汉娜·阿伦特

漢娜出場時，已身在一個舒適的客廳，屬於新大陸，薄暮時分。

在觀眾的視野裡，中景鏡頭平行拉動，紀錄著她和美國朋友的風趣對話。

漢娜被朋友嗔怪，當然只是佯嗔，說怎麼站到了我前夫那邊，幫他說話？

而口角的前因後果隱藏在敘事之外。

漢娜，她的德腔英語總是那麼厲而溫，回答得不假思索：我怎麼會幫他說話？

别忘了我是通過你才認識他的，你是我的朋友。

類似的話語曾遙相呼應於十八世紀中國的經典小說《紅樓夢》。

故事主人公寶玉的小女友黛玉一度吃醋，迫使寶玉主動自清、說他對另一個表姊妹寶釵絕無非分之想：「你這個明白人，怎麼連『親不間疏，先不僭後』也不知道？

……他是才來的，豈有個為他疏你的？

」寶玉說的，是中國人自古人際關係和社會建構的基本原則。

類似的倫理教言廣泛存在于儒家文化圈。

其顯然易見的缺點是不講是非，流於鄉愿。

孔夫子說過，益友的首要條件是正直。

之所以有此一說，正因為這種人太過稀少。

更為例常的是物以類聚，個性相投而無所用心；把大家的相似點當成道德。

至於親族間互相包庇而抵抗公權力的偵查，甚至就直接被認作體現了正直本身。

沒有空間也沒必要讓哲學橫生思辨。

更古老的生物本能已經這樣在人類身上運作了十萬年，寶玉和漢娜不過是最近的兩個例子。

漢娜在紐約猶太老友的祝福和質疑中，獨自飛去以色列旁聽艾希曼的公開審判；同時訪舊。

世界電影的新世代觀眾可能會驚訝於片中猶太人都以德語交談，必須掃除歷史塵封才能認識到老輩猶太人可以看作是一群被納粹賤民化而離散的（一度）德國子民，正如那些曾經被共和國清洗除去的地主和知識份子。

審判開始了。

被漢娜日後形容成猥瑣平庸的艾希曼，在鏡頭的取舍下更像個看透一切的（史學）老教授，重複說著「你們不懂那個時代」，而永遠帶著一句潛台詞「你們太無聊」。

當起訴官終於被激怒而厲聲喝問：你說你只是執行命令，那麼如果上級命令你殺你父親，你也執行嗎？

這時，艾希曼答道：「如果他被領袖證明是有罪的，我當然會執行。

」如果是浸潤中國文化很深的觀眾，此時該會感到強烈的憎惡和恐懼；而不只是在智性層次予以輕蔑的評語，像是漢娜加之於艾希曼的那些形容詞，例如極度愚蠢之類。

弒親屬於中國古代刑罰典律中最深重的罪惡，僅次於弒君。

但是弒君這個詞偶然還能見諸學者的議論文字，因為史鑒太多，而弒親則幾乎被放逐於言說之外，很難啟齒討論。

在一個將父子互相隱庇而抵抗國家權力奉為典則的國度裏，如果出現一個人，竟公開辯稱父亦可殺，弒親無罪，公眾怎麼能說他只是平庸愚蠢？

怎麼能不說他已被惡魔附體？

很難輕易對紀錄片剪輯出來的艾希曼投予一個「不思考」的定論。

有沒有可能艾希曼正是通過了思考（不管它多麼錯誤或被動），比如，要破除一切所謂封建陋習和個體本能而締造強大民族國家，才選擇了投身納粹體制，也同時被納粹體制選擇，而坐上了那個位置？

相反的，有沒有可能，在艾希曼眼裡，那種分别朋友新舊遠近而左右袒的言談、那種朋友之間不責善的信念、相信大家終將言歸於好的信心，才是真正平庸而拒絕思考的生物本能（和屬於東方的愚昧），而它一樣可能在任何時間地點，對任何異類和弱者犯下罪惡，只是它的罪惡更為庸常，甚至日常？

一切留給觀眾思考。

本片真是後勁十足。

提示：这是一部艰涩深刻的德语电影，所以我也没法写一篇轻松的评论。

故事开始在一个月黑风高夜。

前党卫军“犹太人问题”科的军官艾希曼在阿根廷被摩萨德（以色列情报机构）秘密抓捕。

按理说，被摩萨德逮到只有死路一条。

可是当时已经1960年，西德是成了犹太复国运动中最可靠的盟友，而摩萨德搞的大量暗杀动静太大已经引起关注。

所以，在阿根廷的谴责声和国际社会众目睽睽之下，艾希曼被押解（绑架）回耶路撒冷受审。

这场世纪审判立即吸引到了汉娜•阿伦特的注意。

首先，她是《论集权主义的起源和基础》一书的作者，本世纪最重要的德国思想家之一。

其次，自己也是 “黑暗时代”里侥幸逃离集中营的一名犹太人，曾亲历邪恶。

于是，她接受《纽约客》的邀请，来到了耶路撒冷，自然感慨甚多。

从小看动画片时，我们常常会先问大人，哪个是好人，哪个是坏人？

动画片里的好人慈眉顺目，坏人狰狞可怖，正所谓，相由心生。

而这个事件，好人坏人表面上看似乎不言而喻，一方是受迫害屠杀的犹太人，一方面是邪恶的纳粹官员。

于是审判开始了，世界听着检察官义列举着一桩桩我们早已熟知的骇人罪行，围观群众慷慨激愤，恨不能杀之而快慰人心。

而随着审判的深入， 被关在“玻璃笼子”的艾希曼面无表情，略带口吃地辩解道，自己根本不反犹人，只是纳粹官僚体制下一个奉命行事的公务员。

他对纳粹党教义从不关心，他喂流浪小狗，喜欢动物，并且希望努力工作能给家人更好的生活。

在他的一生中，不和人吵架，“从未亲手伤害过任何一个犹太人”。

换而言之，这个“十恶不赦”的杀人魔头只是你我一样，是一个最最不起眼的普通人。

<图片2>这样一个有点像大学教授般温文尔雅的普通人。

而正是他所供职的犹太人问题科学负责“公文的流传和政策的落实”，这其中当然也包括对犹太人实施“最终解决”的政策。

随着审判的开展，汉娜阿伦特以作为哲学家的敏感和冷静发现了问题远不是一开始的区分好坏，这么简单。

20世纪人类社会的邪恶已经不再像魔鬼孟菲斯托般舞着疯狂的爪子向你扑来，有一种新的邪恶产生了。

它打着“努力工作，幸福生活”的口号，通过办公室里的公文，电子邮件，通过精密的推演测算，冷静理智地去杀人。

600万犹太人，对于艾希曼来说，只是一个没有意义的数字。

他从未见过他们中的任何一个，更没有扣动过扳机。

而最大的邪恶，一桩桩“行政谋杀”却是因为有一个个像艾希曼这样不问对错奉命行事的nobody，才最终成为可能。

汉娜•阿伦特把这种新形势的邪恶，命名为“平庸之罪”。

当她向纽约客交出她并不怎么“接地气”的作品，并坚持不做改动地出版后，读者们首先是震惊，其次是困惑乃至愤怒——恶徒被绳之以法大快人心，我们想看到这样的新闻报道，你给我们看哲学论文？

