些东西以对得起这个决定，所以以下只是自己短暂思考的拼贴，而并不是一个典型意义上的影评。

影片从艾西曼审判这个点切入是极好、极聪明的，但同时也是冒风险的，因为这件事无论对阿伦特本人还是对现代政治思想界、哲学界都是极重大的事件。加上汉娜阿伦特本人是犹太人，要想说好这个故事并不容易。

从实际效果看，影片试图着重在汉娜发表文章后的面对压力上用力，但其实仅仅表面描写了其众叛亲离的境况，个人觉得还太肤浅。而这就要牵涉到另一层，在影片前半部分，汉娜思考并写作纽约客这篇文章时，电影也没有很好的描写出她的思考过程。我指得不仅是她作为亲历集中营的犹太人在思考“平庸的恶”这样开创性观点时内心的挣扎，我更希望看到的是她在艾西曼审判的过程中，如何从观察、思考到最后得出结论来的那个推论过程。这可能需要编导有很深的政治哲学功底并对汉娜阿伦特研究极深，似乎有些过于勉为其难了。但其后果就是在这个惊世骇俗的理论那么轻易地横空出世之后，汉娜所受到的孤立与痛苦在观众看来也变得不那么严重了。

导演的难处我能理解一点，毕竟要厘清一个思想家原创性的思想形成脉络以及这个过程中的心路历程简直是不可能完成的任务，而另一方面，汉娜这个特殊人物在艾西曼审判这么戏剧性的事件中所可能产生的情感冲击与个人遭遇又是如此有诱惑力地摆在导演面前，其避难就易的选择也便可以理解了。但这样一来，跻身一流电影的可能性也成了泡影。

其实我发觉，导演应该是意识到这个问题的。因此为了在汉娜的个人情感压力与文章（观点）发表的深层剖析之间摆摆平，导演安排了汉娜在阶梯教室的演讲。必须承认，这个演讲非常清晰扼要的讲清楚了汉娜的思想精髓（我不清楚历史上是否真有此次演讲），但也因此而显得过于简单化，而失去了其思想本身应有的复杂性。更重要的是，在接近结尾时安排的这一桥段，依然让影片有着头轻脚重的感觉，这就是叙事的技术问题了。

事实上，叙事与结构在本片中一直处于很纠结的状态，比如海德格尔，这么重要的一个人，和汉娜又是有着那么著名的关系，但是如何表现，在这样一个不是以他们为主线的影片里，其实是个很尴尬的事情，就现在的结果来看，依然有些脱节和多余。而导演又在汉娜与丈夫海因里希的恩爱感情上大动笔墨，这多少也有点莫名其妙。同时，它更是冲淡了汉娜阿伦特作为20世纪最伟大思想家在这一促成其最具原创性思想产生的重大事件（作为影片主体）中所应引发的深刻的思想性和戏剧性。说难听一点，——变得有些平庸和媚俗了。

下面还有一些看豆瓣评论后的琐碎想法。

1、豆瓣上有朋友在疑惑为什么导演要安排三个关于语言的环节。我的理解，汉娜在德国人朋友间说德语，可吊诡的是他们所处的环境是美国，甚至就有美国朋友在身边，以致他们不得不注意改为英语；同时，作为一个德国人在美国大学，用德语授课而用英语写文章发表，她的内心该是时时刻刻会意识到自己身处他乡，对她来说自己无论怎样都是外来者。甚至在耶路撒冷，汉娜依然是个外人。了解一点汉娜阿伦特一生的人会知道，这种境况固然是客观造成的，但也是汉娜自己想要的一种存在状态。因为这正是她摆脱身份、情感干扰，站在人类理性层面进行思考的先决条件。影片里汉娜对以色列朋友说的话，大意是“我不爱任何民族的人，我只爱我认识的朋友”，就很值得玩味，影片安排语言问题的情节，也正是想说明汉娜站在人类立场而非犹太人立场上的惊人观点，其产生是其来有自的。

2、关于思考的勇气问题。阿伦特明确指出思考的惰性和怯懦是如此有害。“究竟是不能还是不愿去思考”是所有尚未自觉开始自我启蒙的蒙昧者都应警醒的问题。回到阿伦特当时的语境中，我觉得崔卫平老师的评论是最中肯的——“对于阿伦特来说，重要的不是“是”什么，而是去“做”什么；“是”只是一种状态，而只有去“做”才能提供一种说服力。只有去行动才能表明一个人是怎样的、他是谁。她的立场与理论成果，可以看作是对于欧洲那场灾难的全部回应，尤其是对于犹太人悲惨处境的回答。不是她不把自己放到犹太人的脉络中去，而是犹太人必须把自己放到当代政治生活中去，放到与他人一道的行动中去，以解决他们的“无世界性”来解决他们的问题，以参与这个世界的社会政治事务来表明自己是怎样的犹太人，以改变这个世界的政治格局来改变犹太人的历史命运，以及其他民族和人民的命运。”——回看当下，便可知我们正处身的是一个何其两难的神奇境地，一方面大多数人丧失了独立思考（自我启蒙）的能力；另一方面少数有独立思考能力的人却无法做到知行合一。这才是我们这个时代最可耻、可悲的地方。

