《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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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。

Hold on&Humble

这部电影的姿态很特别（话说我喜欢法国版的海报，主题多明确！）

政治社会学题目上，却没有做那种大师级「我高贵冷艳思想高深你们这些凡人不能懂」的冷感，一开始就是两个中年妇女聊家常「我的老公是极品」，后面Hannah同丈夫之间打情骂俏，同朋友之间的嘻笑互动，是有烟火气有肉血感要把观众拉近的节奏。但是另一方面又故意不完备背景信息——从标题开始就极简。除了海德格尔大街一喊一嗓子大家都知道之外，Hannah Arendt是谁，她去以色列听审的被告是谁，犯了什么罪……这些关键信息都是一句话就带过去。

即是说，虽然电影的总体风格是亲切家常的，故事梗概也在一般文艺片的范畴内，但是观众应对其中所涉及的人物事件及思想有大概的认知才不至于落拍。电影和观众的双向选择过程中，本片不挑剔入场观众对电影语言的解读能力——所要传达的信息多数由台词传递，却对知识层面有所要求，可以说是从标题到海报都有「屏蔽信息不足者」的功能。这就很难说是具有「娱乐大众」属性了。以「学习思考」为目的的电影而言，对历史背景的轻掠而过，意味着其最终的诉求乃是——请思考。

思考的主体，是自备一定信息量又有兴趣愿意花时间看这部电影的人。而思考的主题内容是——思考本身。

听到了不等于就听懂了，听懂了不等于就听明白了。地球人并不像瓦肯人那样拥有心电感应的能力，只能依赖符号交流。符号在传达信息时会失真。

Hannah说英语带有很重的德国口音（以至于我要借助字幕才能听懂她在说什么）。她周遭的德国小群体急眼了就用母语唇枪舌战，美国同事们在一旁干瞪眼。这个「语言障碍」的梗在电影中被一再使用，最具象地表现了个体与个体、个体与人群、人群与人群之间「听到」、「听懂」和「听明白」之间的分歧差异：犹太人与非犹太人，二战幸存下来的犹太人和他们年轻理想化的后代，Hannah和她的读者们，她的支持者与反对者们……在各自表达、聆听和理解之间都存在这种「障碍」。

最简单绕过障碍的做法——依赖第三方解读。在耶路撒冷庭审之前有一场很长的争论戏，听不懂德语的Mary先是求助于懂德语的学生，被告知「这么快的语速我听力不行」后暗搓搓想找Hannah的小秘书Lotte口译，后者的回答是「听Hannah自己跟你说不更好」——不愧是跟「大家」混的。

第三方解读为原有信号添加了噪音，最坏的情况会加大理解分歧。比如在Hannah的文章出版后，那些根本没有看过文章或者没有看完的人，也纷纷打电话写信去谩骂，就是听从了第三方、甚至第四方的解读，根本不去听作者本人的陈述，就自以为「听懂了」。

如果想要听明白Hannah跟Hans在吵什么，应该听Hannah本人用英语陈述。这正是影片前半段要跟观众达成的共识。

艾希曼的庭审基本使用了资料片段。每一个片段结束后，都切到认真听审的Hannah。这一段观众和主角是同步的——等于我们也在观看庭审纪录（虽非全部）。在观看这段纪录的时候，我们做了什么样的思考？下了什么样的判断？庭审结束后，又有一段争论戏让Hannah表白自己的观点。到此为止，事件人物（艾希曼）和核心人物（汉娜）的陈述结束。

听懂了。但是有没有听明白呢？

英语并非Hannah的母语，所以这番陈述中可能还是有用词不当、发音错误、语法不严的地方，仍然存在表达与理解之间的间隙，这个间隙的填补，一是需要陈述者自己去弥补（比如Hannah请Mary纠正自己的发音，交由编辑部梳理自己的语法等等），二是聆听者需要「理性」地理解「话语本身」与思考「事实本身」。
这也就是影片后半段的内容。片中《纽约客》的主编在审稿时要求Hannah不要加入「主观解读」，Hannah回答说「这是事实」，主编默认，就是这样的一个「填补过程」：根据内容提问、根据事实回答、理解回答的内容并思考事实是否真如其所说。这个问题的关键在Hannah是否对于二战时的犹太领袖们的动机有否「臆测」。

所谓「臆测」典型的例子是Hannah的作品出版后，其同事断语「以她的聪明，不可能会想不到这篇文章带来的（负面）轰动效应」——在毫无事实根据没有对质的情况下主观对他人的私生活、思维活动、情绪体验等等进行「肯定/否定推论」。电影以细节否认了这种「臆测」又故意突显这句台词，直接就表现了「臆测」的核心特征和社会性危害。非常聪明。

