因为正读《过去和未来之间》，接触到用繁复严谨构造的文字描绘出逻辑思想流动的模样，觉得自己像一叶扁舟从怡情的小说文章小河误入了哲学思辨大江，懵懂间勉强把握着书中高阶思想的动向。因此想从同名人物电影中了解这么一位非凡睿智的哲学学者，或许对我了解汉娜阿伦特和读好手头这本书都有进益。

为了避免给人带来哲学思想者智慧近乎冷酷的印象，电影表现了阿伦特家庭生活的甜蜜，和作为教授备受同僚学生的尊敬，并用许多细节塑造人物的纤细和修养。以此推翻电影里许多人包括她的犹太同胞对她的高等知识分子的理智进行指控。因为她没有从民族情绪作为出发点去对纳粹分子阿道夫·艾希曼进行无情的道德指控，而是从人性上分析德国人当时的精神都属于一种盲目崇拜元首，思考的无能状况，以此为世人需要保持独立思考才免予重蹈覆辙的警惕。并从犹太人在应对欧洲各国生存态度上提出了建议，从而招致所有犹太人的勃然大怒：他们居然要为降临在自身的灭绝性灾难上反省自己的错误！

哲学并不是具有同情和立场的思考模式，哲学没有国籍民族之区分，它应该是一种人类高阶意识的共协，灵超越了肉。而世人则困囿与自身的尊严或者常识，以自己的绝对立场拒绝认同“他人的不合情理的观点”。这在阿伦特那里是付之阙如的东西，“除了自己的朋友，我没有爱过自己的民族。”听起来很冷酷，其实作为一个哲学初心者也是完全可以get到的，这是接近“真理”必要的条件。阿伦特提出一种“平庸的恶”，观点正中我心。因为在看电影的当时，正打开的聊天窗口里，许多人正在对人道清洗穆斯林、印度阿三用手吃饭的低劣，日本人是天朝人和虾夷人杂交产物等话题津津乐道。思考所表现出来的，不是知识，而是分辨是非的能力，判断美丑的能力。而这些随从性的言论正暴露出天朝人身上的缺乏良知判断的“平庸之恶”。这种思考的无能，为犯下规模庞大的犯罪行为，奠定了比人性自私更为邪恶的基础。集权如纳粹的恶，并不是个别具有野心的人可以制造出来的，它生长在平庸之恶泛滥的温床上。“雪崩时没有一片雪花觉得自己有责任。”人类悲剧的思考无能性，正预示着新的雪崩的覆灭。

《漢娜．鄂蘭：真理無懼》：平庸之惡還是惡之平庸？


(原載於《時代論壇》一三七○期.二○一三年十二月一日)

http://brucelaiyung.blogspot.hk/


為甚麼歷史上會出現納粹大屠殺和文化大革命等滅絕人性的災禍？即使幾個極度聰明、心裡滿懷惡念的人聯手，也無法造成規模那麼巨大的人道罪行。參與那些惡行的，包括了無數平民百姓。猶太裔哲學家漢娜鄂蘭（Hannah Arendt）經歷過二次大戰，從納粹德國的魔掌下逃亡到美國，畢生致力研究有關邪惡和極權的問題。《漢娜．鄂蘭：真理無懼》這齣傳奇片，以鄂蘭在一九六一年在以色列見證「耶路撒冷大審」前後的事跡為主幹。鄂蘭本是暴政的受害者，但她嘗試抽離而冷靜地思考邪惡根源和歷史責任的問題，結果惹來激烈的批評。

曾參與大屠殺的納粹軍官艾希曼（Adolf Eichmann）一九六○年被以色列擄走，並舉行公審。在大學任教的鄂蘭向知識份子雜誌《紐約客》自薦，願意親臨大審現場，撰寫一份歷史紀錄。艾希曼在審訊時的表現令鄂蘭感到詫異：他完全不像一個兇殘暴戾的惡魔，只是一個平凡人。甚至可以說，他不是沒有道德感的，因為他堅持自己「盡忠職守」是應份的。他推說，他不是親手殺人的兇手，他只是執行命令。艾希曼的「純真」表現使鄂蘭不得不反思「邪惡是甚麼」的問題。邪惡是有本質的嗎？抑或邪惡只是良善之缺乏？二○○八年上映的電影《讀愛》（The Reader）的女主角Hanna在二戰時也曾為納粹服務，而她只是一個文盲，幹甚麼都只是執行任務而已。結果真實的艾希曼和Hanna都被視為戰犯而判刑。