3、影片最后，阿伦特站在窗台前抽着烟说，别人都没有指出的、自己唯一的错误在于，“并没有什么又平庸又激进的恶，恶只能是极端的，只有善才会是激进的。”——我的理解正因为恶是平庸的，因此它只可能是消极的，哪怕是极端的消极——思维的惰性和怯懦；而善正因为有道德优越感在那里，因此更容易积极作为，从而走向激进。

首先，汉娜作为一个待过集中营的犹太人，能够抛开自己的身份和经历去“理解”阿道夫·艾希曼，实在不是常人能做到的（当然，她自己也说了理解不等同于宽恕）。我们在对待任何人事物的时候，都基于自己的立场，要抛弃自我的偏见是非常困难的事。从这一点，就可以说她是伟大的。
第二，汉娜对”阿道夫·艾希曼“的评判。她认为，他会犯下这样的行为，是因为失去了作为人的基本能力——思考。他只是像做一件普通工作那样”高效、准确“的完成。当党卫军在首长的指导下，完成第三帝国的伟大理想时。他们都躲在这个庞大体系背后，机械地活着。这个”伟大的目标，民族的崛起“就是保护个人丑陋和邪恶的最好屏障。当众人犯罪时，个人就不会觉得那是犯罪。当有一个高尚的理由撑腰时，屠杀和犯罪都成了”战斗“。纳粹不是一个人，把犹太人送进毒气室的也不会是一个人。我们是整个体系中微不足道的一点，但是就是这每一点的不作为、不反思而造就了整个纳粹。每个人都有罪，当然你也可以说每个人都没有罪，因为他们只是执行而已，并不是出于自己的意愿。所以，纳粹是邪恶的，是反人类的。而参与其中的每一个人，都要为
第三，如果说希特勒利用民族主义和复仇情绪煽动了整个民众，那么战后犹太人的仇恨心理何尝不是民族情绪的膨胀。你是犹太人，就不应该为纳粹说话；你是犹太人，就应该仇恨纳粹；你是犹太人就应该爱以色列。如果，你对以上问题提出疑义，那无疑你就是叛徒。其实这些看似很有道理的话，其实根本就没有必然的关系。

生活是有惯性的，思维也有是一个固定模式。社会根据我们的出身给了我们身份，然后我们就要做符合这个身份的事情。对人、对事分类，有利于我们遵循固有的应对方法来应对人事。只有大家都按照统一的规则去生活的时候，这个社会才是平衡的（不是和平），整个国家机器才能正常的运作下去。任何试图打破的人，都将遭到攻击和打压。所以，汉斯是从情感上和思维惯性上都是不能接受汉娜的思想。舆论也是很难接受这种观点的，这和他们对纳粹的固有定义相差太远了。不符合他们的民族情感。

所以，说到邪恶。你可以认为，人人都有邪恶的一面，只是看有没有一个面具可以躲在后面，合理、高尚地施恶。同时，我们都有善良的一面，这个世界上没有纯粹的好人和坏人。善恶是相对的，好坏也是相对的，你站在不同的立场，依据不同的标准，评判同一件事时，是会有不同的结论。

本来上午应当写论文的，结果一开电脑就变成了看电影，而且看完电影还想写点东西。好在电影拍的很好，完全值回时间。
我为什么说这个电影好呢？这并不是说它用了什么高妙的拍摄手法，或演员的演技、装扮有什么特别之处（不过还是要说，阿伦特还是学校的超级学霸时真美；而海德格尔比照片上还猥琐）。这部电影好在启人深思。若论启人深思，那么直接去读阿伦特的原文，或普及的介绍读物不是更好吗？为什么要看电影？
按昆德拉的意思讲，小说相对于哲学的意义在于，它展示人在做选择时的具体情景。更具体地说，小说、电影这些形象化的艺术形式有一个无法取代的好处，即它可以让人们在精心雕琢的情境下做虚拟的道德判断。这种艺术提供的机会无法取代，是因为日常生活并未给我们如此多的机会，而每一次新的抉择都让我们对人性认识得更深。假如没有希腊悲剧，那么我们永远也无法去设想弑父娶母的动机究竟是怎么回事，也没法思考某些内在于我们的想法究竟是不是道德的。假如没有奥威尔，我们很难只凭思辨把极端情况下的人该如何行动考虑清楚。而根据康德（以及数不尽的哲学家），做道德抉择、思考何为对何为错，是自由（或理性，或人性）的最终保障。
基于同样的简单思考，我觉得，《汉娜·阿伦特》这部电影也会使人深入思考究竟在某些情境下究竟何为对何为错，而它提供的情境恰倒好处，干净利索。电影中提供了如下几段情景：纽伦堡大审判及阿伦特发表关于“平庸的恶”的评论；汉娜和海德格尔的绯闻；在生活中汉娜与丈夫、朋友、学生的各种争论或议论。每一个都为深入思考道德抉择提供了情境基础，而每种情境都能揭示出足够重大的问题。具体来说，它们涉及如下几个问题：