艾希曼这样一个血债累累的纳粹，你阿伦特作为一个犹太人居然为他辩护？

脑子是进水了还是进水了？

一时之间，“婊子”，“卖国贼”的骂声响彻全世界。

最后，甚至以色列的摩萨德也跑来威胁她，最好的朋友在也误解她无法原谅她。

汉娜在乡间林荫道上孤独地走着，可谓是名副其实的，臭名昭著，众叛亲离。

思考，虽然并不一定能导致行动，但有时却比行动更需要勇气。

阿伦特所说的思想，德语Denken，被她的恩师海德格尔诠释为对于存在的领会和铭记，思想是把握人类安身立命之根基的唯一道路。

从哲学角度理解很复杂，此文中难以尽述。

可以简单地理解为，康德所说的，不依赖任何权威，为自己树立独立的人格和道德。

正如影片中汉娜的闺蜜，美国著名作家玛丽•麦卡锡所言：你们这些骂她的，大多数根本没有看过她文章的人，批判她的，批判的都是些她根本没说过的话。

汉娜作为集中营的受害者，能思考，能说真话，这更需要很大勇气。

影片的结尾，阿伦特来到大学课堂，以一场慷慨激扬的演讲解释了自己“平庸之罪”的哲学观点。

汉娜认为，艾希曼把自己当成国家机器上的一个齿轮的罪，他的罪在于“思考的匮乏”和“拒绝行使判断力”。

当一个人把自己当成一个齿轮，拒绝思考的时候，他就是等于把自己“非人格化”，主动放弃了作为人的资格，从而顺应集权主义暴政，从而带来了极端恐怖的恶。

阿伦特断言，唯有思想能够对抗“平庸之罪”，在整个国家机器逼迫你去犯罪时，每一个个体的人当以思想来行判断，指挥自己的行动，才能保持住人的尊严，来对抗集体的邪恶。

也许你问，反抗“平庸之罪”就是死，不服从怎么办？

电影《星球大战：原力觉醒》中，第一军团的风暴士兵们已经没有自己的人格，他们不会思考不会去问对错，也不会去问反抗军是不是该死。

“执行任务是军人天职”，况且背叛就意味着与整个军团为敌，螳臂挡车，no zuo no die但是构成这庞大军团的，正是他们自己，每个人成为自己觉醒的绊脚石。

一照思想之原力觉醒，才能尽破藩篱，冲散一切阴霾。

<图片1>集权主义的可怕之处，不在于国家暴力，而在于用洗脑让普通人停止思考。

只知道服从不知道反抗，最后只能被异化为“非人”，沦为国家意志行凶作恶的工具。

主动地去思考，哪怕不行动，也是对邪恶说不，保全自己的人格需要莫大的勇气（如《辛德勒的名单》），而当每个人都能尝试真正去做一个独立的“人”的时候，集权主义的根基就轰然倒塌了。

《铁皮鼓》中写到很多二战后的德国人来到杜塞尔多夫一家叫洋葱餐厅的饭店里，花钱干什么？

切洋葱。

为什么要切洋葱？

因为洋葱“创造了这个世界和这个世界的苦痛，创造了人的滚圆的泪珠”，德国人终于又在体面地哭泣了。

的确，战争中，需要忏悔需要带着负罪感生活的，不仅仅有纳粹党卫军，那些逆来顺受地听任着一切发生的普通人，难道能心安理得吗？

不说德国人，即使在奥斯维辛集中营里，很多犹太人被德国人提拔为小吏，去压迫，甚至去按下塞满自己同胞的毒气浴室的开关，活下来的人常常会在夜里一个人羞愧地自问，为什么活下来的是我？

日军在华屠杀时，帮忙抬尸体的是中国人，起哄围观的也是中国人。

我们建国后的30多年集体浩劫，几乎大部分人都间接参与了对“右派”的迫害，此后，邓公拨乱反正，运动结束。

因为有“平庸之罪”，每个人，甚至被迫害的人，都无法逃避面对历史时应负的责任，所以巴老提倡建议XX博物馆，而我们却选择集体遗忘。

只要有人在，集权主义的幽灵就永远不会死，停止思考，dark side of the force就一定卷土重来。

或许，这才是这部不太轻松的德语电影留给我们的最大财富。

不知看了多少部有关艾希曼及对其审判的电影，但这一部的角度最为特别，我很喜欢。

汉娜·阿伦特是个哲学家、作家，定居美国的德国犹太人，以色列不是她的祖国，她也声称从未爱过这个建国不久的国家，尽管那里居住着与她相同种族的人。

她获得了前往以色列旁听审判艾希曼并发表“命题作文”的机会。

但当她置身于这场世纪审判中，却困惑于两点：这场审判有点像犹太民族的表演，集体情绪的宣泄，或者，究竟是在审判历史还是审判个人。

她进而发现艾希曼是个不懂得思考的普通人，不具有“人间恶魔”的特征，自然而然，“反人类”与充当杀人工具之间存在着本质差异，艾希曼充其量只算得上是纳粹机器的一个零件。

