http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/07/the-banality-of-hannah-arendt/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=e86044dccb-Mosaic_2013_7_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-e86044dccb-41165129
The Banality of Hannah Arendt – In a new movie, Margarethe von Trotta attempts to fight Arendt’s battles over Eichmann in Jerusalem; she doesn’t understand those battles any better than Arendt herself understood Eichmann. Margot Lurie, Standpoint.
“So,” the motherly brunette asks conspiratorially, a billiard cue slung below her arm, “Was he the greatest love of your life?”
No, it’s not a scene from the latest chick flick; it’s from Hannah Arendt, Margarethe von Trotta’s new biopic about the German-Jewish political theorist. The questioner is the American critic and novelist Mary McCarthy, and she is referring to none other than Martin Heidegger, the controversial Nazi-aligned philosopher. The film’s central plotline follows Arendt’s coverage of the 1961 Eichmann trial and its aftermath. Particular attention is given to disputes about the “banality of evil” — Arendt’s notorious thesis intended to explain why the Nazi leader took care of the trains while letting the categorical imperative run on empty. But Geschichtsphilosophie this ain’t.
Part of the problem is that the film leans heavily on the correspondence between Arendt and McCarthy: long stretches of dialogue are taken verbatim from their letters and recast as verbal exchanges. This is curious, for in recent years more information has become available on the Eichmann trial and especially Arendt’s perspective on it than ever before. So why is von Trotta relying largely on the chatty, theatrical exchanges of McCarthy and Arendt for her source material?
Both Arendt and McCarthy are the subject of seemingly endless fascination and study. And no wonder: they led extraordinary lives. McCarthy, born in Seattle in 1912, became a famously cutting wit among the Partisan Review crowd. Arendt, born in Hanover in 1918, studied under (pun sadly intended) Heidegger and went on to write her dissertation with Karl Jaspers. Arendt’s topic was love: specifically, the idea of love in Augustine. McCarthy’s topic was sex: her taboo-busting, bestselling novel The Group included frank treatments of lesbianism, birth control, and sex from the woman’s point of view.
While the friendship, however unlikely, was a deep and loving one, Arendt’s temptations and querks of character — exhibitionism, imprecision, imperiousness — emerged dramatically under McCarthy’s influence. Each woman’s work came to betray the stamp of the other’s thought. While writing Eichmann, Arendt breathlessly read McCarthy’s essay “General Macbeth”, in which the Shakespearean murderer emerges a petty bourgeois bureaucrat:
“The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-tormented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night’s sleep.”
In these lines, McCarthy replaces the usual understanding of Macbeth’s driving force as ambition with a sense of his generality (yes, the title is a pun) — just as Arendt would later replace the usual understanding of Eichmann’s driving force as vicious anti-Semitism with that of unreflective conformism. McCarthy doesn’t use the word “banal”, but there’s enough to suggest that Arendt’s understanding of Eichmann follows McCarthy’s understanding of the Scottish lord.
So it was literary ingenuity and verve that the two women encouraged in each other — and not necessarily truth. This was the case from the start: the friendship almost didn’t take, after a disastrous first encounter.
It happened at a party in New York in 1945. Mary McCarthy (herself possessed of a Jewish grandmother) expressed pity for Hitler, “who was so absurd as to want the love of his victims”. Arendt was furious. “How can you say such a thing in front of me — a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp!” Amends were only made three years later, when McCarthy apologised, and Arendt conceded that she had not in fact been in a concentration camp, but rather a French internment and refugee camp from which she escaped after a few weeks.