「臆测」是一种群众喜闻乐见使用起来亦得心应手的「理解」方式。
这一方式的应用手法在影片的后半段，通过路人、读者、同事、朋友各个群体，得到了全方面多层次的展现。通过台词有点有面地展示了时人对Hannah「反犹」、「藐视本民族」、「过于理性而忽略人类的感情」这些主要指责，又通过她去耶路撒冷看望故友、努力想挽回Hans的友谊、跟海德格尔之间纠结的感情牵扯而一一予以否定。只有排除这些「臆测」的干扰，才能冷静地听明白。

近几年，在讨论（或者我更喜欢使用「吵架」这种更有情调的词）过程，我也会高频地使用「请不要臆测」却很少收到效果，最后常常就是我耐性崩盘。所以关于那句引发口水仗的「（二战时的）犹太领袖们或有意或无意地（在事实上）配合了纳粹。否则遇害人数当大大下降」这句话，我完全无法理解当时美国人与犹太人的反应，就不知道到底是因为我生在红旗下长在新中国的背景，还是本身所谓的「反社会」（「高贵冷艳」、「傲慢无礼」、「没有感情」etc）属性所致。
在我来看，如果要反驳Hannah，应当以这句话的内容是否属实（1. 当时的犹太群体多有「领袖」 2. 「领袖」们是否在事实上配合了纳粹的种族灭绝行动 3. 这种「配合」是否导致了更多的遇难者）；如果要深入，应当以Hannah从此种现象得出「庸恶」的「论据」-->「论点」路径是否清晰严谨。诸如「伤害了xx人民的感情」的呻吟，或者「你是五毛」vs「你是美分」之类的无聊，既不能对事实有所证明，也不能对理论有所帮助，完全是浪费时间和精力，根本没有必要。

Hannah在影片后半段所遭遇的人身攻击，与影片前半段众人围绕艾希曼一案的争论，恰恰证明了她所谓「庸恶」的观点：翘着脚使用第三方解读是思维的懒惰（有别人已经嚼过看起来好像也嚼烂的东西就不需要自己消化了），「臆测」是思维的怯懦（直接用十字架指着「说话的人」大喊「丫被魔鬼附体了」就不需要与对方的观点直接对峙）。纳粹，与那些寄恐吓信给Hannah的人，在「行为」上虽有不同，在「本质」上都是根源于集体思维的懒惰与怯懦。

至此，电影已经完成论证过程，并用Hannah铿锵激昂的演讲（暨自我辩白）结论。但是为什么？在片中时不时露脸的海德格尔留下这个问题是没有回答的：为什么一个天生的thinker仍会「庸恶」的时候？为什么Mary会很自然地请Lotte翻译，在Lotte拒绝前观众也会很自然地认为这是合理的要求？
可能牛顿第一运动定律其实在思考这一运动上也成立：假如没有外力影响，我们总是在同一思维轨迹上前进。这样比较节省能量（精力and时间），并且与社会大部分保持一致也会比较安全。由此造成了很多思维上的「惯性」，绝大多数个体具备同样惯性时就形成了一个密闭空间，逃离这个惯性的个体思维就成为社会「禁忌」。
这些「惯性」和「禁忌」不允许你问「为什么」或者「目的何在」或者「应不应该」，只要求你「顺从不要越界」。比如「你是犹太人就应该爱以色列」（可以扩展到各个民族与国家的对应关系），这一种立令对方放弃思考的要求其实无处不在且在某种社会环境下被视为「美德」（在帝国时期也有「你是雅利安人就应该恨犹太人」的「惯性」）。
一方面越是在社会生活中沉浮得久越是习从这种惯性很难立突摆脱（做网站的都很熟悉这套理论了，facebook的很多功能正是根据「花越多时间在上面就越难抛弃」的行为模式设计的），再者为保持所处空间的稳定性社会群体会尽力阻止个体突围。托勒密系统上的球越加越多、计算越来越复杂，断不会止有哥白尼一个人觉得不妥，但是一旦突破这个体系，就意味着前一千年的思维方式作废，所有习惯于这个思维方式的人都要转轨道，而且万一新轨还不对头，就会造成chaos——社会动物最害怕的情况。

