Film Review: “Hannah Arendt” — Heidegger in Jerusalem
Hannah Arendt is a substantial and worthwhile portrait of the influential and controversial thinker who gave us the phrase “the banality of evil.”
Hannah Arendt. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. German and Hebrew with subtitles. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Barbara Sukowa in HANNAH ARENDT.
When Hannah Arendt approached New Yorker editor William Shawn with her offer to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann shortly to begin in Jerusalem, she had no way of knowing that the result—published as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), after serialization in the magazine—would arouse undying controversy. Nor could the famously—even fiercely?—placid Shawn have foreseen that Arendt’s reporting would put The New Yorker at the center of a debate about the Holocaust, though, if truth be told, Shawn had prior warning: the magazine’s publication of Phillip Roth’s story, “Defender of the Faith” in 1959, had attracted its fair share of ire.
Roth’s story focused on a Jewish conscript’s effort to avoid combat in World War II by appealing to his sergeant’s Jewishness. The story does not, in the end, exonerate this sort of appeal to Jewish solidarity, Auschwitz or no Auschwitz. Nor, of course, did Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem exonerate all Jewish behavior; it accused the Jewish leadership of Eastern European communities of, in effect, smoothing the way to the death camps. As she saw it, chaos would have worked better for Jewish survival than the efficient, top down organization imposed by Jewish communal leadership.
The best critique of Arendt’s approach is Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial. Though Lipstadt defends Arendt against many who have tried to savage her, she adds a telling charge of her own: Arendt simply absented herself from key proceedings at the trial, choosing, instead, despite her brief for the New Yorker, to vacation, when it suited her, in Switzerland. The proceedings Arendt missed, according to Lipstadt, happen to have been the very ones when Eichmann bared his teeth, sloughed off his disguise, and showed he didn’t merely follow orders, as he often averred during the trial, but was a vehement Nazi, a true Jew-hater, and a committed genocidaire.
Hannah Arendt doesn’t follow Lipstadt’s lead in this matter, but the film is nevertheless substantial and worthwhile. It depicts Arendt’s milieu in New York City, when she taught at the New School and was acclaimed, as well she deserved to be, as author of The Origins Of Totalitarianism. The critique Arendt mounts in that book of the leadership of French Jewry in regard to the Dreyfuss Affair prefigures her critique of Jewish leadership during World War II and repays study.
The movie also gets some atmospherics right—the fact that most every intellectual, and most everybody else, including Arendt, smoked cigarettes endlessly in that era; the view, however foggy, of the Hudson as seen, putatively, from Arendt’s Upper West Side apartment where she conducted what was in effect a salon, a salon with roots in enlightenment Europe and with connections to the world she depicted marvelously in Rachel Varnhagen, her portrait of a German Jewish salonier. (It might have been a nice touch if the movie had shown Robert Lowell, for instance, attending Arendt’s Upper West Side salon, as he often appreciatively did. But Margarethe von Trotta is a German filmmaker, and that aspect of the Arendt milieu might well have escaped her, though it raises the questions of what von Trotta’s German audience has made of this movie, about Jewish-German emigres, and Jews.)
And above all, there is the opposition the film, to its credit, puts forward but perhaps also to its credit, does not push more forcefully, the opposition, that is, between Eichmann, in his glass cage at the trial—“to protect him from us,” according to one of Arendt’s Israeli friends—and Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s lover during her student days and her mentor in the art of “thinking.”
The film portrays Heidegger saying—I both paraphrase and fill in—that to think, to think philosophically or better yet ontologically, is not practical or ambitious. It has nothing to do with technology or progress. It is carried out in solitude, leads nowhere, and is therefore all the more fundamental.
Mystical as this may seem, it had resonance for Arendt, and even after it was well-established that Heidegger had allied himself in craven ways with Nazism, it resonated for European philosophical “thinking.”
The movie presents Eichmann, for Arendt, as the anti-Heidegger. He has no thought at all. That, at any rate, is what she accuses him of, utter shrecklich—terrifying—thoughtlessness. Through flashbacks, the movie suggests that Heidegger is her anti-Eichmann. Arendt met with her ex-lover and mentor after the war but never forgave and perhaps never got over his Nazism. It is Heidegger she wants to see on the stand, in the glass cage in Jerusalem, refuting the charges laid against him, standing up, ontologically, for the right of Hitler and the Nazis to murder the Jews.
Arendt, this movie suggests, hungered for that high dialectic. Instead she got only someone incapable of anything approaching it—Eichmann. And so sojourned in Basel.
The irony here is that Arendt’s 1971 essay, “Heidegger at Eighty,” which influenced a generation of philosophy students (in America, at least), was generally seen as an apologia for Heidegger’s involvement with Naziism — since she (publicly) dismissed it as a naïve flirtation and not an indication that his thinking might have actually resonated with some aspects of Nazi ideology.
