SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/IV)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Over the holidays, I watched an inspiring movie about an inspiring woman named Hannah Arendt. I had meant to watch “Schindler’s List.” While I was searching for it, fate intervened, and I came across the poster of a movie I’d neither seen nor heard of. For no apparent reason, I felt completely drawn to it. The poster was not dramatic, but I just had a feeling.
So instead of “Schindler’s List,” I began watching “Hannah Arendt.” She was a German Jewish political scientist who wrote the first proper analysis of totalitarian governments after World War II. “The Origins of Totalitarianism” came out in 1951 and took Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as case studies. Arendt was a prominent figure in the post-war Jewish community in New York, many of whose members had fled from Hitler’s government. She herself had escaped from a concentration camp in Vichy France. So no one doubted her knowledge of the issue or her right to write about it.
But she always believed that she lacked proper experience and hands-on involvement. She had studied with Heidegger in Germany, and had seen the war coming but managed to get away before things got really bad (I guess occupied France doesn’t really count as “bad”).
When Israeli intelligence caught a former Nazi leader in Argentina and (illegally) took him to Jerusalem to be tried for war crimes, Arendt saw an opportunity to get on the ground and see things for herself. She attended the trial as a reporter for The Guardian newspaper.
While there, she noticed something that was a little strange. The more she thought about it, the stranger it became. So when the time came to submit her report, she instead provided a commentary—not on how evil this man who had sent hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths was, but on how banal he was.
In my opinion, banal is the perfect word for the lack of personal involvement that Nazi officers felt at the time. Of course, they were not the only ones ever to have felt like this. But blind obedience had never had such dire consequences as in World War II. This became an important area of research afterward. Arendt was a major name in spotting the disconnect between a person’s beliefs and their deeds. Stanley Milgram was another, with his psychology experiments on obedience. The criminal was not innocent, of course. He could have figured out a way to avoid taking all those lives. But when he said that he did not do it out of spite or politics (or anti-Semitism), he was probably telling the truth.
So what does that make him? An idiot? Was he just too lazy to think for himself? What do we do with him and the others like him who are inert among us, even today, waiting for orders? How do we teach people to think for themselves? I have no idea, but I hope the answer will come to me one day (though I doubt it).
Arendt, however, could think. As a philosopher, it was her job to think. And she was punished for it. She was blamed for not standing up for her own people. Except, what she was doing by admitting that evil is often simply banal rather than devilish was neither for nor against her people. The same with respect to the Nazis. She was honest about her observations. It was illegal for the Israelis to kidnap the man from Argentina. The same man claimed that he had never killed a Jew, and she believed him. Well, she believed that he believed what he was saying. The outcome was that she received condemnation letters and death threats from all around the world. Her formidable reputation (as a survivor, an academic and a brilliant Jewish woman) was tainted by her quest for the truth, even though she should have been commended. It was easier to think that she had betrayed years of loyalty, friendship, religion and character than to admit that she was simply being honest.
I recommend this movie, especially for anyone with an interest in German (the director sensibly made all dialogue between German characters in German but still used English for everything else, so that the movie doesn’t feel intimidating). After you have read this far, however, I need to make the disclaimer that it was a movie, that I was biased when I read about Hannah Arendt afterward, and that things are not always how they seem. But that last part is sort of the point, isn’t it?