于是她出版了一篇不符合“主旋律”的书，从此众叛亲离。

此后很长一段时间，她试图用哲学的思考方法与全世界抗争，与主旋律抗争，与潮水般正义的声音辩论，为自身辩护。

她争取到一些谅解，却扭转不了大方向，仍被主旋律视为叛逆。

我觉得汉娜·阿伦特是可敬的，她尊重人性，关注人类共同命运，她的灵魂没有被体征束缚住，跨越了种族与国界，书写了一个大写的人。

你怎么想？

来看看这部电影吧。

【巧妙的软广】https://site.douban.com/215175/ （我的小站）

许多年前法国思想家帕斯卡说“做一根会思考的芦苇”，而他也终其一生印证了这一句话，始终把思考作为人生于世最大的尊严。

而当我们将视线从西欧的法国转移到东亚的中国时。

现代的胡适说:“我最大的信仰就是别人有思考的自由”。

当代的王小波也讲:“做一只特立独行的猪。

”思考是什么？

为什么让这么多人如此痴迷？

为什么要思考？

思考究竟能带给我们什么？

思考，这是一个让自由人着迷的东西。

①思考，独立之精神。

思考是最容易获得的东西，任何人只要有志于思考，他就可以得到思考，但同时他又是最难保持的东西，即使是一些一生致力于思考的“哲人”“人神”“圣人”他们时常“反智”。

步履不停、思考不止。

在其间，汉娜·阿伦特的存在是如此的弥足珍贵，身为犹太人，在面对大屠杀时也没有“一边倒”，而是冷静的思考了为什么是犹太人，反思了犹太人的劣性根。

战后全世界批判纳粹刽子手时，她却能够从学者的立场严谨的指出，一切都是“平庸之恶”在作怪。

哪怕她的民族抛弃了她，哪怕周围的人都不理解她，但只要能够不停的思考，那么一切的外在条件都不可以成为阻碍，因为思考可以让我们站在巨人的肩膀上看世界。

而将视线从德国转移到俄罗斯时，我同样也发现了一位熠熠生辉的人物——索尔仁尼琴。

索尔仁尼琴这是一位被称作“俄罗斯的良心”的作家，这是一位被评价为“用一支笔战胜一个超级大国”的思想家。

他因为坚持思考，敢说真话被国家机器放逐海外，囚于集中营暗无天日的牢笼里。

而在集中营疲劳的长途行军中，在冰冷的寒夜里，他说什么也打不倒他，因为他是这个集中营里“永远的逃狱者”。

“永远的逃狱者”——这是一个人对于自由的思考多么浪漫的追求！

②思考，无畏之恒心。

中国历史上的三次思想大爆炸分别发生在先秦、魏晋、民国，无一例外不是战乱连年、名不聊生。

战乱为什么能和思考挂钩呢？

这就要从中国封建王朝的统治制度讲起，我们的帝国在体制上实施中央集权，其精神上的支柱为道德，管理的办法则是依靠以丞相为首的文官集团的文牍。

因此我们的政治非常注重社会的稳定，而不计较对一人一事绝对公允，所以统治阶层相信牺牲少数人换来的稳定是正义的。

他们（统治阶层）奉行的是正如老子所提倡“虚其心、实其腹、弱其志、强其骨，使夫知不敢”，文言翻译过来就是“使人们头脑简单纯朴，让他们的肚皮吃饱，削弱他们的意志，强健他们的筋骨，使人民没有知识也没有欲望，使有智慧的人不敢妄言（妄作主张）”。

由此我们就可以发现符号学家福柯提出的那个关于“权力”的理论——知识与权力。

从国家（延伸为邦国/部落）诞生初，知识就掌握在权力阶层手中，部落时期的最高掌握者是神权代理人祭司和酋长，邦国时期是贵族阶层，到了封建王朝时期则是文官集团，他们控制着书本的传播路径、“异端”思想的交流、学校的建立以及知识的教授，他们相信要稳定的统治那么第一要义是“愚民”。

而那些妄图思考的“异端”例如李贽、黄宗羲之辈，他们的结局只能是身死狱中，因为稳定压倒一切。

所以在此背景之下，秦始皇焚书坑儒，汉武帝罢黜百家、独尊儒术，明清大兴文字狱······但乱世由于没有稳定的统治与成型的大一统国家出现，国家机器的力量大大削弱，由此对人民思想的禁锢随之松动。

这就让我们迎来了中国思想史上最耀眼的三个时代，先秦诸子百家百花齐放百家争鸣、魏晋有竹林七贤建安七子、民国更是思想大拿层出不穷。

新思想的出现冲击着现有的社会阶层，“带血”的革命也推动着社会的变革，思考让人不在愚昧，思考让独裁者走向末路。

回到最初的问题，我们为什么思考，为什么要像汉娜·阿伦特那样思考？

没有绝对公平的社会存在，但上帝会分配绝对公平的人格散落人间。

似乎是19年，杨笠的“普信”言论出圈，这让我想起了汉娜·阿伦特的“平庸之恶”，所以为什么舆论要让这群“体制内弱者”背锅，为群众的不满买单?这是一个“大众传播时代”，只要关注过一些社会新闻就会知道，现在的深度报道越来越少了，取而代之的是片面的、迅速的、极具个人（组织）观点的报道，所以往往一件事的真相往往不是我们最初看上去的那么简单。

其中媒介充当着一个“把关人的角色”，对社会进行环境监控，在这种环境下我们如果不想完全被动的卷入“沉默的螺旋”，那么请学会思考，无论何时，无论何地，无论出于何方立场。

请学会像汉娜·阿伦特那样思考，而不是坚持所谓“以河为界”的正义，相信河这边杀了自己人是魔鬼，杀了河对面的人是英雄。

我们要思考，我们要发声，我们不在冰冷，我们坚信有一份光便发一份热，那时我们的社会会是什么样子？

《汉娜•阿伦特》拥有一部成熟的传记片该有的样子，冷静、内敛、完整，不做作，不花俏，抛出了一个与普罗大众都相关的问题，让阿伦特这位20世纪最具思想性的女哲学家给予了答案。

当然，这个答案与哲学一样，魅力无穷，随着思考主体和背景的不同变换着光芒。

汉娜•阿伦特被誉为20世纪最伟大、最具原创性的思想家和政治理论家之一，深受导师海德格尔的喜爱，著于二战后的《极权主义的起源》，被欧美舆论界称为大师杰作。

受胡塞尔的现象学影响，中年著有《人的境况》，以思维与行动的概念迭代古典哲学中理论与实践的概念。

作为生于德国的犹太人，二战期间开始流亡旅居生活，50年代在美国教学，她是普林斯顿大学任命的首位女性正教授。

讲述这样一位不算家喻户晓的故事，是不容易的。

影片没有采用通常传记片的做法——浓缩叙事，即把人物一生中大名鼎鼎的事件描摹一遍，再辅以交叉蒙太奇渲染情绪，俘虏观众的判断，这是大多数名人传记片的拍法。

然而，这部德国电影充满批判的内涵，没有采取万花筒式的结构，而是客观坦率地再现与发现阿伦特对纳粹“死刑执行官”艾希曼的庭审观察，写就《艾希曼在耶路撒冷》后处于舆论风暴中的种种。