鄂蘭除了把別人眼中的惡魔描述為一個平凡人之外，也把那些曾與納粹合作的猶太社群領袖牽進來，指他們也須對大屠殺負責。她這樣的論點旋即惹來學界內外、猶太同胞與其他族裔的人、報章讀者與鄰居等各方的攻擊和恐嚇，說她背棄自己的同胞、違反人性、冷酷和高傲。連大學也想中止她的教席，她卻堅拒妥協，並在大學講堂裡辯解時提出「Banality of Evil」的名言。「Banality of Evil」多被譯作「平庸之惡」，偶爾引來誤解，認為這是從高高在上的精英姿態，詆譭平凡的普羅大眾，意味著他們本身蘊藏著一種邪惡的特質。其實「Banality of Evil」的意思應是「邪惡的平庸面向」。鄂蘭澄清，她不是說像艾希曼所做的事並非不邪惡，而他受刑也是罪有應得；她想指出的是邪惡不一定體現為滿懷惡念的魔君形式，猶如《讀愛》中目不識丁的女主角也是希特拉的化身。邪惡會以「平庸」的方式體現於世，其特徵就是停止和拒絕獨立思考，只管跟隨比個人更大的國家機器和集體意識。在巨大的邪惡之網羅籠罩之下，即使「盡責」本可稱為美德，一旦人們停止思考，彷彿把腦袋皆變為「外置硬碟」，結果仍是災難性的。「盡忠職守有甚麼問題」的反詰，令人想起無數香港人的金科玉律：「都係搵食啫！」香港人並非不會思考，只是把精力都放在「搵食」之上，公餘時間不想用腦，所以反智電視劇比國家地理頻道更吸引。他們也不是不關心社會，只是那些高官和輿論領袖的「語言偽術」功力太高，真假難辨，只能順大勢而行。

《漢娜．鄂蘭：真理無懼》穿插著鄂蘭與德國哲學家馬丁海德格（Martin Heidegger）舊日交往的回憶片段：當日已婚的大學教授海德格與學生鄂蘭發展一段不倫關係。一九三三年，海德格加入納粹黨並成為弗萊堡大學的校長，助紂為虐。戰後二人重逢，海德格已是聲名狼藉，卻跟鄂蘭解釋說當時世局艱難，作為不諳政治的學者，他只是一時糊塗，很多人的攻擊也是無理中傷云云。鄂蘭似乎被打動了。電影對於鄂蘭和海德格的關係只是蜻蜓點水，主要是跟鄂蘭和現任丈夫的恩愛甜蜜作比較，卻沒有深入地勾劃鄂蘭、海德格和艾希曼之間的微妙關係。儘管說艾希曼只是機器裡的一顆螺絲，但海德格怎能算是不會思考的平庸之輩？電影也沒有提及戰後鄂蘭如何跟海德格回復曖昧的師友關係，幫助名聲掃地的他回復學術界的地位，而他也始終沒有真正悔改。若編劇在鄂蘭和海德格的關係上著墨更深，或許會令電影沒那麼沉悶平板。其實魔掌也是孤掌難鳴的，邪惡那平凡庸俗的一面，及其狡黠兇惡的一面實是渾成一體。

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.

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。

《汉娜•阿伦特》拥有一部成熟的传记片该有的样子，冷静、内敛、完整，不做作，不花俏，抛出了一个与普罗大众都相关的问题，让阿伦特这位20世纪最具思想性的女哲学家给予了答案。当然，这个答案与哲学一样，魅力无穷，随着思考主体和背景的不同变换着光芒。

汉娜•阿伦特被誉为20世纪最伟大、最具原创性的思想家和政治理论家之一，深受导师海德格尔的喜爱，著于二战后的《极权主义的起源》，被欧美舆论界称为大师杰作。受胡塞尔的现象学影响，中年著有《人的境况》，以思维与行动的概念迭代古典哲学中理论与实践的概念。作为生于德国的犹太人，二战期间开始流亡旅居生活，50年代在美国教学，她是普林斯顿大学任命的首位女性正教授。

讲述这样一位不算家喻户晓的故事，是不容易的。影片没有采用通常传记片的做法——浓缩叙事，即把人物一生中大名鼎鼎的事件描摹一遍，再辅以交叉蒙太奇渲染情绪，俘虏观众的判断，这是大多数名人传记片的拍法。然而，这部德国电影充满批判的内涵，没有采取万花筒式的结构，而是客观坦率地再现与发现阿伦特对纳粹“死刑执行官”艾希曼的庭审观察，写就《艾希曼在耶路撒冷》后处于舆论风暴中的种种。她的视角超越了犹太民族，也挑战了同胞们的情感认同。

拥有浩瀚哲学星空中最亮的那几颗星辰，德国思想界的严谨思辨传统对后世的影响一直都在。本片绝不止于呈现这个极具话题和学术造诣的女哲学家个体，更意在表现犹太民族面对劫难的反思和质疑，回忆同胞逝去的扼腕和痛楚。正是在一片民族阵痛中，阿伦特的警醒与思考显得振聋发聩。她看到了一种“平庸的恶”，个体在纳粹极权政治下的麻木和不思考，人们犹如机器一般附庸作恶。这种恶平庸又日常化，导致艾希曼一次次执行屠杀命令正是这种“平庸的恶”。

