Figure 1. Shy Abady, Dusty Orange (2004). Mixed media on paper. Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/34/2/103/688578/0340103.pdf by University of California Santa Barbara user on 16 September 2019 A Tale of Two Feminists? Hannah Arendt Revisited by Margarethe von Trotta Yosefa Loshitzky Though innovative in its refusal to conform, the genius of these women [Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette] came at a price: rebels glean their stimulation from their genius, and they pay for it by being ostracized, misunderstood, and disdained. That fate is common to all geniuses. Is it also common to women in general? — Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt I am not disturbed at all about being a woman professor because I am quite used to being a woman. — Hannah Arendt In the opening scene of Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt (Germany/Luxembourg/France, 2012), we see two women, Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) and her friend, the writer Mary McCar- thy (Janet McTeer), discuss men and the “affairs of the heart.” The two women’s feminine gossip and confessional conversation Camera Obscura 101, Volume 34, Number 2 doi 10.1215/02705346-7584928 © 2019 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press 103 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/34/2/103/688578/0340103.pdf by University of California Santa Barbara user on 16 September 2019 104 • Camera Obscura about love is tainted by sarcastic overtones and comments regard- ing men. Their light, bemused conversation introduces a subver- sive undertone to the melodramatic effect produced by the scene. If the spectator did not know who these two women were, she would have been led to believe that this domestic scene depicts two slightly bored, typical, upper- middle- class women discussing their love lives. She would not suspect, even for a moment, that one of them is among the foremost political thinkers of the twen- tieth century and the other a famous writer and political activist. One of the most engaging, yet controversial, public intel- lectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt continues to be attacked with the same venom and ferocity that followed the publi- cation of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) more than fifty years ago.1 Central to this ongoing controversy is Arendt’s accusation that “the Jewish leaders knew what the Jewish people at large did not know.” She writes, “This is especially true for Theresienstadt and for Hungary. The decision in There- sienstadt, for instance, not to tell people what transports meant, resulted in people volunteering for deportation!”2 Arendt contin- ues to be a divisive figure for Jews and non- Jews alike, and her intellectual legacy is still unsettling, particularly for Zionists. The release of four major texts in the last six years — von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt; the edited collection The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2013);3 Claude Lanzmann’s documentary The Last of the Unjust (France, 2014);4 and Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (2014 – present) — have revived, if not inflamed, the old debate. Yet again, Arendt is at the center of the controversy over allegations of Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust, disrupting the hegemony of the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the surprise hit success of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) following the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 as the president of the US is a case in point attesting to the ongoing power of her writing. The relevance of the German Jewish thinker’s ideas to the world’s contemporary situation, as Amnon Raz- Krakotzkin writes, derives from Arendt regarding herself “as a political thinker, and following her therefore demands thinking politically, namely, read- ing her texts into the present reality.”5 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/34/2/103/688578/0340103.pdf by University of California Santa Barbara user on 16 September 2019 A Tale of Two Feminists? • 105 Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is particularly important in the context of these debates and political developments because it is a cinematic intervention in a conversation that has traditionally been conducted within the confines of the intellectual and schol- arly sphere. Furthermore, von Trotta’s intervention is informed by her particular point of view as a post- Holocaust German, leftist woman filmmaker who has been hailed as one of the most promi- nent contemporary feminist directors working today. On the one hand, a German director seems to be the ideal filmmaker to deal with this highly sensitive and contested issue. On the other, von Trotta’s authorial persona has exposed her to charges of self- censorship, evasive politics, and a lack of openness, as well as to “Jewish criticism” accusing her of subtle anti- Semitism. After all, there are limits to what a German can say about “prominent Jews” in relation to the Holocaust.6 Von Trotta’s transformation of the “historical Arendt” into a “cinematic Arendt” is particularly fascinating because the film- maker’s work has celebrated the life and activism of revolutionary women, including Rosa Luxemburg in the 1986 film of that title (played by Barbara Sukowa, who also plays Arendt in Hannah Arendt) and Gudrun Ensslin from the Red Army Faction in Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit, West Germany, 1981). Although Arendt was not a revolutionary in the tradition of Luxemburg (about whom she wrote), the German- Jewish political thinker “was opposed to the women’s movement in the same way that Rosa Luxemburg had been” because she thought that “women’s issues should be part of a larger political struggle,”7 according to Elisabeth Young- Bruehl, Arendt’s student and the author of the acclaimed intellectual biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Arendt presents a paradox for feminists due to the contradictions embedded in her works and public pronouncements. Famously, in a ZDF television conversation filmed in 1964, she said, “I have actually been rather old- fashioned. I have always thought that there are certain occupa- tions that are improper for women, that do not become them, if I may put it that way. It just doesn’t look good when a woman gives orders. She should try not to get into such a situation if she wants to remain feminine.”8 Young- Bruehl notes that Arendt “was suspi- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/34/2/103/688578/0340103.pdf by University of California Santa Barbara user on 16 September 2019 106 • Camera Obscura cious of women who ‘gave orders,’ skeptical about whether women should be political leaders, and steadfastly opposed to the social dimensions of Women’s Liberation.”9 In this essay, I examine how von Trotta tackles and negoti- ates these contradictions. I also ask how the film positions itself in the “Arendt debate,” asking what kind of Hannah Arendt emerges from this film, which attempts to portray a politically engaged intellectual woman, a figure almost entirely absent from the big screen. I argue that Arendt represents a very complex historical case for a post- Holocaust German director like von Trotta. A Ger- man Jew who fled Nazi Germany after being interrogated by the Gestapo, a lover — and, some would argue, an exonerator — of Mar- tin Heidegger, and a harsh critic of Zionism and the Zionist Jewish State, Arendt was obviously a taboo- breaking public intellectual.10 And yet von Trotta, I argue, challenges the most difficult of these taboos by putting the Eichmann controversy at the center of her film, hence bringing history and its discontents into sharp focus on the political screen. Faced with the enormous task of adapting Arendt’s ideas and the controversies that they have triggered into a narrative film, as well as constructing a realistic and believable character, von Trotta built her film as “a portrait of life and not only of thinking.” She explained that her biggest problem in making and even con- ceptualizing her film was “how to represent thinking and intellec- tuals.” “How do we make a film about a thinker?” was the question she posed to her co- scriptwriter Pamela Katz. Von Trotta argued that “[Arendt’s] mind is very visible” in the film.11 The challenge of cinematically representing the act of thinking itself is invoked by one of the flashbacks to a lecture, on the topic of thinking, given by Heidegger. Von Trotta’s desire to represent thinking by having a concrete human subject “per- form” it led her to portray Arendt as a woman of flesh and blood, almost as a heroine of a woman’s picture. Many critics and peo- ple who knew Arendt personally and were intellectually engaged with her either as students or colleagues — most notable among them, Jerome Kohn (her former student and assistant at the New School for Social Research, who acted as a special adviser to Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/34/2/103/688578/0340103.pdf by University of California Santa Barbara user on 16 September 2019 A Tale of Two Feminists? • 107 the film) — regarded von Trotta’s film as giving Arendt back her humanity, which had been attacked and debased by her ferocious critics. One of the most noteworthy of those critics was the neo- conservative ideologue Norman Podhoretz, who in the film dis- missively describes Arendt as “the woman who is all intellect and no heart.” Furthermore, by literally and symbolically placing Arendt at the center of the private sphere by beginning the film with her discussing her love life in her living room, surrounded by the com- forts of the New York intellectual elite, von Trotta references the femininity that Arendt herself was keen to maintain.