她的视角超越了犹太民族，也挑战了同胞们的情感认同。

拥有浩瀚哲学星空中最亮的那几颗星辰，德国思想界的严谨思辨传统对后世的影响一直都在。

本片绝不止于呈现这个极具话题和学术造诣的女哲学家个体，更意在表现犹太民族面对劫难的反思和质疑，回忆同胞逝去的扼腕和痛楚。

正是在一片民族阵痛中，阿伦特的警醒与思考显得振聋发聩。

她看到了一种“平庸的恶”，个体在纳粹极权政治下的麻木和不思考，人们犹如机器一般附庸作恶。

这种恶平庸又日常化，导致艾希曼一次次执行屠杀命令正是这种“平庸的恶”。

片尾，阿伦特的好友、同事、邻居、亲人，因为她高高在上的哲人姿态离她而去，她孤独地站在窗边自言自语道：他们都没有意识到，正是这种平庸的恶汇聚起激进的力量，造成了我们的不幸。

镜头转向阿伦特的哲学家丈夫，他揽过阿伦特的肩，问道：如果早知出版后会引发争议和批评，你还会出版吗？

阿伦特眉头一锁，说：我会。

阿伦特面对真理的诚实和勇气，并在此基础上坚持的公民精神，比他的老师兼恋人海德格尔走得更远。

作为基础存在论的弟子，阿伦特没有停留在海德格尔存在与此在的学说，而是将人的生命实践延伸为个体责任与政治生活的关系。

当中年的阿伦特每每陷入回忆中，一个象征性抚慰的画面就浮现了：少女阿伦特羞涩又好奇地站在海德格尔面前，提出质疑，海德格尔只说一句：思考是一份让人孤独的事业。

拍哲学家的传记片远比政客、科学家或是明星要难，常常会因为着力思维的快感与痛感显得晦涩艰深，而本片的两层叙事一张一弛。

一层用艾希曼庭审牵引，镜头在犹太幸存者之间平移。

庭外，阿伦特在耶路撒冷与挚友的对谈也外化为她的思索。

严谨的叙事推进，没有绕过任何重要的情节演进，直到阿伦特从堆积如山的资料和庭审录音里，找到了论点。

另一层有阿伦特的家人朋友们领着，带出她生活化的一面，话唠群戏像是在试探她的思维底线，当她和闺蜜、丈夫在一起时，每段台词和场景都透露着她本真的一面。

那些略带辩论味的形容词和对话，道出了一个女哲学家智性的叛逆和精致的淘气。

在与海德格尔重逢的中午，两人漫步在深秋的白桦林里，海德格尔再次表露爱意，又说教了一句：真正喜欢的东西，只出现在少年或是青年，就是所谓“爱在第一眼”。

玩笑间也有浓浓的形而上的腔调。

好在这腔调并不令人生厌，相反，也增添了本片的哲学意味。

作为一部传记片，高明之处在于没有刻意表现人物的拧巴和纠结，没有刻意把冲突和内心戏戏剧化，而是节奏稳健地只拍一个事件，毫不吝啬地沉溺着展示着她的思考，正如她主张的个体思考与伦理觉醒都是首要的。

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汉娜阿伦特一开始的毛衣两件套好看，最近miumiu又出了很多类似的套装。

开篇汉娜评论好友的丈夫不愿离婚是为了掌握更多主动权。

感想太多了短评不够。

汉娜好友家的玫瑰品种好像是女娲。

她竟然在57岁已经有相当存款和超稳定收入的时候还自己看着菜谱做饭。

烟瘾这么凶吗。

在逆境中坚持突破的勇气可以瞬间从有到无，这个我有体会。

汉娜丈夫对耶路撒冷艾希曼审判的反对理由：以色列没有对艾希曼进行跨国直接抓捕和在耶路撒冷这个部分犹太人新国家对其进行审判的权力，所谓正义不能凌驾于公约法治上。

原来英国军队里还有一个犹太旅。

遗憾电影这种形式更方便展示人物的经历而不是人物智识思想的形成。

可惜中国人没有等来针对日军的纽伦堡审判。

反对审判成为煽情表演。

犹太战后一代与战争一代的分歧。

屁股决定脑袋的人性让受害者希望加害者加倍偿还也是正义，学者阿伦特追求在思辨中更精准的定罪，不是复仇思路。

阿伦特的犹太复国主义领袖的思路更容易被普通人理解。

这场审判的律师很会打煽动。

阿伦特在这里默认了艾希曼是诚实地为自己辩护而不是在表演，但一个人对自己的记忆就是会随着当下的利益而修改，即使他自己没有非常刻意地掩饰自己，这也是自然而然的人性。

艾希曼在代表整个纳粹被审判。

审判也是一种专家访谈。

为什么阿伦特在艾希曼说对希特勒的宣誓誓言在希特勒死后自然失效时笑了？

因为艾希曼在通过把自己看作一个工具来减少自己对恶行的主观责任吗。

艾希曼说自己对自己良心和行为职责的认知是分裂的，在二者之间摇摆，这只能论迹不论心地去听了。

一个邪恶组织中的“乖孩子”尽职尽责地完成自己的任务（恶行）但他的主要发心是赢得环境的认可不被环境排斥，而对环境本身的善恶没有思辨的愿望因此也没有思辨的能力，这样的人是否应该为自己的恶行付出代价？