片尾，阿伦特的好友、同事、邻居、亲人，因为她高高在上的哲人姿态离她而去，她孤独地站在窗边自言自语道：他们都没有意识到，正是这种平庸的恶汇聚起激进的力量，造成了我们的不幸。镜头转向阿伦特的哲学家丈夫，他揽过阿伦特的肩，问道：如果早知出版后会引发争议和批评，你还会出版吗？阿伦特眉头一锁，说：我会。

阿伦特面对真理的诚实和勇气，并在此基础上坚持的公民精神，比他的老师兼恋人海德格尔走得更远。作为基础存在论的弟子，阿伦特没有停留在海德格尔存在与此在的学说，而是将人的生命实践延伸为个体责任与政治生活的关系。当中年的阿伦特每每陷入回忆中，一个象征性抚慰的画面就浮现了：少女阿伦特羞涩又好奇地站在海德格尔面前，提出质疑，海德格尔只说一句：思考是一份让人孤独的事业。

拍哲学家的传记片远比政客、科学家或是明星要难，常常会因为着力思维的快感与痛感显得晦涩艰深，而本片的两层叙事一张一弛。一层用艾希曼庭审牵引，镜头在犹太幸存者之间平移。庭外，阿伦特在耶路撒冷与挚友的对谈也外化为她的思索。严谨的叙事推进，没有绕过任何重要的情节演进，直到阿伦特从堆积如山的资料和庭审录音里，找到了论点。另一层有阿伦特的家人朋友们领着，带出她生活化的一面，话唠群戏像是在试探她的思维底线，当她和闺蜜、丈夫在一起时，每段台词和场景都透露着她本真的一面。那些略带辩论味的形容词和对话，道出了一个女哲学家智性的叛逆和精致的淘气。在与海德格尔重逢的中午，两人漫步在深秋的白桦林里，海德格尔再次表露爱意，又说教了一句：真正喜欢的东西，只出现在少年或是青年，就是所谓“爱在第一眼”。玩笑间也有浓浓的形而上的腔调。

好在这腔调并不令人生厌，相反，也增添了本片的哲学意味。作为一部传记片，高明之处在于没有刻意表现人物的拧巴和纠结，没有刻意把冲突和内心戏戏剧化，而是节奏稳健地只拍一个事件，毫不吝啬地沉溺着展示着她的思考，正如她主张的个体思考与伦理觉醒都是首要的。


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这个电影从本身来说，技巧已经不那么重要了。重要的是其所阐述的内容，“平庸之恶”这种一杆子打翻一船人的说法确实会引起所有人的愤怒，尤其是涉及到诸多人生死的时候，这样的话似乎确实失去了说的意义，不合时宜。
但是汉娜说了，她敢冒天下之大不韪，直击了真相。是傲慢也好还是读书人的蠢钝也好，最终她还是将这个东西说了出来。
也许有人觉得她是再拿诸多人的生死在那里做作但是我敬佩她，揭开人性的真相去阐述我们甚至都不愿意承认的东西，是如此艰难。就比如说，法律上也说法不责众。事实上这与整个社会的传统伦理道德所背离。
汉娜一直在坚持的是平庸之恶是造成了纳粹屠杀犹太人的悲剧的原因之一。作为转运官员的那个刽子手，他只是在遵循命令。而这种命令本身的遵循就是一个人放弃了自己的良知的结果。众多人背离良知的遵守命令，最终导致了恶果。【这一点上并不完全，有兴趣的朋友可以去看电影或是著作】
同时她当然对犹太人有同情又关爱，这一点毫无疑问。
她希望通过唤醒人们在这一点上的认识，从而鼓励人们要用良知道德去抗争，而不是成为这个强大国家机器的螺丝钉。
当你看到人们谩骂她是替刽子手辩护的婊子或是犹太人中的败类，你就会明白这些人不过是被自己内心的伤痛所折磨，没有办法去正视汉娜的观点。当然我也并不责备那一点，反击也没有意义，事实上很多人遭受那样的创伤之后永远走不出来，就像她那个同事再听了她如此明晰的观点也好，依旧在情感上接受不了。
汉娜是个真正勇敢的人，因为她正视了自己内心的伤痛，敢于自我解剖。
有良知的人放弃良知，有良知的人惧怕对抗，才是这个社会最为可怕之处。
我依旧记得我那个操着一口不标准普通一辈子是个讲师的法理学老师，他说：如果所有人都觉得社会变革、公共事件与自己毫无关系，那么下一个当遭遇不合理体制伤害的人就是你。如果你有这么一颗心，你就会有良知。

一个自以为是夸夸其谈的傻逼。决定去借汉娜的著作来看。