汉娜

《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)

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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。

人类的确是思考的动物吗？

拜校友赠票看了上海国际电影节的参展影片，知道了汉娜-阿伦特这个人和关于她的这一段历史，激发了一些无意义的思考。

在40多年后的今天，当年造成轩然大波的阿伦特观点“平庸的邪恶”已经成为看待参与过纳粹德国活动的无数德国人和其他人的主流观点。前两年的获奖影片《Reader》讲述的就是这样一个故事。但是在当时，一个从纳粹集中营中逃出来的犹太人提出这样的观点——即某名具体的纳粹军官并非自主拥有邪恶的思想和行为，只是通过盲目地执行命令协助了邪恶的实现——却被犹太人群看做是一种背叛。

在我看来，这是对思想家的双重讽刺：即群众不能理解思想家的思想，同时群众对其思想做出的情绪反应正是思想家极力想要指出的问题：纳粹德国的民众是随着从众的惯性和莫名的对犹太人的偏见而默认了纳粹对犹太人的灭绝；而战后的犹太人是抱着从众的复仇的情绪和同样莫名的民族主义仇恨阿伦特“为纳粹开脱”的观点。

在情绪驱使的两段历史潮流之上，思想家在孤独地阐述着她的观点，年轻的学生听进去了，因为他们没有过去的包袱，没有个人的历史遭遇，作为一种思想他们貌似理解了；但是所有其他人，都被情绪席卷着，完全听不进去。

思想家说，独立的思考（和判断），是人之所以为人的基本条件——这听起来很美的话，无疑是一种理想化的误导。如果要落实到具体的个人的话，我们来猜一下，当今地球上的60亿人口，有多少是能够思考的，又有多少是能够独立思考的。

理性，这是自启蒙运动以降的至高目标和不懈追求，带领西方世界在300多年的时间里创造了空前的人类福祉，但是残酷的一战和二战让这一追求遭遇了空前的失败，造成了理想的崩塌。我私下认为，这就是为什么战后的所有艺术都如此丑陋不堪，因为（视觉）艺术最能直观反映当代心灵的面貌。

如果说对理性的追求在西方遭到了重挫，那么我们中国人就太幸运了，因为我们从来就没有追求过那个东西。

在人类的所有属性中，理性算是非常纯粹和崇高的，但却也是最脆弱的。古今中外，茫茫人海，有多少人像阿伦特这样，把一生投入理性的思考，又有多少人像她一样，为理性做出过牺牲？相比之下，人们为其他的东西不懈追求，奋勇牺牲前仆后继：金钱、权利、爱情、性、爱国主义、民族主义、宗教——所有这些，很不幸的，都跟理性没有什么关系，如果不是对立的话。

从前读MBA，印象最深刻的是一个教Organization Behavior的教授讲的一句话（他正好也是美国犹太人）：永远不要设想人们是理性的（不论是在股市里、谈判桌上或者会议室里）。而近年来在金融领域一个热门的研究课题就是心理状态和情绪对投资行为的影响。

总而言之，如果阿伦特的思考有任何缺陷的话，那就是她对于人类的理性程度和对理性追求的热情都估计过高了。在我看来，这个人类，离理性的光辉殿堂，还有半个世界的距离。

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。

它所表现出的，给予人的感觉粗暴而直接。这样一部传记电影，看起来似乎深刻，有人还说“它达到了一个传记电影少有的高度”。然而，我看到的，它只是将汉娜一个极深刻且具代表性的关于“平庸的恶”这个论题拿来包裹整部电影，于是，它看似将电影带入了一种“前所未有的深刻”，但其实缺乏真正有价值的内容。就像一个画家想要表现美丽的海伦，却只是为她布满华丽的装饰，却无法真正表现出她的美。它为观众带来的更多的是一种快感，一种结果，一种光环和成就，而不是什么前所未有的深刻。
电影里，一个从头到尾都在抽烟的汉娜，甚至是一开始就给了一段长达两分钟的抽烟镜头。
这在日常生活中，一个人思考一个问题，抽一根烟这确实是稀松平常的事情，但是当你用一种文学方式，或者是如这种影像的方式去表现它，甚至是强化它，这却可以给予他人更多的解读内容。对于一名女性哲学家来讲，这带有明显的标识，应该避免聚焦于此，而不是强化。
这可以体现什么呢，或者说对于人们理解汉娜有什么帮助呢？只有曲解。不应该用这种粗暴的方式去体现一个独立的女性，这甚至让人看不到比其汉娜本身性格特点更多抑或是更重要的内容。不过后面还有更多的让人难以招架的方式。
譬如他人对于汉娜的评价。当汉娜因为艾希曼审判一事，想为《纽约客》撰稿，报社里的成员这样谈论：”难以置信，那个汉娜阿伦特竟然想要为我们写稿。“…..”她应该像其他人一样乞求得到为《纽约客》撰稿的机会。“”弗里西斯，是她写了《极权主义的起源》“”什么鬼题目。“”这是二十世纪最重要的一本书，去看看吧。“她是第一位用我们的西方的语言文化来描绘第三帝国的作家。“它是辉煌的，但抽象的。“
哇哦，真是辉煌。一个带蔑视的形象，一个洋洋得意的形象，一个年迈的老人下结论。三人各自的表现将这种成功后所带来荣耀和名誉的一种影响，在他人的一唱一合里发挥极致。我觉得导演不懂得什么是含蓄。当然，这是一种常规套路。但是这一段话就这么赤裸裸地砸给了我，淬不及防。如同在关于艾希曼的审判那段一样，人们在汉娜思索、疑惑、闪烁的眼神里看到了快感的临界点。因为人们知道《艾希曼在耶路撒冷》这部重要的作品即将诞生。然后在演讲台上达到了高潮。
因为这是一部汉娜阿伦特的传记电影，如果不是这个定位我想我不会这么失望，顶多就是一部稀松平常的电影。
它做出一副道貌岸然的模样，人们总是聚在一起谈论种种深刻的话题，然而影片中的汉娜以一种傲慢的、似乎总是可掌握全局的姿态以及总是特写的抽烟及思考镜头，以及干瘪粗暴的表现方式都无一不是说明它用一种平庸的方式的去论述平庸。

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.

汉娜的朋友汉斯在演讲后批评她以精英的视角傲慢、自以为是地批评犹太人。她这种居高临下的态度是使很多人感到不快的原因。汉斯这一批评是我认为对于汉娜的一个最大挑战，尽管她自己到结尾也没有意识到。

“人们不思考”。这个指控太精英主义、自以为是了。

放到现在，发表这种言论的人估计被归类为该挨骂的公知。

我虽然也欣赏精英对自身的高要求，但对于划定精英与平民界限这一做法抱怀疑态度。

书如其人。她《human condition》的argument透露着相同的精英主义气质。

讽刺的是，不思考的平民的反面---哲学家海德格尔---也不可避免地被卷入了纳粹的阴谋。思考或不思考，受害与施害，两者都是无能为力的。

对此，阿伦特会如何回应呢？