电影中耶路撒冷的风景画面令人怀念起6年前的旅行。

结合我个人对恶行的复仇心态我可能做不了政治哲学家。

我发现很多电影中的插花都不摘叶子，尤其是玫瑰，外国人养花只在乎外观不在乎花期是不是，后来电影里还出现了一瓶混色、一瓶艾莎，一把紫霞仙子与黄玫瑰。

犹太人也觉得美国人请假太多了。

电影好像在暗示汉娜的亲密女性朋友们都认为她丈夫在出轨只有汉娜毫不在意，不过查查资料没有他出轨的新闻。

电影的边叙边闪回的方法和节奏很适合我。

思考是孤独的行为。

怪不得像我这种表达欲旺盛的人总是感觉自己思考量不够。

第一次知道法国人在短暂地接收了犹太难民后因德国入侵（可能明显武力不敌）把犹太难民送进了法国的隔离营（也是一种集中营吧）。

也是第一次知道大大小小各处的犹太人领袖在早期与纳粹是有合作的并且这种合作对大屠杀的后果有直接影响。

对艾希曼进行绞刑是正义的表面的对恶行的惩罚，更勇敢的做法是让他活着。

（inspiring personally）。

阿伦特的犹太人朋友/同僚因艾希曼的职位和影响力而把他看作罪恶的首脑之一，阿伦特把他看作思辨能力有限的官僚体制中的傀儡，犹太人朋友当然会认为这是一种洗地说法。

犹太人朋友希望有人能为罪恶负责。

我觉得更关键的需要去理解的是，阿伦特并没有因为艾希曼对罪行的缺乏思考而“原谅”他，她似乎是在试图寻找更精准的对艾希曼罪行的描述。

（海德格尔）思考不产生实际的知识，思考不能赋予人行动的力量（怪不得我内心OS这么多还是行动力不足动力也不足）。

人思考是因为思考是人的天性（此处与对艾希曼的论述有冲突吗）。

——（安娜阿伦特）思考给人力量尤其在危急时刻阻止灾祸发生。

汉娜阿伦特是不是在不对等的师生关系中半被动地做了小三。

她对交稿是真没有迫切性啊。

这就是已经成名的著名作家的底气吗。

汉娜阿伦特因这篇论述在部分犹太人心中的地位是不是类似周树人在日本人政府工作时论述的地位。

看起来她所引发的公愤对她的攻击没有对她的情绪或精神有什么影响。

海因里克的红颜知己精神分析学者朋友对她的精神分析对了吗（partly）。

她的作家朋友好会吵架。

以色列的特务机关好厉害呀。

“我为什么要爱犹太人，我只爱我的朋友，那是我唯一具备的爱”。

抽象的思辨，具体的情感。

初代网暴、恶评与线下boycott受害者。

她的朋友们在文章发表前都提出了发表的后果，是她的学术自信让她有勇气公开发表自己的真实的思辨结果。

”我将理解视为我的职责。

我用哲学方法思考这些问题” 这种平庸不思考或怂于抵抗系统的邪恶在我身边仍比比皆是。

勇于公开回应。

但一个人一个群体一旦认为自己被伤害了情感，他或他们就开始拒绝沟通思辨了。

电影结束的时机也很好，适时的停顿。

令人想要继续阅读汉娜阿伦特的著作。

汉娜·阿伦特提出了她的著名观点，认为艾希曼所犯下的罪行，并非极端之恶，而是平庸的恶，那是在邪恶体制之下，每个小人物都可能犯下的恶。

因为他们彻底放弃了思考的权利，以制度之思想代替了自己的思考。

你放弃思考，让制度的思想取代自己的思想，必然会丧失自己的良知，必然导致平庸之恶，众多的平庸之恶，必然会导致整个社会灾难的发生。

恶一向都是激进的，它没有深度也没有魔力。

它可能毁灭整个世界，恰恰是因为它的平庸！

极权国家没有真相，民众得不到真相，最高统治者也由于信息被层层过滤、隐瞒，同样得不到真相，而知道真相的人，因为恐惧更不敢说出真相。

所以，国家到处欣欣向荣。

当罪恶的链条足够长，长到无法窥视全貌时，那么每个环节作恶的人都有理由觉得自己很无辜。

思考所表现出来的，不是知识，而是分辨是非的能力，判断美丑的能力。

——汉娜·阿伦特

汉娜·阿伦特 (2012)8.22012 / 德国 卢森堡 法国 / 剧情 传记 / 玛加蕾特·冯·特罗塔 / 芭芭拉·苏科瓦 珍妮·麦克蒂尔

其实我从来都不是一个传记片的爱好者。

不爱看传记片，不爱看纪录片，不爱看古老的片子。

结果刚看完存在主义女王波伏娃，又看阿伦特。

看着看着我知道，我是在遥远的这里，只有50+的大叔们做老师的环境里，寻找新的人格典范。

看看她们，大概知道我想要成为什么样的人。

让阿伦特困惑的问题是，一个籍籍无名的普通人，何以做出罪大恶极的反人类的行为。

——面对恶，最可怕和真实的一面是，你惊讶地发现，恶的背后不是童话里那个长角的怪兽，不是奥特曼里面硕大无比力大无穷，长得稀奇古怪皮肤隆起甚至流脓的怪兽，真正的恐怖片是，恶的背后是一个平常人，不起眼，平常到你总觉得这执行恶的使命是正好落到他头上，下次可能就会落到自己身上，然后觉得不寒而栗。

她的答案是，思考。

思考是一个人和自己对话的方式，当一个人放弃思考，就放弃自己成为一个人（有趣的是正好呼应Rogers的书名），自己否认了自己的人性，为人的尊严，之后做出反人类的行为，自然不足为奇。

他做的只是执行别人的命令，请别人替代自己思考。

好像隐约看到一些逻辑，结尾字幕说，阿伦特终其一生都在思考恶是什么的问题，我偏偏从她的回答中看到，她对善的相信，她相信经过思考，经过成为一个人，善会自然的显现，善是必然的，恶是智的缺乏。

这事实上和西方诸多伦理理论呼应：常常读到恶只是智缺乏的结果而已。

在影片的前面，有一句话一闪而过，似乎是阿伦特思考的中继站，她说艾希曼居然从没有觉得这些人的死亡是他的责任，这是她惊奇和思考的起点，我却被这里的一个词拖得走不动道，她说，责任。

这个一遍遍出现却没有办法得到解释的词，是要我的命嘛？

话说回来，理解不意味着原谅，理解事实上是以悬置判断为前提的，理解之后仍然可以继续判断，但是事实上，真正的理解达成，却很难继续责怪。

阿伦特理解到个人意识层面的不思考，可是谁知道呢，或许他想要思考，却无力承重，他压抑自己的责任，思考，愧疚，因为他以为他不得不这样活下去。

当然我相信人的自由，再不济也有生死的自由。

但那是个人的选择。

阻止汉娜继续思考下去的，是她对自己的不接纳，她试图撇清自己的情感与自己的哲学思辨，可惜的是，思辨可以被艾希曼放下，情感却无论如何没有办法真正被阿伦特放下，她要发出声音，她要愤怒，要反击，会激动，会伤心——否认和不接纳是没有出路的，是的，这就是我的中心论点。

