汉娜

        美国政治学者汉娜•阿伦特是20世纪最重要的思想家之一。一部关于哲学家的电影怎么拍呢？要知道哲学家大部分时候就是坐着思考，本片导演玛格雷特·冯·特洛塔，也是德国新电影运动的资深导演，还真的把它拍成了一部关于思考的传记电影。
        1924年，18岁的汉娜•阿伦特成为35岁的年轻编外讲师海德格尔的学生和情人，这段地下情维持了四年，直到1928年海德格尔决定让阿伦特离去。一般学者大师的婚外恋情、政治经历，传记电影中都是一笔带过，点到为止。可她的初恋海德格尔偏是后来比她还名满天下有哲学王之称的存在主义大家，参与的那一下政治，又偏偏搅进后来万劫不复的纳粹暴政。注定她与海德格尔这段纠葛无法忽略。个人感情的痛苦成为她扩大自己存在疆界的一个源泉，在1930年之前，阿伦特的思想活动局限于哲学领域，甚至还瞧不上政治，然而她目睹了这个她深爱的才华横溢的教授卷入国家社会主义兴起的狂潮中附逆纳粹，并且天真地为这场运动提供一种存在主义的哲学解释。 再往后，阿伦特看到他回避世界，重新退缩到沉思的孤独中，对他认为混乱而败坏的公共领域投以蔑视。一个哲学家沉浸于个体性的自足，而缺乏返回公共领域的能力，阿伦特痛心海德格尔的选择，开始强调知识分子的行动性。
        影片在这样的背景下以1961年对纳粹军官艾希曼审判为切入点，以阿伦特报道此事件写出的《耶路撒冷的艾希曼——一份关于恶的平庸性的报告》发表引起巨大争论结束。
        1960年《纽约时报》上的一篇报道引起了汉娜•阿伦特和朋友们的注意：以色列间谍在阿根廷发现了纳粹时期杀害犹太人的纳粹军官艾希曼的踪迹，并于5月将其劫持到以色列，并坚持在本国审判艾希曼。臭名昭著的艾希曼官阶并不高，只是党卫队中校，但是他曾经担任过德国第三帝国保安总部第四局B-4科的科长，是犹太种族大清洗的前线指挥官，负责一车皮一车皮地组织运送整个欧洲的犹太人，在他的监督下，奥斯维辛集中营的屠杀生产线到二战结束，共有五百八十万犹太人因“最后方案”而丧生。
        于是阿伦特向《纽约客》总编提出，她愿意作为记者，去耶路撒冷报道审判的有关情况。此时的她已完成《极权主义起源》《人的条件》等大作，在学界德高望重，有这样的名人担任特派记者，总编自然乐不可支欣然接受。她在变更1961年日程推迟接受洛克菲勒基金会资助的信上写道，“您一定理解我，为什么去耶路撒冷，因为我曾错过了报道纽伦堡的审判，这次，我不能再次失去目睹对战争罪犯审判的机会了。”她原是德籍犹太人，纳粹兴起逃离德国，流亡巴黎，在法国集中营所幸戏剧性地出逃前往美国，后入美籍。作为犹太人所遭受的苦难也指引着阿伦特的思考，这些外部事件为什么会发生？她把此行视为一次历史使命。
        《耶路撒冷的艾希曼——一份关于恶的平庸性的报告》由《纽约客》5次连载。这份报告包括三部分：第一部分是对罪犯艾希曼本人的分析。她根据艾希曼在法庭上表现及对有关卷宗的阅读，发现艾希曼并不像想象中是一个本性邪恶的魔鬼，平时热爱家庭、热爱音乐、热爱自然，人格也不扭曲病态，精神病学家鉴定“他的精神状态比做完他的精神鉴定之后的我还要正常。”“不仅是个正常人而且还非常讨人喜欢。” 就像恐怖分子寻常得可能轻易成为我们的邻居或飞机上的邻座。由此，阿伦特提出了“平庸之恶”这一个观点，艾希曼之所以犯下如此罪行，完全是由于“思考的缺乏”以及由此而来的不做判断。这类通过执行国家命令，透过行政程序，从事集体屠杀政策的人，被称为“案牍谋杀者”，他们严谨干练的良好素质加上无思的顺从效忠，正是暴政与专政的天然基础。第二部分是对犹太组织的评价。她甚至批评当时犹太组织领导人，指责他们未能领导犹太人对当初的迫害进行有效的抵抗，反而一定程度上与纳粹形成了同谋。最后一部分是关于艾希曼审判的政治目的。
        文章一刊出，在美国乃至欧洲引起强烈反响。就阿伦特本身运思历程看，艾希曼审判事件的报道是非常重要的思想转折点，这个事件的争议带动阿伦特从思考实践活动意义走进探索思考与判断的哲学课题。
        导演玛格雷特·冯·特洛塔凭借此片获得了2013年德国电影奖最佳导演提名，她说“我只是拍我喜欢或者感兴趣的人。但如果说这部电影有什么理念的话，那就是你应保持自我反思和独立判断能力，不要追随某种观念或者时尚。汉娜说这是‘不用扶手的思考'。”

Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth
Mark Lilla
Hannah Arendt
a film by Margarethe von Trotta
Hannah Arendt: Ihr Denken veränderte die Welt [Hannah Arendt: Her Thought Changed the World]
edited by Martin Wiebel, with a foreword by Franziska Augstein
Munich: Piper, 252 pp., €9.99 (paper)
1.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi’s final book on his experiences at Auschwitz, he makes a wise remark about the difficulty of rendering judgment on history. The historian is pulled in two directions. He is obliged to gather and take into account all relevant material and perspectives; but he is also obliged to render the mass of material into a coherent object of thought and judgment:

    Without a profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions…. We are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema.

lilla_1-112113-250.jpg Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Sicily, 1971

Satisfying both imperatives is difficult under any circumstances, and with certain events may seem impossible. The Holocaust is one of those. Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism. This is why Holocaust studies seems to swing back and forth with steady regularity, now trying to render justice to particulars (German soldiers as “ordinary men”), now trying to restore moral coherence (Hitler’s “willing executioners”).

Among Primo Levi’s virtues as a writer on the Holocaust was his skill at finding the point of historical and moral equipoise, most remarkably in his famous chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. It is not easy reading. Besides recounting the horrifying dilemmas and unspeakable cruelties imposed by the Nazis on their victims, he also gives an unvarnished account of the cruelties that privileged prisoners visited on weaker ones, and the compromises, large and small, some made to maintain those privileges and their lives. He describes how the struggle for prestige and recognition, inevitable in any human grouping, manifested itself even in the camps, producing “obscene or pathetic figures…whom it is indispensable to know if we want to know the human species.”

Levi tells the story of Chaim Rumkowski, the vain, dictatorial Jewish elder of the Łódź ghetto who printed stamps with his portrait on them, commissioned hymns celebrating his greatness, and surveyed his domain from a horse-drawn carriage. Stories like these that others have told and others still have wished to bury are unwelcome complications. But Levi tells them without ever letting the reader lose sight of the clear, simple moral reality in which they took place. Yes, “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.” But “I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer.”

Two recent films by major European directors show just how difficult this point of equipoise is to find and maintain when dealing with the Final Solution. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is a well-acted biopic on the controversy surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and its place in her intellectual and personal life. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust is a documentary about Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, who was considered a traitor and Nazi collaborator by many of the camp’s inmates, and was the only elder in the entire system to have survived the war. The directors have very different styles and ambitions, which they have realized with very different degrees of success. But neither has managed to replicate Levi’s achievement.
2.

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. It’s hard to think of another work capable of setting off ferocious polemics a half-century after its publication. Research into the Nazi regime, its place in the history of anti-Semitism, the gestation of the Final Solution, and the functioning of the extermination machine has advanced well beyond Arendt, providing better answers to the questions she was among the first to address.

