HANNAH ARENDT: Her Ideas Changed the World

"Where there is no political alternative, there remains only the moral alternative – non-participation." - Hannah Arendt

 

Tonight at the Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami a powerful movie about a brilliant thinker was screened. The film is HANNAH ARENDT that dramatizes an important chapter in the life of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. The film covers Arendt's reporting of the trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker and the events surrounding the publication of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. She also wrote a series of articles for The New York Review of Books.


It was during this period that Hannah Arendt coined the term "the banality of evil." The film also engages in a nuanced analysis of the difference between what is radical and what is extreme and raises the question of what falls between resistance and cooperation.



Arendt is best known for her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),and The Human Condition (1958). The interview above with English subtitles is also found on youtube with Spanish subtitles was conducted in and broadcast in West Germany on October 28, 1964.

Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher

The film is directed by Margarethe von Trotta (Vision, Rosa Luxemburg) and the German actress Barbara Sukowa plays the title role. Its been well reviewed with Rotten Tomatoes giving it an 89% fresh rating and is now showing in South Florida this weekend with a limited release. Go out and see it if you can.