在善恶的摆中来回太多次，我简直不知道自己现在真正是什么立场，只能说，我相信思考的尊严，也相信情感和体会的不得不的重要性，至于哪个引人向善，remain unrevealed。

anyway，阿伦特仍然是让人尊敬的，爆满演讲厅的人也是可敬的，大概可以看到对说话机会的尊重。

首先，汉娜作为一个待过集中营的犹太人，能够抛开自己的身份和经历去“理解”阿道夫·艾希曼，实在不是常人能做到的（当然，她自己也说了理解不等同于宽恕）。

我们在对待任何人事物的时候，都基于自己的立场，要抛弃自我的偏见是非常困难的事。

从这一点，就可以说她是伟大的。

第二，汉娜对”阿道夫·艾希曼“的评判。

她认为，他会犯下这样的行为，是因为失去了作为人的基本能力——思考。

他只是像做一件普通工作那样”高效、准确“的完成。

当党卫军在首长的指导下，完成第三帝国的伟大理想时。

他们都躲在这个庞大体系背后，机械地活着。

这个”伟大的目标，民族的崛起“就是保护个人丑陋和邪恶的最好屏障。

当众人犯罪时，个人就不会觉得那是犯罪。

当有一个高尚的理由撑腰时，屠杀和犯罪都成了”战斗“。

纳粹不是一个人，把犹太人送进毒气室的也不会是一个人。

我们是整个体系中微不足道的一点，但是就是这每一点的不作为、不反思而造就了整个纳粹。

每个人都有罪，当然你也可以说每个人都没有罪，因为他们只是执行而已，并不是出于自己的意愿。

所以，纳粹是邪恶的，是反人类的。

而参与其中的每一个人，都要为第三，如果说希特勒利用民族主义和复仇情绪煽动了整个民众，那么战后犹太人的仇恨心理何尝不是民族情绪的膨胀。

你是犹太人，就不应该为纳粹说话；你是犹太人，就应该仇恨纳粹；你是犹太人就应该爱以色列。

如果，你对以上问题提出疑义，那无疑你就是叛徒。

其实这些看似很有道理的话，其实根本就没有必然的关系。

生活是有惯性的，思维也有是一个固定模式。

社会根据我们的出身给了我们身份，然后我们就要做符合这个身份的事情。

对人、对事分类，有利于我们遵循固有的应对方法来应对人事。

只有大家都按照统一的规则去生活的时候，这个社会才是平衡的（不是和平），整个国家机器才能正常的运作下去。

任何试图打破的人，都将遭到攻击和打压。

所以，汉斯是从情感上和思维惯性上都是不能接受汉娜的思想。

舆论也是很难接受这种观点的，这和他们对纳粹的固有定义相差太远了。

不符合他们的民族情感。

所以，说到邪恶。

你可以认为，人人都有邪恶的一面，只是看有没有一个面具可以躲在后面，合理、高尚地施恶。

同时，我们都有善良的一面，这个世界上没有纯粹的好人和坏人。

善恶是相对的，好坏也是相对的，你站在不同的立场，依据不同的标准，评判同一件事时，是会有不同的结论。

Arendt & Eichmann: The New TruthMark LillaHannah Arendta film by Margarethe von TrottaHannah Arendt: Ihr Denken veränderte die Welt [Hannah Arendt: Her Thought Changed the World]edited by Martin Wiebel, with a foreword by Franziska AugsteinMunich: Piper, 252 pp., €9.99 (paper)1.In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi’s final book on his experiences at Auschwitz, he makes a wise remark about the difficulty of rendering judgment on history. The historian is pulled in two directions. He is obliged to gather and take into account all relevant material and perspectives; but he is also obliged to render the mass of material into a coherent object of thought and judgment:Without a profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions…. We are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema. lilla_1-112113-250.jpg Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary TrustHannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Sicily, 1971Satisfying both imperatives is difficult under any circumstances, and with certain events may seem impossible. The Holocaust is one of those. Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism. This is why Holocaust studies seems to swing back and forth with steady regularity, now trying to render justice to particulars (German soldiers as “ordinary men”), now trying to restore moral coherence (Hitler’s “willing executioners”).Among Primo Levi’s virtues as a writer on the Holocaust was his skill at finding the point of historical and moral equipoise, most remarkably in his famous chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. It is not easy reading. Besides recounting the horrifying dilemmas and unspeakable cruelties imposed by the Nazis on their victims, he also gives an unvarnished account of the cruelties that privileged prisoners visited on weaker ones, and the compromises, large and small, some made to maintain those privileges and their lives. He describes how the struggle for prestige and recognition, inevitable in any human grouping, manifested itself even in the camps, producing “obscene or pathetic figures…whom it is indispensable to know if we want to know the human species.”Levi tells the story of Chaim Rumkowski, the vain, dictatorial Jewish elder of the Łódź ghetto who printed stamps with his portrait on them, commissioned hymns celebrating his greatness, and surveyed his domain from a horse-drawn carriage. Stories like these that others have told and others still have wished to bury are unwelcome complications. But Levi tells them without ever letting the reader lose sight of the clear, simple moral reality in which they took place. Yes, “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.” But “I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer.”Two recent films by major European directors show just how difficult this point of equipoise is to find and maintain when dealing with the Final Solution. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is a well-acted biopic on the controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and its place in her intellectual and personal life. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust is a documentary about Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, who was considered a traitor and Nazi collaborator by many of the camp’s inmates, and was the only elder in the entire system to have survived the war. The directors have very different styles and ambitions, which they have realized with very different degrees of success. But neither has managed to replicate Levi’s achievement.2.Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. It’s hard to think of another work capable of setting off ferocious polemics a half-century after its publication. Research into the Nazi regime, its place in the history of anti-Semitism, the gestation of the Final Solution, and the functioning of the extermination machine has advanced well beyond Arendt, providing better answers to the questions she was among the first to address.In any normal field of historical research one would expect an early seminal work to receive recognition and a fair assessment, even if it now seems misguided. Yet that is only now starting to happen within the history profession, in works like Deborah Lipstadt’s judicious, accessible survey The Eichmann Trial (2011). As the strong reactions to von Trotta’s film indicate, though, the Arendt–Eichmann psychodrama continues in the wider world. Now as then critics focus on two arguments Arendt made, and on the fact that she made them in the same book.The first, and better known, was that although Adolf Eichmann was taken by many at the time to be the mastermind of the Final Solution, the trial revealed a weak, clueless, cliché-spewing bureaucrat who, according to Arendt, “never realized what he was doing,” an everyman caught up in an evolving bureaucratic program that began with forced emigration and only later ended with extermination as its goal. That one “cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann” did not, in her eyes, reduce his culpability. From the start Arendt defended his capture, trial, and execution, which were not universally applauded then, even by some prominent Jews and Jewish organizations.1 This her critics forget, or choose to forget. What they remember is that she portrayed Eichmann as a risible clown, not radically evil, and shifted attention from anti-Semitism to the faceless system in which he worked.Had Arendt written a book on what she called “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” in modern bureaucratic society, it would have been read as a supplement, and partial revision, of what she said about “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. No one would have been offended. But in Eichmann she made the unwise choice of hanging her thesis on the logistical “genius” of the Holocaust, whose character she tried to infer from court documents and a few glimpses of him in the bullet-proof glass docket in Jerusalem.To make matters worse, in the same book Arendt raised the sensitive issue of the part that Jewish leaders played in the humiliation and eventual extermination of their own people. These included the heads of the urban Jewish community organizations that facilitated forced emigration, expropriations, arrests, and deportations; and the heads of the Jewish councils the Nazis formed in the ghettos and camps to keep the inmate population in line. These men were understandably feared and resented even if they carried out their duties nobly, while those who abused their power, like Rumkowski, were loathed by survivors, who circulated disturbing stories about them after the war.There was little public awareness of these figures, though, until the Kasztner affair broke in the mid-1950s. Rudolph Kasztner was at that