In any normal field of historical research one would expect an early seminal work to receive recognition and a fair assessment, even if it now seems misguided. Yet that is only now starting to happen within the history profession, in works like Deborah Lipstadt’s judicious, accessible survey The Eichmann Trial (2011). As the strong reactions to von Trotta’s film indicate, though, the Arendt–Eichmann psychodrama continues in the wider world. Now as then critics focus on two arguments Arendt made, and on the fact that she made them in the same book.

The first, and better known, was that although Adolf Eichmann was taken by many at the time to be the mastermind of the Final Solution, the trial revealed a weak, clueless, cliché-spewing bureaucrat who, according to Arendt, “never realized what he was doing,” an everyman caught up in an evolving bureaucratic program that began with forced emigration and only later ended with extermination as its goal. That one “cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann” did not, in her eyes, reduce his culpability. From the start Arendt defended his capture, trial, and execution, which were not universally applauded then, even by some prominent Jews and Jewish organizations.1 This her critics forget, or choose to forget. What they remember is that she portrayed Eichmann as a risible clown, not radically evil, and shifted attention from anti-Semitism to the faceless system in which he worked.

Had Arendt written a book on what she called “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” in modern bureaucratic society, it would have been read as a supplement, and partial revision, of what she said about “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. No one would have been offended. But in Eichmann she made the unwise choice of hanging her thesis on the logistical “genius” of the Holocaust, whose character she tried to infer from court documents and a few glimpses of him in the bullet-proof glass docket in Jerusalem.

To make matters worse, in the same book Arendt raised the sensitive issue of the part that Jewish leaders played in the humiliation and eventual extermination of their own people. These included the heads of the urban Jewish community organizations that facilitated forced emigration, expropriations, arrests, and deportations; and the heads of the Jewish councils the Nazis formed in the ghettos and camps to keep the inmate population in line. These men were understandably feared and resented even if they carried out their duties nobly, while those who abused their power, like Rumkowski, were loathed by survivors, who circulated disturbing stories about them after the war.

There was little public awareness of these figures, though, until the Kasztner affair broke in the mid-1950s. Rudolph Kasztner was at that time an Israeli official, but during the war he had worked for a group in Budapest that helped European Jews get to Hungary, which was then unoccupied, and then tried to get them out after the German invasion in 1944. As thousands of Jews were being shipped daily to the gas chambers, Kasztner and his group entered into negotiations with the Nazis to see if some could be saved. After various plans to save large numbers failed, Kasztner persuaded Eichmann to accept a cash ransom and allow 1,600 Hungarian Jews to leave for Switzerland, many of them wealthy people who paid their way and others from his hometown and family.

In 1953 a muckraking Israeli journalist claimed that Kasztner had secretly promised the Nazis not to tell other Jews about Auschwitz, trading a few lives for hundreds of thousands. Kastzner sued for libel but lost his case when it was revealed that he had written exculpatory letters to war tribunals for Nazis he had worked with in Hungary. Before his appeal could be heard Kastzner was assassinated in front of his Tel Aviv home, in circumstances that remain obscure to this day. He was posthumously acquitted.

The cooperation of Jewish leaders and organizations with the Nazi hierarchy became more widely known through the Eichmann trial and the publication in 1961 of Raoul Hilberg’s monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews, which Arendt relied on heavily without adequate attribution. Though Hilberg’s book is widely revered today, he was just as widely attacked after its publication by Jewish organizations and publications for emphasizing the leaders’ cooperation and the rarity of active resistance, which he attributed to habits of appeasement developed over centuries of persecution, an argument Bruno Bettelheim echoed a year later in his controversial article “Freedom From Ghetto Thinking.”

So Hannah Arendt was not betraying any secrets when she discussed these issues in a scant dozen pages of her book; she was reporting on what came up at the trial and found herself in the middle of an ongoing, and very sensitive, polemic. But exercising her gift for the offending phrase, she also portrayed the Jewish leaders as self-deceived functionaries who “enjoyed their new power,” and she termed their actions “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”

Perhaps by “dark” all she meant was especially awful and a sign of “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused…not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.” But pulled out of context her phrases made it appear that she was equating doomed Jewish leaders with the “thoughtless” Eichmann, or even judging them more severely. In any case, the whole discussion, a small fraction of the book, was psychologically obtuse and made her monstrous in the eyes of many.