诸如「犹太人必须爱以色列」、「纳粹都是变态杀人狂」之类的观点就是当时托勒密系统上的小球，一旦提出「这个球的位置不对」必然要重新计算甚至更新一套新的理论体系。所以那些听Hannah演讲的年轻学生们因受的惯性约束小，又有更多的时间和精力，是以更容易吸收接纳她的解说，而年长的教授们则更顽固己见不愿意去毁坏自己的「思维内部生态平衡」（一如当年的海德格尔），这并不意味着这些年轻学子，或者我们任何一个人，能免除「庸恶」的制约与诱惑。

在本片的案例中，Hannah最后能够抗住压力，除了她以及共同工作的人（丈夫、主编、Mary、学生们）hold on之外，还需要humble（我称之为「与狼共舞」）。在针对Hannah的诸多指责中，唯有「傲慢」这一项被微妙地认同：Mary纠正Hannah的发音后周围友人纷纷低声「她不喜欢这样」，Mary说「是她自己要求我纠正她」之后更是友人惊诧。这亦体现在恶意指责甚嚣尘上时，Hannah依然拒绝向公众解释，意下「反正他们不看就瞎嚷嚷或者根本就看不懂，那都是他们的事」。
但是一种突破禁忌的观点，必然需要进入到集体的轨道中去，然后才能使出那一把「改变速度（的标量或/及矢量）」的外力。Hannah不但站到了讲台上，还正确地发出了chips这个词。要双方面共同的努力——陈述者更耐心细致地解释，聆听者更理性主动地思考，才可能跨越「理解」的障碍。

影片的姿态是H&H具在，剩下就看观众们的了。

电影不好，但“审判”引发的现象和阿伦特的观念很可以再思考。

艾希曼为自己的辩护词归根到底无非是：我是一杆无辜的枪，不应为持枪者的罪行负责。这也很好辩驳，因为人到底不应该是一杆枪，即便由于极端环境的压迫而丧失了坚持良心判断的可能。但人仍然不是枪。所以阿伦特的恶魔，再也不是那个头戴犄角在钢琴边诱惑浮士德，伴随着火焰和鲜血出场的上帝可尊敬的对手了。恶魔变成了个长着一张平庸面孔，半秃，苍白，面对众人直出冷汗，坐在起居室里和沙发融为一体，走入丛林鸟兽不惊的那类人物。

审判其实给了艾希曼一个拉回人性高度的机会，他的最后结局（绞刑）其实远远高于他为自己所设下的情境判断。影片中着重表现的仍是阿伦特对艾西曼的解读，也就是所谓“平庸的恶”。但真正的他是否被异化得如此极端，很难看出来。

影片里的阿伦特角色存在感很单薄，要么抽烟，要么沉思，要么抽着烟沉思。我总觉得最后一段激情澎湃的课堂演讲很俗套，代表邪恶方的校董们和眼神纯真的学生齐聚一堂，被英雄阿伦特的激情和公正抽离，严谨细致的学术态度所打动。坏人最后灰溜溜离去，好人在纯真的孩子们心中播下种子。这太好莱坞了，又不是死亡诗社或闻香识女人。如果说阿伦特的朋友，同事和纽约客的读者们都在“误读”她，那凭什么一场课堂演讲就会避免学生们“误读”她呢？这个价值判断在影片里显得很是简单粗暴。倒是演讲结束后她的朋友汉斯对她的一番话很真实，她难道真的不仅仅就是一个高傲的西方哲学家吗？

影片也花了很多篇幅来交待她在立场上的困境和摇摆，可一直到结束我都没找到她对自己立场坚守的认同感。处处都是矛盾和含混不清，如果她坚持用抽离和形而上的观点来对待艾西曼的审判，那早先她对海德格尔认同纳粹时“恶心”的表态岂不是很矛盾？只许你判断别人，不许别人判断你，这未免也太霸道了些。再比如，当海因里希不满地向她道出最后审判的结果的时候，她却极为淡定地说出他罪有应得。到底是导演意图不清，还是刻意为之的灰色氛围，不得而知。

查资料的时候，看到这么一条很有趣，在康德看来，愚蠢是由邪恶的心灵引起的。阿伦特却认为，平庸和愚蠢比邪恶更普遍。这比康德有道理多了。柔顺，平庸，服从，放弃思考，放弃自我心灵的对话，各方面都平板得惊人的人，往往催生最大的恶。所以记得但丁在下炼狱第一层时，便为数不清的庸人准备了大锅般的地狱，不是最坏者下地狱，而是最平庸者垫锅底。想一想罢，再看看现实，多有趣。

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.