Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (/ˈɛərənt/ or /ˈɑːrənt/; German: [ˈaːʀənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." An assimilated Jew, she escaped Europe during the Holocaust and became an American citizen. Her works deal with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honor.

Life and career

Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (now a part of Hanover), the daughter of Martha (born Cohn) and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Arendt's family was a very assimilated Jewish family and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it." Arendt came to define her Jewish identity in a negative sense after encountering anti-Semitism as an adult. Arendt came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, a 19th century Prussian Jewish hostess who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born and grew up Jewish. Arendt later wrote about Varnhagen that she was "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now."

Hannah Arendt is a 2012 German-Luxembourgian-French biographical drama film directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa. The film centers in the life of German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. It is distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the United States, where it opened theatrically on 29 May 2013.

German director von Trotta's film centers on Arendt's response to the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered for The New Yorker. Her writing on the trial became controversial for its depiction of both Eichmann and the Jewish councils, and for its introduction of Arendt's now-famous concept of "the banality of evil".

Plot summary

As the film opens Eichmann has been captured in South America. It is revealed that he escaped there via the "rat line" and with forged papers. Arendt, now a professor in New York, volunteers to write about the trial for The New Yorker and is given the assignment. Observing the trial, she is impressed by how ordinary and mediocre Eichmann appears. She had expected someone scary, a monster, and he does not seem to be that. In a cafe conversation in which the Faust story is raised it is mentioned that Eichmann is not in any way a Mephisto (the devil). Returning to New York, Arendt has massive piles of transcripts to go through. Her husband has a brain aneurysm, almost dying, and causing her further delay. She continues to struggle with how Eichmann rationalized his behavior through platitudes about bureaucratic loyalty, and that he was just doing his job. When her material is finally published, it immediately creates enormous controversy, resulting in angry phone calls and a falling out from her old friend, Hans Jonas.