【纳粹的罪责由谁来承担】
控方指责艾希曼屠杀犹太人，而艾希曼则辩驳说他只是执行上级命令，只是尽自己的职责而已。令所有人震惊的是，他竟没有感受到相应的负罪感，而（真心地）认为自己是无辜的，最多只是有一点“分裂”。法庭一再用犹太人被残忍迫害作为证据，而这并不能根本动摇艾希曼的反驳。最终艾希曼还是以通常罪名被绞死，但他难道是个毫无感情的恶魔吗，或者他真是无辜的？
阿伦特的解释是，纳粹的邪恶已经远超过去的想象，根本无法用传统法典上的罪名来衡量。艾希曼作为个人，在犯下罪行时时无意识的常人。这是一种“平庸的恶”，但在某且极端情境下却能犯下最残忍的罪行。他更大的罪行在于丧失了自我，这是反人类。不仅艾希曼，即使她的法国朋友、犹太委员会也因有这种“平庸的恶”。只有更深刻地检审“平庸的恶”，才能真正认识到纳粹究竟的罪责究竟由谁来承担，才能避免悲剧的重演。
我没有研读过阿伦特相关的原文，但这里也不需要，电影提供的情景已足够清楚，足以使人思考了。倘若承认了“平庸的恶”，那么是否意味着每个人都要经常高强度地检审自己的每一个选择，因为许多无意识的行为其实承载了最邪恶的东西？这种有点存在主义式的生活方式真的现实吗？艾希曼作为纳粹的头领，他的行为会被追究，但小人物也有与他同样的动机，也导致了同样的事情，罪孽几何？
这里当然有张力存在，但教诲已足够清楚：我们应当意识到自己是自由选择能力的人，我们在任何情况下都应考虑自己应当如此选择，而非把一切都推给下达命令的上级、家长、习俗。当然这种检审具体如何进行、责任具体如何划分、是否会让人累的身心俱疲，是值得更深入讨论的。两德统一后，向翻越柏林墙的民众开枪的军警也同样被审判，他们也诉诸于艾希曼同样的辩解——服从命令而已。而这次判罪的理由比纽伦堡审判时好了许多：他们本可以在（被迫）执行命令的同时把枪口抬高一点的。
德国人反思纳粹的深度常常超过常人想象，这部电影在这一主题上达到了这个深度。

【哲学与政治的张力】
这个主题自从施派流行起来以后已经烂大街了，不过它的确值得思考。电影为我们呈现的是：不仅在民众，甚至在怀着复仇情绪的知识分子眼里，阿伦特所谓艾希曼是无知的，只是在用一种奇怪的方式为纳粹辩护。而关于“平庸的恶”的思考势必把一部分责任到作为受害者的犹太人自己头上去，这简直是骇人听闻。于是来自愤怒的民众的电话或信件接踵而至，而来自朋友决裂、劝诫、失望、不理解也影响到了汉娜的生活。
其实汉娜与朋友的争论从一开始就充斥了整部电影，他们从一开始就不能理解为什么阿伦特要以那种奇怪的态度为艾希曼辩护，只是争论在私下以种种方式被平息了。只有丈夫理解她，他也觉得审判并不正义，但却担心妻子会不会因思考回到过去的“黑暗岁月”。而阿伦特的文章在《纽约客》上发表并引起众怒后，她的第一反应是别人没有仔细读它，但这被丈夫说成天真。众人没能阅读并理解她的观点，这究竟是因为众人的愚蠢，还是因为众人根本不会真正阅读与自己意见严重相左的观点？有人说（历史主义的），使自己被排斥的最佳方式，便是不断挑战自己所在共同体的基本信念，即使它们是独断的。
影片中，更深一点的问题是：既然众人无法理解哲学，那么哲人是否应该把自己激进的观点发表出去？如果以施派的方式回应，她当然不应如此幼稚，至少该采取一种更谨慎的方式进行表达。但片中阿伦特却说激进并不就是错的，应当有勇气去发言（片中反复提到勇气）。还有一个内在问题：是否有一些观点明明是真的，但基于现实永远也不该说出来？比如最后阿伦特在大教室进行了一场精彩的演讲，阐明了自己的观点和立场，说服了所有的学生，但却没能说服自己的犹太老友，反而使他下定决心与汉娜决裂。学生被说服，是不是因为他们身在美国没能经历当年的恐怖，而犹太朋友没能被说服，是因为他经历了一切，如果再说三道四那么就是亵渎？显然，哲学的危险处境在于它对一切都想说三道四。
有意思的细节是：阿伦特觉得自己要卷铺盖走人了，但丈夫安慰她说在美国并不用担心被驱逐。但政治与哲学，或怀着情绪的大众与试图说出道理的哲人之间的矛盾并没有被消解。哲人该如何做？作为大众我们该如何看待似乎完全无法理解的思想，这都是值得深思的。

