Hannah Arendt: thought made visible

This is one of those unpremeditated posts where I rush to gush, I hope not too indiscriminately, about a pleasant surprise just witnessed/experienced. On an idle Sunday afternoon, both shaking off thick colds which have evolved with all sorts of hideous offshoots like eye, lip and sinus infections (gross, yes), we watched a film I imagined would be a little solid and grey, Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt. It was good enough for me that I'd read and admired Arendt's study of Adolf Eichmann's 1963 show trial  in Jerusalem, and that the film featured two actresses I love to the point of idolisation, Barbara Sukowa (consummate for Fassbinder in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Lola, spellbinding reader of the Stefan Georg poems for Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with Mitsuko Uchida) and Janet McTeer (perhaps still top of my No.1 great stage performances list as Ibsen's Nora, though Juliet Stevenson's Winnie is now joint first).

Forget Downfall and The Lives of Others, both films I found well made and acted, but a bit too mainstream-conventional: if you're sober enough to face it, this is the most masterfully understated non-documentary film I've seen about the Nazis. Except, of course, it's about so much more: the integrity of examining a problem philosophically, the refusal to compromise a point of view, staying intensely human all the time. And humanity in her women - Rosa Luxembourg (also starring Sukowa, must see it again) and Hildegard of Bingen (must simply see it) - would appear to be a von Trotta keynote.

Nobody puts a foot wrong here. It's not often you think you see inside someone's mind - though that happened recently, the understanding and then the enigma, with Rylance's Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, another film - even more remarkable on BBC Television these days - which was not afraid to focus on reaction without dialogue for long stretches. Sukowa is astonishing in the way she expresses the power of thought (she also looks nothing like Hannah Arendt, for what it's worth, but compelled me throughout all the more by her resemblance to my own beloved, incorruptible and bloody-minded academic Noëlle Mann).

Here we follow Arendt through the Eichmann trial, where von Trotta uses the extraordinary archive footage and shows us the shrivelled, unthinking man not just on the wide screen but also on the TV format which viewers would have experienced at the time. My thanks to The Orphan Film Symposium for putatively permitting me, since I give a link and advise you to go over and read, to use a juxtaposition of stills. My further juxtaposition is to show Sukowa's Arendt watching the telly in Jerusalem.

We know what Sukowa's Arendt is thinking before she explodes in her reasoning, fascination, horror and disgust - not just at Eichmann. We follow her believable incorruptibility as America and Israel go crazy over her refusal to tone down the facts about the Jewish leaders who collaborated, under unthinkable pressure (and if you read Amos Elon's wonderful introduction to the Penguin edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, you learn that Arendt was not as measured in some of her original expressions as we are usually led to believe). The naked explosion of hate, usually by folk who hadn't read the New Yorker articles or - more often - said they were too disgusted to get to that point, is so familiar today today.

A Jewish New Yorker friend of mine says you famously can't discuss certain things rationally with folk who are so rational on most other issues: viz the madness over Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met. But it happened here, too, in blatant misunderstanding of the Tricycle's refusal to screen its annual Jewish Film Festival last year because funding from the Israeli state was involved and they simply couldn't be seen to be partial (they wouldn't have taken money from Palestinian organisations either). We see, month by month, the hideous parallels between the oppressors and the once oppressed: I'm glad Obama laid it on thick to Netanyahu that he had crossed the line in trying to get votes by being alarmist about Arab voters were rushing to the polls. His own people - Jewish citizens! Substitute 'black voters' or 'gay voters' and you see how far it's got. No politician in this country, not any that seriously expect to be elected at any rate, could possibly get away with it (even Farage tries to cover up most of the time).

Too much of a digression there. But this is a real riff in itself, so let it stand. There's no hysteria in this film. Sukowa's Arendt gets her big speech to the students in the face of dismissal, decidedly a 'yesss...' moment.