time an Israeli official, but during the war he had worked for a group in Budapest that helped European Jews get to Hungary, which was then unoccupied, and then tried to get them out after the German invasion in 1944. As thousands of Jews were being shipped daily to the gas chambers, Kasztner and his group entered into negotiations with the Nazis to see if some could be saved. After various plans to save large numbers failed, Kasztner persuaded Eichmann to accept a cash ransom and allow 1,600 Hungarian Jews to leave for Switzerland, many of them wealthy people who paid their way and others from his hometown and family.In 1953 a muckraking Israeli journalist claimed that Kasztner had secretly promised the Nazis not to tell other Jews about Auschwitz, trading a few lives for hundreds of thousands. Kastzner sued for libel but lost his case when it was revealed that he had written exculpatory letters to war tribunals for Nazis he had worked with in Hungary. Before his appeal could be heard Kastzner was assassinated in front of his Tel Aviv home, in circumstances that remain obscure to this day. He was posthumously acquitted.The cooperation of Jewish leaders and organizations with the Nazi hierarchy became more widely known through the Eichmann trial and the publication in 1961 of Raoul Hilberg’s monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews, which Arendt relied on heavily without adequate attribution. Though Hilberg’s book is widely revered today, he was just as widely attacked after its publication by Jewish organizations and publications for emphasizing the leaders’ cooperation and the rarity of active resistance, which he attributed to habits of appeasement developed over centuries of persecution, an argument Bruno Bettelheim echoed a year later in his controversial article “Freedom From Ghetto Thinking.”So Hannah Arendt was not betraying any secrets when she discussed these issues in a scant dozen pages of her book; she was reporting on what came up at the trial and found herself in the middle of an ongoing, and very sensitive, polemic. But exercising her gift for the offending phrase, she also portrayed the Jewish leaders as self-deceived functionaries who “enjoyed their new power,” and she termed their actions “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”Perhaps by “dark” all she meant was especially awful and a sign of “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused…not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.” But pulled out of context her phrases made it appear that she was equating doomed Jewish leaders with the “thoughtless” Eichmann, or even judging them more severely. In any case, the whole discussion, a small fraction of the book, was psychologically obtuse and made her monstrous in the eyes of many.And the response was ferocious, in Europe and the United States. Her now former friend Gershom Scholem sent Arendt a public letter complaining, rightly, about her “flippancy” and lack of moral imagination when discussing the Jewish leaders, and declared her to be lacking in “love of the Jewish people.” Siegfried Moses, a former friend and recently retired Israeli official, sent a letter “declaring war” on her and got the Council of Jews in Germany to publish a condemnation even before serialization of her book in The New Yorker was complete. (He then flew to Switzerland to try to persuade her to abandon the book project altogether.) The American Anti-Defamation League sent out a pamphlet titled Arendt Nonsense to book reviewers and rabbis across the country, urging them to condemn her and the New Yorker articles for giving succor to anti-Semites.And in the New York intellectual circles that had become her adoptive home, she became the focus of angry attention from friends who once admired her. At the controversy’s peak Dissent magazine organized a forum to discuss the work and invited Arendt (she declined), Hilberg, and their critics. Hundreds showed up and the evening quickly descended into a series of denunciations of Arendt, who was defended briefly only by Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and a few others. Only when President Kennedy was assassinated in November did she finally escape the spotlight.3.This messy episode is the surprising focus of Margarethe von Trotta’s much-discussed new film. As von Trotta tells it, her original intention was to trace the arc of Arendt’s life as a whole, much as she did with Rosa Luxemburg in her award-winning biopic Rosa Luxemburg (1986), but found the material too unwieldy. And so she choose to limit herself to Arendt’s life in New York. As she says in the short German book on the film edited by Martin Wiebel, what interested her was not the ins and outs of the Eichmann case but rather Hannah and her friends. This seems an odd choice for a movie but makes sense in view of von Trotta’s other work. Her specialty is didactic feminist buddy movies—in fact, one might say that she’s been making the same film throughout her career. The story usually involves two women, either friends or sisters, one of them a visionary or pillar of strength, the other a jejune admirer, and follows the evolution of their relationship against a political backdrop.In her first solo directed work, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), a woman holds up a bank to save the child care center she works at, then gets help from a soldier’s wife who becomes her lover and goes into hiding with her. They end up in a rural Portuguese cooperative getting their consciousness raised, are expelled for lesbianism, and have other adventures before it all ends badly. Marianne and Juliane (1981) uses as its model the life of Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who committed suicide in her cell in 1977; the story follows the Gudrun character and her sister as their relationship develops from alienation to reconciliation, and ends in a display of sisterly solidarity that reaches beyond the grave.lilla_2-112113.jpg Bettmann/CorbisAdolf Eichmann with Israeli police at his trial in Jerusalem, May 1962Von Trotta’s Vision (1991), which treats the life of the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, is the most transparent example of the type. It portrays a courageous, enlightened woman prone to epiphanies who stays true to her visions and resists the church’s attempts to silence her. Along the way she develops a deep if unequal friendship with another nun, then another, provoking jealousy and misunderstanding, though it all works out in the end. She dies revered by those around her, though not by the powers that be.And this, more or less, is the story of Hannah Arendt. The film opens with a jovial Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) in conversation with her best friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer), who in the movie is reduced to a hyperactive sidekick. They discuss men, they discuss love, they have a cocktail party with Arendt’s devoted if wayward husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) and fellow New York intellectuals. Then they get news of Eichmann’s capture and the imminent trial. More drinks, more discussion, and then Arendt is off to Jerusalem, where she witnesses the trial mainly from the press room (where she could smoke) and visits an old Zionist friend.Von Trotta deftly intersperses clips from the actual trial into her film and shows Arendt watching them on closed-circuit television in the press room. This device allows her to stage a conversion scene. As the camera slowly zooms in on Arendt watching Eichmann testify, we see on her face the dawning realization that he was not a clever, bloodthirsty monster but an empty-headed fool caught up in an evil machine. She leaves Jerusalem, writes her articles, and all hell breaks loose in New York.It is not true, as some reviewers have charged, that the film portrays Arendt as flawless. Throughout she hears complaints about her tone, from friends like McCarthy