【该如何评价海德格尔】
我不是太懂海德格尔，因此不敢贸然写太多，这比评价纳粹还要复杂。无论如何，这是所有哲学学生最感兴趣的八卦，至少一睹了“女神”当年的风采。
片中每次出现与海德格尔相关的段落，都由两张旧照片引起。这些段落包括：（阿伦特还是学生时）在图书馆听到男同学对她说海德格尔向纳粹效忠、海德格尔上课给学生讲如何“denken”（思考）、阿伦特去海德格尔办公室、阿伦特和海德格尔做爱做的事；以及（战后）阿伦特与海德格尔再次相遇。实话说，这些段落并不试图使人明白为什么教会了阿伦特“如何思考”海德格尔要当纳粹、或海德格尔为什么不道歉、或阿伦特对海德格尔的态度究竟是什么。它们主要意义是引起困惑，让电影的主题更深更广。
不仅我们不理解，片中阿伦特的朋友、丈夫、甚至她自己也没能解释这个问题。每次朋友问她关于海德格尔的问题，她都会回答说最爱是自己的丈夫——这种甚至有些做作的爱，是否是为了抚平心中的困惑？先知式的哲人是否会在政治上犯如此幼稚的错误？还有，哲学家跪在女学生膝下时，他还是那个哲学家吗？我只能说不知道。

总之，这是我今年看过的有关哲学的最好的一部电影，至少比那部《维特根斯坦》强多了，尽管后者视觉效果出彩，但除了让人看出维特根斯坦是个怪异的天才外，并未带来更多原文以外的思考。

Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth
Mark Lilla
Hannah Arendt
a film by Margarethe von Trotta
Hannah Arendt: Ihr Denken veränderte die Welt [Hannah Arendt: Her Thought Changed the World]
edited by Martin Wiebel, with a foreword by Franziska Augstein
Munich: Piper, 252 pp., €9.99 (paper)
1.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi’s final book on his experiences at Auschwitz, he makes a wise remark about the difficulty of rendering judgment on history. The historian is pulled in two directions. He is obliged to gather and take into account all relevant material and perspectives; but he is also obliged to render the mass of material into a coherent object of thought and judgment:

    Without a profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions…. We are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema.

lilla_1-112113-250.jpg Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Sicily, 1971

Satisfying both imperatives is difficult under any circumstances, and with certain events may seem impossible. The Holocaust is one of those. Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism. This is why Holocaust studies seems to swing back and forth with steady regularity, now trying to render justice to particulars (German soldiers as “ordinary men”), now trying to restore moral coherence (Hitler’s “willing executioners”).

Among Primo Levi’s virtues as a writer on the Holocaust was his skill at finding the point of historical and moral equipoise, most remarkably in his famous chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. It is not easy reading. Besides recounting the horrifying dilemmas and unspeakable cruelties imposed by the Nazis on their victims, he also gives an unvarnished account of the cruelties that privileged prisoners visited on weaker ones, and the compromises, large and small, some made to maintain those privileges and their lives. He describes how the struggle for prestige and recognition, inevitable in any human grouping, manifested itself even in the camps, producing “obscene or pathetic figures…whom it is indispensable to know if we want to know the human species.”

Levi tells the story of Chaim Rumkowski, the vain, dictatorial Jewish elder of the Łódź ghetto who printed stamps with his portrait on them, commissioned hymns celebrating his greatness, and surveyed his domain from a horse-drawn carriage. Stories like these that others have told and others still have wished to bury are unwelcome complications. But Levi tells them without ever letting the reader lose sight of the clear, simple moral reality in which they took place. Yes, “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.” But “I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer.”

