Our law firm’s annual legal film festival at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre will launch later this week with the Hawaii premiere of Hannah Arendt, an award-winning film about the controversial New Yorker reporting by Arendt about the Jerusalem war crimes trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
During the festival, we show films about lawyers (or, in the case of Hannah Arendt, films that raise issues of interest to lawyers). Our Damon Key colleague Bethany Ace joined us in reviewing the movie. We hope you can join us if you are in Honolulu from September 14-20. If so, and you’d like a ticket or two gratis, let us know.
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Robert H. Thomas and Bethany C.K. Ace
Last week, Rochus Misch, 96, aretired German shopkeeper, died in Berlin of old age. His death was noted byevery major news outlet in the world.
Why would the passing of this nondescript pensionermerit such attention?
Because many years ago, he wasAdolf Hitler’s devoted bodyguard and the last remaining witness to the finalhours in the Berlin bunker; and to his own last days, Misch was, as reported bythe Associated Press, “unrepentant,” claiming “he knew nothing of the murder of6 million Jews and that Hitler never brought up the Final Solution in hispresence.” Misch, an unremarkable man, embodied the phrase “banality of evil,”a term coined by German-Jewish philosopher-turned-controversial-reporter HannahArendt, the subject of the self-titled award-winning film by Margarethe vonTrotta (Rosa Luxemberg).
Arendt introduced the world to theconcept of evil perpetrated by unassuming—even boring—men, bureaucrats of deathwho believed they avoided responsibility for the Holocaust by actively surrenderingtheir consciences to others, or claiming they “knew nothing.” Barbara Sukowawon the Lola, Germany’s version of the Oscar for her performance as thebrittle, chain-smoking, unrepentant Arendt, covering the Israeli 1961 warcrimes trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker and subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, were controversialat the time, and the film raises many questions, both about the Eichmann trial,and about Arendt herself.
Firstof all, what is Hannah Arendt—which containsfew courtroom scenes (and no lawyer characters), doing in a festival focused onlegal movies? Indeed, the actual footage of the Eichmann trial used in thefilm, while driving the movie’s ideas, is but a sidelight to the story. Ultimately,we settled on including the film because Sukowa’s subtle portrayal of adifficult and somewhat unsympathetic personality made it worthy ofconsideration, and it must have been a challenge to make a movie centered on thoughtsand ideas, not events.
Second, even a half-century later, Arendt’s reportingof the Eichmann trial continues to be controversial, both for its portrayal ofthe defendant as well as of the Jewish leaders who Arendt claimed made iteasier for the Nazis than they could have. Most recently, for example, Commentary magazine ran a piece titled“The Lies of Hannah Arendt,” arguing the film “distort[s] the historical recordand defame[s] many of the thoughtful writers who criticized Arendt—and who wereproved right in their critique.” We’ll let you decide whether the film isaccurate (or whether a movie has any obligation to be so).
We were further convinced to feature the film byits final act: Hannah Arendtconcludes with her defense of her controversial writings, a scene that rivalsthe closing arguments in any legal film.
But what put us over the top was that Hannah Arendt tied in well with otherfilms about similar cases, Judgment atNuremberg, most obviously. Eichmann was not tried at Nuremberg because hehad already escaped. He was not the subject of “victor’s justice,” or aninternational tribunal, but was prosecuted in a jurisdiction that did not evenexist at the time of his crimes, under the idea that it was a “sacred right” ofIsrael to try and execute a Nazi for crimes against the Jewish people. AsArendt’s husband proclaims when she tells him she is going to Jerusalem tocover the trial, “you can’t put history on trial,” arguing that the proceeding itselfmay be “illegal.”
Thus, HannahArendt raises ideas central to most serious legal movies: how do we treatthose who advocate unpopular or controversial ideas, where does our concept of“law” fit into what may be exclusively moral judgments about conduct thatviolates no statute, and what is the nature of “crime” when conduct is notillegal under the law of the prevailing jurisdiction?
HannahArendtdoesn’t necessarily answer the questions it raises, but you may be more likelyto have formed your own answers after viewing this film.