CUNY Lehman Hanner Arendt’s Banality of Evil in The Film Arendt Discussion
In the last module we explored the way in which Martin Scorsese's film Silence gives expression to Hannah Arendt's concept of the "Banality of Evil"; and in this module we'll explore the way in which Margarethe von Trotta's film Hannah Arendt gives expression to Hannah Arendt's concept. Trott'a film, and so too Scorsese's film, gives expression to one of the central thematics of this course: the struggle to be good in a world that seems to be shot through with evil -- shot through with both systemic evil (atmospheric evil); and individual evil which typically tends to be the byproduct of systemic evil: it's is when the "absence of good" (Aristotle's definition of evil) is felt by the individuals of X-community or X-sub-community to be such a ubiquitous and omni-present human condition that being good comes to be more of a rarified human condition than being evil. Thinkers, artists, prophets, sages through the millennia have long hypothesized that "a good society is a society that makes it easy to be good," which is a hypothesis that comes with the implication that "an evil society is a society that makes it easy to be evil." Critics, including the philosopher-scholar Hannah Arendt herself, have long argued that such a species of society thrived around the time of the Holocaust, insofar as around that time there existed the diabolical influence of a society that, in retrospect, made it easy -- that made it unremarkable and therefore somewhat normal -- to be evil. The perpetrators of the Holocaust – from those who organized it in Berlin to those who carried it out in the death camps and killing fields – included figures who were regarded as some of the most brilliant young men and women in Germany. Many left the university to participate in the “final solution” and returned to highly prestigious jobs in post-war Germany. Figures like Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler himself and the numerous doctors and lawyers who were tried at Nuremberg, were some of the brightest university students, students who began by burning Jewish books who ended by burning Jewish children.One of Hitler’s key supporters -- as represented in Trotta's film - was the philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most influential philosopher of his day. Arendt was his student and lover. And after the war she tried desperately to rehabilitate him.Another one of Hitler's key supporters was a man who authorized the slaughter of numberless innocent Jews -- Adolf Eichmann. He was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust—the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in Nazi terminology. He was tasked by Nazi leaders with the task of facilitating and managing the the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Eichmann was eventually found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicised trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962.Trotta's film is essentially a dramatization of Arendt's speculative desire to answer the controversial question, a question treated in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil -- Was Eichman's evil banal -- or in other words, was it an evil carried out naively and/or in ignorance of itself as being evil -- or, by contrast, was Eichman's evil clear-headedly conscious of itself as evil, or in other words, was it carried out as a form of "calculation, manipulation and shrewdness," the shrewdness of a man who was ready to use his psychological insights, his mind to his advantage over innocent Jews? Controversy -- Was Eichman's Evil "Banal" or "Calculated"? Trotta's film essentially dramatizes the above controversy, the above tension implied in Arendt's desire to resolve a controversial question, a controversial tension between two alternative ways of comprehending and adjudicating the nature of Eichman's evil actions as either:1. "banal" -- as an action which is more or less unconscious, un-self-aware of itself as evil; or as...2. "calculated, manipulated, shrewd," which would be to understand Eichman's action of evil as more or less conscious, self-aware of itself as evil. Trotta's film constitutes an exploration of a court-room trial in which what is being adjudicated is the above controversial question. And our Module 8 discussion question will invite you spy out and explain evidence of this controversial question, this controversial tension between banal versus calculated evil in association with Eichmann in Trotta's film. For because Arendt was not the only correspondent reporting on Eichmann's trial: professor Telford Taylor - who had been the chief prosecutor at the Second Nuremburg Trial -- was invited to report on the trial as well. Taylor's account of the trial varied enormously from that of Hannah Arnedt. Where she saw banality, he saw calculation, manipulation and shrewdness. And so Trotta's film constitutes an examination of the tension, the controversy between Arendt's and Taylor's opposed view points. Apropos of Trotta's depiction of Arendt's viewpoint, we recall the film critic Roger Ebert's viewpoint: he -- commenting on the banality of evil in the film Silence -- remarked that the act of evil in the film (which indeed is represented by Scorsese vaguely as a "caution," or as a "cautionary" message) is as "matter-of-fact" as the act of merely "showing up for a day's work."If such a "matter-of-fact-ness" can be associated with the motives behind Eichmann's controversial actions, than Eichmann's actions might be viewed not as the actions of a man regarding his actions as "grandiose" or "terrible" or "demonic" but rather as "mundane," "trivial" -- "banal." In the words of Maria Popova taken from our last module's reading -- "A core cause of this perplexity [with regard to "banal evil"] lies in the fact that while acts of evil can mushroom into monumental tragedies, the individual human perpetrators of those acts are often marked not with the grandiosity of the demonic but with absolute mundanity."Taylor's report on Eichmann-- in contrast to Arendt's report on Eichmann -- identifies no such mundanity, no such banality, behind Eichmann's motives. Taylor's report identifies purely shrewd, calculated motives -- motives very much self-aware of themselves as "grandiose," epic, demonic. And it's with the nature of Taylor's optic on Eichmann's evil in mind, that some thinkers continue to characterize Arendt's optic not only as a distortion of the history of the Holocaust – whether by denial, minimization, or by an unfair comparisons or false characterizations of the perpetrators – but as a moral, literary, aesthetic sin. One critic -- Alan Dershowitz -- has argued that "Eichmann is presented [in Trotta's film] in his multifaceted complexity, in the manner in which Shakespeare presented Iago, Lady Macbeth and many of his other evil villains – not as banal but as brilliantly evil" -- as an ingenious, mastermind of evil.Dershowitz argues --It is essential to the memory of the victims of the Shoah, as well as to the future efforts to prevent recurrences of genocide, that we not simplify with ideologically driven and historically false oversimplifications such as “the banality of evil.” That mendacious and dangerous phrase should be struck from the historical vocabulary of the Holocaust and the trial of Eichmann, lest we look in the future for banality and miss the brilliance of those who would repeat Eichmann’s crimes.In opposition to Taylor's and Dershowitz' optics on Eichmann, Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was "neither perverted nor sadistic," but "terrifyingly normal." He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy, the Nazi corporation. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her 1963 case-study. Instead, Eichmann performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his "thoughtlessness," a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann, Arendt argued,"‘never realised what he was doing" due to an "inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he "commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong." What do you think? Learning Goals: 1. To continue to comprehend evil as "banal" in contrast to "calculated" according to Hannah Arendt's philosophical characterization, and Trotta's cinematic / aesthetic representation or Arendt's characterization. 2. To learn the art of identifying philosophical distinctions: which is the art of isolating both the specificity and the implications of two opposed philosophical viewpoints / optics (in this case, viewpoints / optics on evil), so as be able to subsequently avail of that art, that optic in our acts of trying to understanding evil. Study Materials: 1. Margarethe von Trotta's, Hannah Arendt (2012)