Two recent films by major European directors show just how difficult this point of equipoise is to find and maintain when dealing with the Final Solution. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is a well-acted biopic on the controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and its place in her intellectual and personal life. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust is a documentary about Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, who was considered a traitor and Nazi collaborator by many of the camp’s inmates, and was the only elder in the entire system to have survived the war. The directors have very different styles and ambitions, which they have realized with very different degrees of success. But neither has managed to replicate Levi’s achievement.
2.

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. It’s hard to think of another work capable of setting off ferocious polemics a half-century after its publication. Research into the Nazi regime, its place in the history of anti-Semitism, the gestation of the Final Solution, and the functioning of the extermination machine has advanced well beyond Arendt, providing better answers to the questions she was among the first to address.

In any normal field of historical research one would expect an early seminal work to receive recognition and a fair assessment, even if it now seems misguided. Yet that is only now starting to happen within the history profession, in works like Deborah Lipstadt’s judicious, accessible survey The Eichmann Trial (2011). As the strong reactions to von Trotta’s film indicate, though, the Arendt–Eichmann psychodrama continues in the wider world. Now as then critics focus on two arguments Arendt made, and on the fact that she made them in the same book.

The first, and better known, was that although Adolf Eichmann was taken by many at the time to be the mastermind of the Final Solution, the trial revealed a weak, clueless, cliché-spewing bureaucrat who, according to Arendt, “never realized what he was doing,” an everyman caught up in an evolving bureaucratic program that began with forced emigration and only later ended with extermination as its goal. That one “cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann” did not, in her eyes, reduce his culpability. From the start Arendt defended his capture, trial, and execution, which were not universally applauded then, even by some prominent Jews and Jewish organizations.1 This her critics forget, or choose to forget. What they remember is that she portrayed Eichmann as a risible clown, not radically evil, and shifted attention from anti-Semitism to the faceless system in which he worked.

Had Arendt written a book on what she called “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” in modern bureaucratic society, it would have been read as a supplement, and partial revision, of what she said about “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. No one would have been offended. But in Eichmann she made the unwise choice of hanging her thesis on the logistical “genius” of the Holocaust, whose character she tried to infer from court documents and a few glimpses of him in the bullet-proof glass docket in Jerusalem.

To make matters worse, in the same book Arendt raised the sensitive issue of the part that Jewish leaders played in the humiliation and eventual extermination of their own people. These included the heads of the urban Jewish community organizations that facilitated forced emigration, expropriations, arrests, and deportations; and the heads of the Jewish councils the Nazis formed in the ghettos and camps to keep the inmate population in line. These men were understandably feared and resented even if they carried out their duties nobly, while those who abused their power, like Rumkowski, were loathed by survivors, who circulated disturbing stories about them after the war.

There was little public awareness of these figures, though, until the Kasztner affair broke in the mid-1950s. Rudolph Kasztner was at that time an Israeli official, but during the war he had worked for a group in Budapest that helped European Jews get to Hungary, which was then unoccupied, and then tried to get them out after the German invasion in 1944. As thousands of Jews were being shipped daily to the gas chambers, Kasztner and his group entered into negotiations with the Nazis to see if some could be saved. After various plans to save large numbers failed, Kasztner persuaded Eichmann to accept a cash ransom and allow 1,600 Hungarian Jews to leave for Switzerland, many of them wealthy people who paid their way and others from his hometown and family.

In 1953 a muckraking Israeli journalist claimed that Kasztner had secretly promised the Nazis not to tell other Jews about Auschwitz, trading a few lives for hundreds of thousands. Kastzner sued for libel but lost his case when it was revealed that he had written exculpatory letters to war tribunals for Nazis he had worked with in Hungary. Before his appeal could be heard Kastzner was assassinated in front of his Tel Aviv home, in circumstances that remain obscure to this day. He was posthumously acquitted.

The cooperation of Jewish leaders and organizations with the Nazi hierarchy became more widely known through the Eichmann trial and the publication in 1961 of Raoul Hilberg’s monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews, which Arendt relied on heavily without adequate attribution. Though Hilberg’s book is widely revered today, he was just as widely attacked after its publication by Jewish organizations and publications for emphasizing the leaders’ cooperation and the rarity of active resistance, which he attributed to habits of appeasement developed over centuries of persecution, an argument Bruno Bettelheim echoed a year later in his controversial article “Freedom From Ghetto Thinking.”

So Hannah Arendt was not betraying any secrets when she discussed these issues in a scant dozen pages of her book; she was reporting on what came up at the trial and found herself in the middle of an ongoing, and very sensitive, polemic. But exercising her gift for the offending phrase, she also portrayed the Jewish leaders as self-deceived functionaries who “enjoyed their new power,” and she termed their actions “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”

Perhaps by “dark” all she meant was especially awful and a sign of “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused…not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.” But pulled out of context her phrases made it appear that she was equating doomed Jewish leaders with the “thoughtless” Eichmann, or even judging them more severely. In any case, the whole discussion, a small fraction of the book, was psychologically obtuse and made her monstrous in the eyes of many.

