A
Cut in the Flesh of the Twentieth Century
In
her New York years Hannah Arendt is stuck between the prejudices of the American and Israeli public, her dedication to profound
understanding and genuine truth and the moral thaw of the post-war
era.
by Kilian
momentous
banalities
In the 2012 movie, German
movie maker and screenwriter Margarethe von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa recount a circa
five year period in the life of the outstanding female thinker who has become one of the most important political
theorists of the twentieth century.
New York City, the early sixties. Hannah Arendt inhabits a high-rise
apartment in Manhattan with her husband Heinrich Blücher,
philosopher and former comrade of 1919 murdered socialist Rosa
Luxemburg. Decorated with a bourgeois canapé, piles of typewriter
sheets and manuscripts on desks and tables, respectably filled
bookshelves and primitivist paintings that remind of Paul Gauguin in
the South Sea, Arendt's residence invites the prominent New York
Intellectuals, progressive minds from journalism, literature and
academia influential on East Coast zeitgeist, to hilarious
get-togethers on whisky and champagne.
Beside
this playful metropolitan life western public is shaken by Adolf
Eichmann, manager of the Holocaust in Nazi occupied Europe some
twenty years ago. The former SS-officer, who was caught gone
underground in Buenos Aires, is put on trial in Jerusalem and
confronted with meticulous reconstructions of Nazi crimes committed
on European Jews. Arendt reports on the Eichmann trial from the young
Israel, collects kilos of protocols and, back in the US, comes out
with a series of scandalous articles in the prestigious magazine The
New Yorker. Thereupon she is heavily offended for emphasizing the
role of Jewish leaders cooperating with the Nazi administration
during WWII and her characterization of war criminal Eichmann as an
example of banal mediocrity of a technocratic follower. These
outrageous statements bring her defaming hostility, both personally
and academically and even an unexpected split-up with an old and
honoured friend …
a
courageous thinker on the borderlands
post-war
life
Today
Hannah Arendt's notions on the Eichmann trial, Jewish opportunism and
the withering personality under total rule are generally accepted. In
her day this progressive and by now factually verified thought was
met with refusal since twenty years after the war the American and
Jewish naïve fallacy about the monstrous and virtually “nonhuman”
Nazi culprits was still the prevalent opinion. Arendt once more
proved that intellectual pioneering is oftentimes impeded by the
rocky road of prejudice and narrowmindedness, hindering forward thinking.
Another
nexus to present age is Arendt's friend Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel
The Group about the young
adult life of eight highly educated upper class New York women and
their entanglements with career, marriage, sexual relationships and
the mores and morals of their age. In the late 90s this concept was
adapted to the worldwide popular TV show Sex and the City.
the
lesson to learn
The
curtain finally falls with the approaching portrait of a fascinating
figure of twentieth century thought who campaigns for
independent thinking and personal development to defend liberty and
human dignity as an essential matter of forcing back moral
corruption. This concept, albeit rhetorically antiquated, is still
lacking assertive practice, for in times of globally increasing
expenses on arms, rigorous turbo capitalism and ecological
haemorrhage man obviously hasn't learned very much from the
misconducts of his past century.
sources of pictures