But all the performances work as an ensemble to keep this a perfect example of an understated biopic, real marriage and strong friendships (where McTeer's Mary McCarthy comes into her own). Essential watching for all schoolchildren and university students. Even though you should still read the book, tough as it sometimes is, this is no filmic watering down of it, but rather something different that works flawlessly on its own terms. A final shot of Arendt - who, as Sukowa and von Trotta make clear, was as often vivacious as she was steely - in 1972.

The year of reading Ulysses

I must have cast my eyes over those opening words at least a dozen times (opening of the 'Telemachus' chapter as illustrated by Robert Berry courtesy of the excellent ulyssesseen website. Or rather, courtesy assumed, as they adopted one of my pix in their blog section, so I'm assuming mutual fair use). But only this year did I get to the end with, if not exactly full understanding, an awed appreciation of what Joyce was trying to do, the breadth and humour of his references, the ephiphanic attitude to the everyday.

Much of what I felt was neatly summed up in Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Faber), which adopts the Bryan Magee approach of explaining the complicated in simple, direct language. Kibberd's basic premise is that Ulysses follows the great traditions of the Odyssey, the New Testament, Dante's Divine Comedy and Hamlet, as 'wisdom literature' - the wisdom reposing mostly in the everyday living of Leopold Bloom rather than the thickety consciousness of Stephen Dedalus. Of course it doesn't make us feel better to know that the third episode, getting inside young Stephen's head, is precisely the one at which most readers give up because it's so knotty, and is supposed to be.


Kiberd sometimes seems to lose his way, and his style: why does 'Singing', on the Sirens instalment, read so badly? But I like his opposition to the navel-gazing academic approach, which is why I gave up fairly soon on Richard Ellman's Ulysses on the Liffey.

Anyway, life's too short to read piles of secondary literature. And I don't think I've ever had a more rewarding year in terms of discoveries. It began with Hilary Mantel - J's reading Wolf Hall was the lynchpin, but I started with Beyond Black in January and only worked my way through to the historical novels much later. Very much on a par with them is the Norfolk/Africa family saga A Change of Climate. I've only got Eight Months on Ghazzah Street still to go, but I've been steeling myself to feeling robust when I read it.

Which is a bit rich bearing in mind that I've been steeped in misery lit for the past six weeks. Yet never was there a better saying than the epigraph to Dostoyevsky's From the House of the Dead, 'in every human being a spark of God'. Clearly not every, as Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin so hideously demonstrated*. But it only needs some to make it worth going on living.


No-one puts that better than the steely-brilliant Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She's been holding to account the testimony of a German army physician on the killing of Jews in Sevastopol. He points out that totalitarianism's skill in 'disappearing' people makes a visible protest useless. She counters:

It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempt, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of massacres - through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents 'disappear in silent anonymity' were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion posssible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be 'practically useless', at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today [Arendt's account was first published in 1963], not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

I ought to quit while Arendt is so splendidly ahead, but I haven't finished with the peak of the year's reading. Margaret Atwood constantly points out in her futuristic nightmares the lesson that 'some people will not', but what makes Oryx and Crake a great book are the flights of stylistic fantasy, especially in the warped games played by the dystopic adolescents. Who else writes like this? Mantel, Martin Amis - name me others, please, whose manner doesn't seem flat after reading these supreme manipulators of the English language, and I'll be happy to read them. But if high stylishness isn't your metier as a novelist, then simplicity is always best. Which is why Tove Jansson's books for adults seem to translate so well, and why of all this year's novels, The Summer Book remains for me absolutely of the essence.



I'm now a third of the way through another Fallada masterpiece, Wolf among Wolves, a panorama of German life in the big inflation of 1923, and I'm looking forward to more thrillers and detective stories from Robert Littell and Ian Rankin, but I know it's La Jansson to whom I'll return for rooting.

*BTW, if anyone's still interested in the upshot of that A&E story, I went back to the Harrow hospital for the verdict on whether I needed an op or not and - the nice but clearly embarrassed specialist told me the CT scan hadn't been sent to him as promised, nor could it be obtained over the net on the spot. A waste of both our times. But he thinks a) it's pretty sure the damage is merely cosmetic and b) they need to do a much more detailed CT scan to make sure. And so it rolls on in to late January.