And the response was ferocious, in Europe and the United States. Her now former friend Gershom Scholem sent Arendt a public letter complaining, rightly, about her “flippancy” and lack of moral imagination when discussing the Jewish leaders, and declared her to be lacking in “love of the Jewish people.” Siegfried Moses, a former friend and recently retired Israeli official, sent a letter “declaring war” on her and got the Council of Jews in Germany to publish a condemnation even before serialization of her book in The New Yorker was complete. (He then flew to Switzerland to try to persuade her to abandon the book project altogether.) The American Anti-Defamation League sent out a pamphlet titled Arendt Nonsense to book reviewers and rabbis across the country, urging them to condemn her and the New Yorker articles for giving succor to anti-Semites.

And in the New York intellectual circles that had become her adoptive home, she became the focus of angry attention from friends who once admired her. At the controversy’s peak Dissent magazine organized a forum to discuss the work and invited Arendt (she declined), Hilberg, and their critics. Hundreds showed up and the evening quickly descended into a series of denunciations of Arendt, who was defended briefly only by Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and a few others. Only when President Kennedy was assassinated in November did she finally escape the spotlight.
3.

This messy episode is the surprising focus of Margarethe von Trotta’s much-discussed new film. As von Trotta tells it, her original intention was to trace the arc of Arendt’s life as a whole, much as she did with Rosa Luxemburg in her award-winning biopic Rosa Luxemburg (1986), but found the material too unwieldy. And so she choose to limit herself to Arendt’s life in New York. As she says in the short German book on the film edited by Martin Wiebel, what interested her was not the ins and outs of the Eichmann case but rather Hannah and her friends. This seems an odd choice for a movie but makes sense in view of von Trotta’s other work. Her specialty is didactic feminist buddy movies—in fact, one might say that she’s been making the same film throughout her career. The story usually involves two women, either friends or sisters, one of them a visionary or pillar of strength, the other a jejune admirer, and follows the evolution of their relationship against a political backdrop.

In her first solo directed work, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), a woman holds up a bank to save the child care center she works at, then gets help from a soldier’s wife who becomes her lover and goes into hiding with her. They end up in a rural Portuguese cooperative getting their consciousness raised, are expelled for lesbianism, and have other adventures before it all ends badly. Marianne and Juliane (1981) uses as its model the life of Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who committed suicide in her cell in 1977; the story follows the Gudrun character and her sister as their relationship develops from alienation to reconciliation, and ends in a display of sisterly solidarity that reaches beyond the grave.
lilla_2-112113.jpg Bettmann/Corbis
Adolf Eichmann with Israeli police at his trial in Jerusalem, May 1962

Von Trotta’s Vision (1991), which treats the life of the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, is the most transparent example of the type. It portrays a courageous, enlightened woman prone to epiphanies who stays true to her visions and resists the church’s attempts to silence her. Along the way she develops a deep if unequal friendship with another nun, then another, provoking jealousy and misunderstanding, though it all works out in the end. She dies revered by those around her, though not by the powers that be.

And this, more or less, is the story of Hannah Arendt. The film opens with a jovial Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) in conversation with her best friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer), who in the movie is reduced to a hyperactive sidekick. They discuss men, they discuss love, they have a cocktail party with Arendt’s devoted if wayward husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) and fellow New York intellectuals. Then they get news of Eichmann’s capture and the imminent trial. More drinks, more discussion, and then Arendt is off to Jerusalem, where she witnesses the trial mainly from the press room (where she could smoke) and visits an old Zionist friend.

Von Trotta deftly intersperses clips from the actual trial into her film and shows Arendt watching them on closed-circuit television in the press room. This device allows her to stage a conversion scene. As the camera slowly zooms in on Arendt watching Eichmann testify, we see on her face the dawning realization that he was not a clever, bloodthirsty monster but an empty-headed fool caught up in an evil machine. She leaves Jerusalem, writes her articles, and all hell breaks loose in New York.

It is not true, as some reviewers have charged, that the film portrays Arendt as flawless. Throughout she hears complaints about her tone, from friends like McCarthy and her New Yorker editor William Shawn. She is also challenged repeatedly by her close friend the philosopher Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), who is given some of the best lines in the movie (some drawn from Scholem’s letter). Jonas rejected the very idea of “thoughtless” murder and criticized her for lacking psychological sympathy for fellow Jews trapped in the most horrifying circumstances imaginable. Still, by and large, her critics are portrayed as irrational, defensive Jews who, unlike Arendt, refuse to think about the uncomfortable complexities of the Nazi experience, whether out of shame or omertà.

