• DOI:10.1080/10848770.2014.965516
• Corpus ID: 145426826

Judging the Trial: Hannah Arendt as a Moral Philosopher of Nation-State Building

@article{Epstein2014JudgingTT,
  title={Judging the Trial: Hannah Arendt as a Moral Philosopher of Nation-State Building},
  author={Alek D. Epstein},
  journal={The European Legacy},
  year={2014},
  volume={19},
  pages={901 - 905}
}

• A. Epstein
• Published 16 October 2014
• History
• The European Legacy

Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is a thought-provoking film about Arendt’s controversial 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The film captures Arendt at a crucial moment in her life and career, along with several other prominent intellectuals, Martin Heidegger, Mary McCarthy, and editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial (1961) and weaving a narrative that spans three countries (Germany, Israel, and the United States), von Trotta beautifully turns Arendt’s often invisible passion for thought into immersive, dramatic cinema. Hannah Arendt’s closing remarks to her students— she has refused the board’s request to resign —qualifies as one of the great classroom scenes in cinema and a thrilling lesson in courage. “‘We respectfully advise you to relinquish your teaching obligations’,” the board member suggested, but Hannah Arendt replied: “‘Under no circumstances will I give up my classes, ... and because of the extraordinary support of the students I have decided to... speak publicly about the hysterical reaction to my report [on the Eichmann trial]’.” The film centers on Arendt’s journalistic coverage of the Eichmann trial and the polemics it cause, and does not attempt to encompass her life and intellectual legacy, though some see Arendt as perhaps the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. The fundamental tension that marked all her work between universalism and her Jewish identity seemed to have been resolved by her report on Eichmann’s trial. Attending this trial was, in her own words, a “late cure.” While Arendt’s report on the trial has been widely scrutinized in books and articles, this film not only offers a new look at the event and the debate but also significantly enlarges the audience. Arendt was born in 1906 to an assimilated German Jewish family. In September 1929, she married Gunther Stern, whose pen-name was Gunther Anders (they divorced in 1937; in 1940 she married the German poet and leftist thinker Heinrich Blucher, whose first wife was the Jewish-Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich). That year, she completed her dissertation on the idea of love in the thought of St. Augustine and earned her doctorate. However, the rise of anti-Semitism distracted her from metaphysics and turned her attention to the historical dilemma of German Jews. By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (who lived in Berlin in the early nineteenth century and hosted a famous literary salon), Arendt sought to understand how her subject’s conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Judaism could illuminate the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. Arendt was always interested in secular Jewish matters and hardly at all in Judaism as such. The biography was not published until 1958, by which time Arendt’s concern was no longer directed at the question whether the Jews were fit to enter the salons, but whether they were fit to inhabit the earth.