Thanks. I’m not familiar with that essay, which I will definitely dig up. If Arendt tries to call Heidegger’s Nazism a youthful flirtation, that, alas, is bs. It went much deeper. And Heidegger wanted it to go deeper still; he resented not being titled the official Nazi philosopher.
But of course, Heidegger couldn’t be, given that much of his work is opaque if not entirely incomprehensible. That near incomprehensibility was part of its power. Heidegger had a weird love of language, at least his own. There is a suggestiveness about his writing, as if a great lost secret is about to be revealed, by him and only by him. That secret would take readers to the pre-Socratics and beyond — it would take civilization, on his shoulders, out of its technocratic illusions back to Being itself.
Heidegger is not generally thought of as a philosopher of language — unlike, say Wittgenstein. But in some ways he was much like Wittgenstein in the fixation on the crucial importance of language. Wittgenstein wanted to relieve language of its metaphysical burdens. Heidegger wanted to do the opposite; he wanted language to carry a greater load.
No, Heidegger was not drawn to Nazism by virtue of its anti-Semitism. But he happily conformed to that anti-Semitism. He wouldn’t attend the funeral of his teacher, Edmund Husserl, because Husserl was Jewish.
But, thanks again, I need to dig up Arendt’s essay.
I think we need to understand Heidegger’s Naziism as being somewhat eccentric (as in not always conforming precisely to party orthodoxy.)
While he rejected the racial biologism of the Reich, he certainly believed in a linguistic supremacy of the German language which had racist dimensions– and thus viewed Enlightenment philosophical and political ideas as foreign and decadent when compared to the authentically German.
I’m not clear that he had a special animus against Jews that was greater than his general linguistic xenophobia against the French and the English– but he certainly had problems with the ideas that Jews brought with them: So while he might not have bought into Naziism’s biological anti-Semitism, he arguably did believe in a rarified form of old-school anti-Judaism.
Point being, whatever Arendt thought of Heidegger’s Naziism in private; she minimized it in public.
It would have been unusual, though possible and of course, laudatory if Heidegger had not identified with the Nazi — the Völkisch cause. He was, as you say, trying to clear away, “Enlightenment philosophical and political ideas as foreign and decadent”. He believed he had been granted the sort of access to BEING that had been lost ever since the pre-Socratics. He was not only going to rescue THOUGHT (ontology, philosophy) but with it, Western civilization.
He had no way of gauging — had no compass for — what his THINKING would entail when translated into politics. It translated into veneration of the Fuhrer and enthusiasm for the Nazi movement.
That is in itself the best critique of his thought — and his kind of thought. Heidegger’s Nazism may have been somewhat “eccentric” but was in no way accidental. A Heidegger who did not salute Hitler and feel mass murder was beneath his notice would have been another Heidegger.
It should be recalled that Carl Jung, too, trying to cut back to the root of things, back through all that Enlightenment detritus, flirted for a spell with Nazism. The Nazi Party, he wrote, was Wotan arising to speak, once again, through the German volk. Jung got over this nonsense much sooner than Heidegger, who never, that we know of, really did.
The relationship between Arendt and Heidegger remains tangled for me. It takes thought (not, definitely not, THOUGHT).
In a piece Ron Rosenbaum did for slate.com a while back, he wrote: “Having as a Jew escaped from Germany in 1933, Arendt remained for the rest of her life loyal to the whole philosophic tradition that had helped lead to Hitlerism.” If you read Rosenbaum closely, here as elsewhere, it’s hard to avoid noticing how shallow he is. What “whole philosophic tradition” was so culpable? Does he mean Arendt should have burned her copies of Plato and Aristotle? Are they somehow responsible for Hitlerism?
Moving on.
But in the piece “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” (translated by Albert Hofstadter) that Arendt wrote and I thank you for pointing out, Arendt does herself no credit. In the very last paragraphs she at last gets around to talking about — or around — the fact that her favorite octogenarian had been a Nazi. She compares Heidegger’s fervor for the Fuhrer to Plato’s desire to set sail to Syracuse to instruct its resident tyrant in mathematics, and concludes that this, in effect, is an occupational hazard of being a great thinker — or “what the French call a déformation professionelle.”
What an absurd and shoddy summation. There were thinkers — yes, even German ones — who did not fall for Hitler and bear no responsibility for Nazism. Karl Jaspers, also a sort of mentor to Arendt, was one. Martin Heidegger, her mentor/lover, was not.
These days nobody really gets savage on behalf of BEING. We’ve cut back to GOD: Allah, Christ, or Yahweh, take your pick.