and her New Yorker editor William Shawn. She is also challenged repeatedly by her close friend the philosopher Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), who is given some of the best lines in the movie (some drawn from Scholem’s letter). Jonas rejected the very idea of “thoughtless” murder and criticized her for lacking psychological sympathy for fellow Jews trapped in the most horrifying circumstances imaginable. Still, by and large, her critics are portrayed as irrational, defensive Jews who, unlike Arendt, refuse to think about the uncomfortable complexities of the Nazi experience, whether out of shame or omertà.But although Arendt defends herself and the task of “thinking” deftly throughout the film, particularly in a fine public speech at the end, we don’t see her arriving at her position through thinking. Film can portray inner psychological states through speech and action and image, but lacks resources for conveying the dynamic process of weighing evidence, interpreting it, and considering alternatives. Barbara Sukowa smokes and rifles through documents and stares into space like a silent picture star, but we get no sense of the play of a mind. And so we are left with the impression that she, like Hildegard, has had a vision.And perhaps this is how von Trotta sees Arendt. She admits in the book by Wiebel that she, like many on the German left in the 1960s and 1970s, turned their noses up at Arendt for comparing communism and Nazism as instances of totalitarianism and refused to read her books. But later she came upon Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography and discovered a strong figure, a female philosopher engaged in political debate whose personal life was also rich in friends and lovers. This woman she could admire and celebrate. The problem is that von Trotta has chosen an episode in Arendt’s life where the stakes were so high, intellectually and morally, that they cannot in good taste be treated as the backdrop of a human interest story. Though the battle may be lost, it can never be emphasized enough that the Holocaust is not an acceptable occasion for sentimental journeys. But here it’s made into one, which produces weird, cringe-inducing moments for the viewer.In one shot we are watching Eichmann testify or Arendt arguing about the nature of evil; in the next her husband is patting her behind as they cook dinner. When Blücher tries to leave one morning without kissing her, since “one should never disturb a great philosopher when they’re thinking,” she replies, “but they can’t think without kisses!” As for the short, incongruous scenes about her youthful affair with Martin Heidegger, the less said the better.The deepest problem with the film, though, is not tastelessness. It is truth. At first glance the movie appears to be about nothing but the truth, which Arendt defends against her blinkered, mainly male adversaries. But its real subject is remaining true to yourself, not to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In her director’s statement on the film von Trotta says that “Arendt was a shining example of someone who remained true to her unique perspective on the world.” One can understand von Trotta’s reluctance to get into the details of the Eichmann case, let alone foreshadow what we know about it now, which would have violated the film’s integrity. But something else seems violated when a story celebrates a thinker’s courage in defending a position we now know to be utterly indefensible—as Arendt, were she alive, would have to concede.Since the Eichmann trial, and especially over the past fifteen years, a great body of evidence has accumulated about Eichmann’s intimate involvement in and influence over the Nazis’ strategy for expelling, then herding, and then exterminating Europe’s Jews. More damning still, we now have the original tapes that a Dutch Nazi sympathizer, Willem Sassen, made with Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s, in which Eichmann delivers rambling monologues about his experience and his commitment to the extermination project. These have recently been collated and analyzed by the German scholar Bettina Stangneth, and the passages she quotes in her new book are chilling:The cautious bureaucrat, yeah, that was me…. But joined to this cautious bureaucrat was a fanatical fighter for the freedom of the Blut I descend from…. What’s good for my Volk is for me a holy command and holy law…. I must honestly tell you that had we…killed 10.3 million Jews I would be satisfied and would say, good, we’ve exterminated the enemy…. We would have completed the task for our Blut and our Volk and the freedom of nations had we exterminated the most cunning people in the world…. I’m also to blame that…the idea of a real, total elimination could not be fulfilled…. I was an inadequate man put in a position where, really, I could have and should have done more.2 In the end, Hannah Arendt has little to do with the Holocaust or even with Adolf Eichmann. It is a stilted, and very German, morality play about conformism and independence. Von Trotta’s generation (she was born in 1942) suffered the shock of learning in school about the Nazi experience and confronting their evasive parents at home, and in a sense they never recovered from it. (She convincingly dramatizes one of these angry dinner table confrontations in Marianne and Juliane.) Even today this generation has trouble seeing German society in any categories other than those of potential criminals, resisters, and silent bystanders.When left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore, anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler. For the left in that period the Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jews and hatred of Jews (in fact, anti-Semitism was common on the radical left). It was, narcissistically, about Germans’ relation to themselves and their unwillingness, in the extreme case, to think for themselves. Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt shares that outlook.And so, in part, did Eichmann in Jerusalem. Reading the book afresh fifty years on, one begins to notice two different impulses at work in it. One is to do justice to all the factors and elements that contributed to the Final Solution and understand how they might have affected its functionaries and victims, in surprising and disturbing ways. In this Arendt was a pioneer; and, as Bettina Stangneth notes in her contribution to Martin Wiebel’s book, many of the things she was attacked for have become the scholarly consensus.But the other impulse, to find a schema that would render the horror comprehensible and make judgment possible, in the end led her astray. Arendt was not alone in being taken in by Eichmann and his many masks, but she was taken in. She judged him in light of her own intellectual preoccupations, inherited from Heidegger, with “authenticity,” the faceless crowd, society as a machine, and the importance of a kind of “thinking” that modern philosophy had abolished. Hers was, you might say, an overly complicated simplification. Closer to the truth was the simplification of Artur Sammler in his monologue on Hannah Arendt in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet:Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial? Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust leaves no doubt about the answer to that question. At the center of it is a remarkable interview he conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish elder of Theresienstadt who survived the war. Murmelstein worked closely with Eichmann for seven years and saw through his camouflaging techniques; he even witnessed Eichmann helping to destroy a Viennese synagogue on Kristallnacht. Yet Murmelstein was also a master of the gray zone, a survivor among survivors whose reputation was anything but pristine. Lanzmann’s film plunges us into that zone and reveals more than perhaps even he realizes.—This is the first of two articles.