In 1924, 18-year-old Hannah Arendt became the student and lover of the 35-year-old young supernumerary lecturer Heidegger. This affair lasted for four years until Heidegger decided to let Arendt leave in 1928. The extramarital affair and political experience of general scholars and masters are all mentioned in biographical movies. But her first love, Heidegger, was an existentialist who was later known as the philosophical king than her. The politics she participated in was also involved in the Nazi tyranny that was never recovered. It is destined that this entanglement between her and Heidegger cannot be ignored. The pain of personal feelings became a source for her to expand the boundaries of her own existence. Before 1930, Arendt's thought activities were limited to the field of philosophy, and she did not even look down on politics. However, she witnessed her beloved and talented professor. Entering into the frenzy of the rise of National Socialism, he rebelled against the Nazis and naively provided an existential philosophical explanation for this movement. Later, Arendt saw him avoiding the world, retreating into contemplative solitude, and scorned the public sphere that he thought was chaotic and corrupt. A philosopher who is immersed in individual self-sufficiency, but lacks the ability to return to the public sphere, Arendt is saddened by Heidegger's choice and begins to emphasize the mobility of intellectuals.
In this context, the film started with the trial of Nazi officer Eichmann in 1961, and the publication of "Eichmann of Jerusalem-A Report on the Mediocrity of Evil", written by Arendt on the incident. The great controversy is over.
A report in the New York Times in 1960 caught the attention of Hannah Arendt and her friends: Israeli spies found traces of Eichmann, a Nazi officer who killed Jews during the Nazi period, in Argentina, and took him in May. Hijacked to Israel and insisted on trying Eichmann in his own country. The infamous Eichmann is not a high-ranking officer, just a SS lieutenant colonel, but he once served as the head of the B-4 Section of the Fourth Bureau of the German Third Reich Security Headquarters, and was the front-line commander of the Jewish ethnic cleansing. Organized and transported Jews across Europe, one wagon by wagon, and under his supervision, from the Auschwitz concentration camp's massacre production line to the end of World War II, a total of 5.8 million Jews were killed as a result of the "final plan."
So Arendt proposed to the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker that she was willing to go to Jerusalem to report on the trial as a reporter. At this time, she has completed masterpieces such as "The Origin of Totalitarianism" and "Human Conditions". She is highly respected in academia. With such a celebrity as a special reporter, the editor-in-chief is naturally very happy to accept it. She wrote in the letter changing the 1961 schedule to postpone the acceptance of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, "You must understand me why I went to Jerusalem, because I missed reporting on the Nuremberg trial. This time, I cannot lose sight of the trial of war criminals again. It’s a chance." She was originally a German Jew. The Nazis fled Germany and went into exile in Paris. Fortunately, she fled to the United States dramatically in a concentration camp in France, and then became an American citizen. The sufferings suffered as a Jew also guided Arendt’s thinking, why did these external events happen? She regarded this trip as a historical mission.
"Eichmann of Jerusalem-A Report on the Mediocrity of Evil" was serialized 5 times by The New Yorker. This report consists of three parts: The first part is an analysis of the criminal Eichmann himself. Based on Eichmann’s performance in court and reading the relevant dossiers, she found that Eichmann was not like a devil with evil nature in her imagination. She loves family, music, and nature, and her personality does not distort sickness. Psychiatry Home appraisal "His mental state is more normal than I was after his psychiatric appraisal." "Not only is a normal person but also very likable." Just like terrorists are so common that they can easily become our neighbors or on an airplane. Neighbors. As a result, Arendt put forward the view of "banal evil". The reason why Eichmann committed such a crime was entirely due to "lack of thinking" and the resulting non-judgment. This type of people who engage in collective massacre policies through the implementation of state orders and administrative procedures are called "slay murderers." Their rigorous, capable, good qualities and unthinking obedience and allegiance are the natural basis for tyranny and dictatorship. . The second part is the evaluation of Jewish organizations. She even criticized the leaders of the Jewish organization at the time, accusing them of failing to lead the Jews to effectively resist the original persecution, and instead formed an accomplice with the Nazis to a certain extent. The last part is about the political purpose of the Eichmann trial.
As soon as the article was published, it caused a strong response in the United States and even Europe. From the perspective of Arendt's own thinking process, the report of Eichmann's trial was a very important turning point in his thoughts. The controversy of this event led Arendt to explore the philosophical topics of thinking and judgment from thinking about the significance of practical activities.
Director Margrethe von Trotta was nominated for Best Director at the 2013 German Film Awards for this film. She said, "I just shoot people I like or are interested in. But if there is any idea about this film, That is, you should maintain self-reflection and independent judgment, and don't follow certain concepts or fashions. Hannah said this is "thinking without armrests.""
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