Post by pim on Apr 7, 2014 13:07:20 GMT 10
I finally got to see this movie yesterday. Showing at all good arthouse cinemas.
The movie is in German and English, and focusses on the reactions of émigré German Jewish intellectuals in New York to the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. All of the characters in the movie had originally come to New York as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and were artists/intellectuals. One of their number, Hannah Arendt, was commissioned by the New Yorker magazine to cover the Eichmann trial and what she wrote in her article caused a controversy that still resounds today - especially going on the review of the movie in the same New Yorker magazine www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-glorification-of-thinking.html
Basically Arendt, in observing the trial and the defence that Eichmann put up, concluded that the individual in the dock, far from being a two-headed Nazi "monster", was just a boring little functionary who was capable of the evil that he perpetrated by submerging and immersing himself in the administrative minutiae of implementing the Holocaust. It was a job of work like making the trains run on time or running an outfit like Centrelink. She argued that Eichmann, far from being a "monster", was a banal little bureaucrat and she coined the phrase "the banality of evil".
The phrase, and the article, made the shit hi the fan and wrecked most of Hannah Arendt's personal relationships. It also spawned the accusation that far right apologists for Zionism still hurl at Jews who dare to question the Jewish "consensus" regarding the Holocaust and the existence of Israel, and which was first levelled at Hannah Arendt: that she was a "self-hating Jew". Her response to that particular accusation was devastating and the movie is worth seeing just for that alone.
See it!!
The movie is in German and English, and focusses on the reactions of émigré German Jewish intellectuals in New York to the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. All of the characters in the movie had originally come to New York as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and were artists/intellectuals. One of their number, Hannah Arendt, was commissioned by the New Yorker magazine to cover the Eichmann trial and what she wrote in her article caused a controversy that still resounds today - especially going on the review of the movie in the same New Yorker magazine www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-glorification-of-thinking.html
Basically Arendt, in observing the trial and the defence that Eichmann put up, concluded that the individual in the dock, far from being a two-headed Nazi "monster", was just a boring little functionary who was capable of the evil that he perpetrated by submerging and immersing himself in the administrative minutiae of implementing the Holocaust. It was a job of work like making the trains run on time or running an outfit like Centrelink. She argued that Eichmann, far from being a "monster", was a banal little bureaucrat and she coined the phrase "the banality of evil".
The phrase, and the article, made the shit hi the fan and wrecked most of Hannah Arendt's personal relationships. It also spawned the accusation that far right apologists for Zionism still hurl at Jews who dare to question the Jewish "consensus" regarding the Holocaust and the existence of Israel, and which was first levelled at Hannah Arendt: that she was a "self-hating Jew". Her response to that particular accusation was devastating and the movie is worth seeing just for that alone.
See it!!