But although Arendt defends herself and the task of “thinking” deftly throughout the film, particularly in a fine public speech at the end, we don’t see her arriving at her position through thinking. Film can portray inner psychological states through speech and action and image, but lacks resources for conveying the dynamic process of weighing evidence, interpreting it, and considering alternatives. Barbara Sukowa smokes and rifles through documents and stares into space like a silent picture star, but we get no sense of the play of a mind. And so we are left with the impression that she, like Hildegard, has had a vision.

And perhaps this is how von Trotta sees Arendt. She admits in the book by Wiebel that she, like many on the German left in the 1960s and 1970s, turned their noses up at Arendt for comparing communism and Nazism as instances of totalitarianism and refused to read her books. But later she came upon Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography and discovered a strong figure, a female philosopher engaged in political debate whose personal life was also rich in friends and lovers. This woman she could admire and celebrate. The problem is that von Trotta has chosen an episode in Arendt’s life where the stakes were so high, intellectually and morally, that they cannot in good taste be treated as the backdrop of a human interest story. Though the battle may be lost, it can never be emphasized enough that the Holocaust is not an acceptable occasion for sentimental journeys. But here it’s made into one, which produces weird, cringe-inducing moments for the viewer.

In one shot we are watching Eichmann testify or Arendt arguing about the nature of evil; in the next her husband is patting her behind as they cook dinner. When Blücher tries to leave one morning without kissing her, since “one should never disturb a great philosopher when they’re thinking,” she replies, “but they can’t think without kisses!” As for the short, incongruous scenes about her youthful affair with Martin Heidegger, the less said the better.

The deepest problem with the film, though, is not tastelessness. It is truth. At first glance the movie appears to be about nothing but the truth, which Arendt defends against her blinkered, mainly male adversaries. But its real subject is remaining true to yourself, not to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In her director’s statement on the film von Trotta says that “Arendt was a shining example of someone who remained true to her unique perspective on the world.” One can understand von Trotta’s reluctance to get into the details of the Eichmann case, let alone foreshadow what we know about it now, which would have violated the film’s integrity. But something else seems violated when a story celebrates a thinker’s courage in defending a position we now know to be utterly indefensible—as Arendt, were she alive, would have to concede.

Since the Eichmann trial, and especially over the past fifteen years, a great body of evidence has accumulated about Eichmann’s intimate involvement in and influence over the Nazis’ strategy for expelling, then herding, and then exterminating Europe’s Jews. More damning still, we now have the original tapes that a Dutch Nazi sympathizer, Willem Sassen, made with Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s, in which Eichmann delivers rambling monologues about his experience and his commitment to the extermination project. These have recently been collated and analyzed by the German scholar Bettina Stangneth, and the passages she quotes in her new book are chilling:

    The cautious bureaucrat, yeah, that was me…. But joined to this cautious bureaucrat was a fanatical fighter for the freedom of the Blut I descend from…. What’s good for my Volk is for me a holy command and holy law…. I must honestly tell you that had we…killed 10.3 million Jews I would be satisfied and would say, good, we’ve exterminated the enemy…. We would have completed the task for our Blut and our Volk and the freedom of nations had we exterminated the most cunning people in the world…. I’m also to blame that…the idea of a real, total elimination could not be fulfilled…. I was an inadequate man put in a position where, really, I could have and should have done more.2

In the end, Hannah Arendt has little to do with the Holocaust or even with Adolf Eichmann. It is a stilted, and very German, morality play about conformism and independence. Von Trotta’s generation (she was born in 1942) suffered the shock of learning in school about the Nazi experience and confronting their evasive parents at home, and in a sense they never recovered from it. (She convincingly dramatizes one of these angry dinner table confrontations in Marianne and Juliane.) Even today this generation has trouble seeing German society in any categories other than those of potential criminals, resisters, and silent bystanders.

When left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore, anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler. For the left in that period the Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jews and hatred of Jews (in fact, anti-Semitism was common on the radical left). It was, narcissistically, about Germans’ relation to themselves and their unwillingness, in the extreme case, to think for themselves. Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt shares that outlook.

And so, in part, did Eichmann in Jerusalem. Reading the book afresh fifty years on, one begins to notice two different impulses at work in it. One is to do justice to all the factors and elements that contributed to the Final Solution and understand how they might have affected its functionaries and victims, in surprising and disturbing ways. In this Arendt was a pioneer; and, as Bettina Stangneth notes in her contribution to Martin Wiebel’s book, many of the things she was attacked for have become the scholarly consensus.

But the other impulse, to find a schema that would render the horror comprehensible and make judgment possible, in the end led her astray. Arendt was not alone in being taken in by Eichmann and his many masks, but she was taken in. She judged him in light of her own intellectual preoccupations, inherited from Heidegger, with “authenticity,” the faceless crowd, society as a machine, and the importance of a kind of “thinking” that modern philosophy had abolished. Hers was, you might say, an overly complicated simplification. Closer to the truth was the simplification of Artur Sammler in his monologue on Hannah Arendt in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet:

    Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial?

Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust leaves no doubt about the answer to that question. At the center of it is a remarkable interview he conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish elder of Theresienstadt who survived the war. Murmelstein worked closely with Eichmann for seven years and saw through his camouflaging techniques; he even witnessed Eichmann helping to destroy a Viennese synagogue on Kristallnacht. Yet Murmelstein was also a master of the gray zone, a survivor among survivors whose reputation was anything but pristine. Lanzmann’s film plunges us into that zone and reveals more than perhaps even he realizes.

—This is the first of two articles.

漢娜出場時，已身在一個舒適的客廳，屬於新大陸，薄暮時分。在觀眾的視野裡，中景鏡頭平行拉動，紀錄著她和美國朋友的風趣對話。漢娜被朋友嗔怪，當然只是佯嗔，說怎麼站到了我前夫那邊，幫他說話？而口角的前因後果隱藏在敘事之外。漢娜，她的德腔英語總是那麼厲而溫，回答得不假思索：我怎麼會幫他說話？别忘了我是通過你才認識他的，你是我的朋友。

類似的話語曾遙相呼應於十八世紀中國的經典小說《紅樓夢》。故事主人公寶玉的小女友黛玉一度吃醋，迫使寶玉主動自清、說他對另一個表姊妹寶釵絕無非分之想：「你這個明白人，怎麼連『親不間疏，先不僭後』也不知道？……他是才來的，豈有個為他疏你的？」寶玉說的，是中國人自古人際關係和社會建構的基本原則。類似的倫理教言廣泛存在于儒家文化圈。其顯然易見的缺點是不講是非，流於鄉愿。孔夫子說過，益友的首要條件是正直。之所以有此一說，正因為這種人太過稀少。更為例常的是物以類聚，個性相投而無所用心；把大家的相似點當成道德。至於親族間互相包庇而抵抗公權力的偵查，甚至就直接被認作體現了正直本身。沒有空間也沒必要讓哲學橫生思辨。更古老的生物本能已經這樣在人類身上運作了十萬年，寶玉和漢娜不過是最近的兩個例子。

漢娜在紐約猶太老友的祝福和質疑中，獨自飛去以色列旁聽艾希曼的公開審判；----同時訪舊。世界電影的新世代觀眾可能會驚訝於片中猶太人都以德語交談，必須掃除歷史塵封才能認識到老輩猶太人可以看作是一群被納粹賤民化而離散的（一度）德國子民，正如那些曾經被共和國清洗除去的地主和知識份子。

審判開始了。被漢娜日後形容成猥瑣平庸的艾希曼，在鏡頭的取舍下更像個看透一切的（史學）老教授，重複說著「你們不懂那個時代」，而永遠帶著一句潛台詞「你們太無聊」。當起訴官終於被激怒而厲聲喝問：你說你只是執行命令，那麼如果上級命令你殺你父親，你也執行嗎？這時，艾希曼答道：「如果他被領袖證明是有罪的，我當然會執行。」

如果是浸潤中國文化很深的觀眾，此時該會感到強烈的憎惡和恐懼；而不只是在智性層次予以輕蔑的評語，像是漢娜加之於艾希曼的那些形容詞，例如極度愚蠢之類。弒親屬於中國古代刑罰典律中最深重的罪惡，僅次於弒君。但是弒君這個詞偶然還能見諸學者的議論文字，因為史鑒太多，而弒親則幾乎被放逐於言說之外，很難啟齒討論。在一個將父子互相隱庇而抵抗國家權力奉為典則的國度裏，如果出現一個人，竟公開辯稱父亦可殺，弒親無罪，公眾怎麼能說他只是平庸愚蠢？怎麼能不說他已被惡魔附體？

很難輕易對紀錄片剪輯出來的艾希曼投予一個「不思考」的定論。有沒有可能艾希曼正是通過了思考（不管它多麼錯誤或被動），比如，要破除一切所謂封建陋習和個體本能而締造強大民族國家，才選擇了投身納粹體制，也同時被納粹體制選擇，而坐上了那個位置？相反的，有沒有可能，在艾希曼眼裡，那種分别朋友新舊遠近而左右袒的言談、那種朋友之間不責善的信念、相信大家終將言歸於好的信心，才是真正平庸而拒絕思考的生物本能（和屬於東方的愚昧），而它一樣可能在任何時間地點，對任何異類和弱者犯下罪惡，只是它的罪惡更為庸常，甚至日常？

一切留給觀眾思考。本片真是後勁十足。