Hannah Arendt

About the movie

In 1961, the noted German-American philosopher of Jewish origin, Hannah Arendt, gets to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. While observing the legal proceedings, Arendt concludes that Eichmann was not a monster, but an ordinary man who had thoughtlessly buried his conscience through his obedience to the Nazi regime and its ideology. Arendt's expansion of this idea, presented in her articles for 'The New Yorker', would create her concept of 'the banality of evil' that she thought even sucked in some Jewish leaders of the era into unwittingly participating in the Holocaust. The result is a bitter public controversy in which Arendt is accused of blaming the Holocaust's victims. Now that strong willed intellectual is forced to defend her ideas in a struggle that will exact a heavy personal cost.—Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)