And the response was ferocious, in Europe and the United States. Her now former friend Gershom Scholem sent Arendt a public letter complaining, rightly, about her “flippancy” and lack of moral imagination when discussing the Jewish leaders, and declared her to be lacking in “love of the Jewish people.” Siegfried Moses, a former friend and recently retired Israeli official, sent a letter “declaring war” on her and got the Council of Jews in Germany to publish a condemnation even before serialization of her book in The New Yorker was complete. (He then flew to Switzerland to try to persuade her to abandon the book project altogether.) The American Anti-Defamation League sent out a pamphlet titled Arendt Nonsense to book reviewers and rabbis across the country, urging them to condemn her and the New Yorker articles for giving succor to anti-Semites.

And in the New York intellectual circles that had become her adoptive home, she became the focus of angry attention from friends who once admired her. At the controversy’s peak Dissent magazine organized a forum to discuss the work and invited Arendt (she declined), Hilberg, and their critics. Hundreds showed up and the evening quickly descended into a series of denunciations of Arendt, who was defended briefly only by Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and a few others. Only when President Kennedy was assassinated in November did she finally escape the spotlight.
3.

This messy episode is the surprising focus of Margarethe von Trotta’s much-discussed new film. As von Trotta tells it, her original intention was to trace the arc of Arendt’s life as a whole, much as she did with Rosa Luxemburg in her award-winning biopic Rosa Luxemburg (1986), but found the material too unwieldy. And so she choose to limit herself to Arendt’s life in New York. As she says in the short German book on the film edited by Martin Wiebel, what interested her was not the ins and outs of the Eichmann case but rather Hannah and her friends. This seems an odd choice for a movie but makes sense in view of von Trotta’s other work. Her specialty is didactic feminist buddy movies—in fact, one might say that she’s been making the same film throughout her career. The story usually involves two women, either friends or sisters, one of them a visionary or pillar of strength, the other a jejune admirer, and follows the evolution of their relationship against a political backdrop.

In her first solo directed work, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), a woman holds up a bank to save the child care center she works at, then gets help from a soldier’s wife who becomes her lover and goes into hiding with her. They end up in a rural Portuguese cooperative getting their consciousness raised, are expelled for lesbianism, and have other adventures before it all ends badly. Marianne and Juliane (1981) uses as its model the life of Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who committed suicide in her cell in 1977; the story follows the Gudrun character and her sister as their relationship develops from alienation to reconciliation, and ends in a display of sisterly solidarity that reaches beyond the grave.
lilla_2-112113.jpg Bettmann/Corbis
Adolf Eichmann with Israeli police at his trial in Jerusalem, May 1962

Von Trotta’s Vision (1991), which treats the life of the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, is the most transparent example of the type. It portrays a courageous, enlightened woman prone to epiphanies who stays true to her visions and resists the church’s attempts to silence her. Along the way she develops a deep if unequal friendship with another nun, then another, provoking jealousy and misunderstanding, though it all works out in the end. She dies revered by those around her, though not by the powers that be.

And this, more or less, is the story of Hannah Arendt. The film opens with a jovial Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) in conversation with her best friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer), who in the movie is reduced to a hyperactive sidekick. They discuss men, they discuss love, they have a cocktail party with Arendt’s devoted if wayward husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) and fellow New York intellectuals. Then they get news of Eichmann’s capture and the imminent trial. More drinks, more discussion, and then Arendt is off to Jerusalem, where she witnesses the trial mainly from the press room (where she could smoke) and visits an old Zionist friend.

Von Trotta deftly intersperses clips from the actual trial into her film and shows Arendt watching them on closed-circuit television in the press room. This device allows her to stage a conversion scene. As the camera slowly zooms in on Arendt watching Eichmann testify, we see on her face the dawning realization that he was not a clever, bloodthirsty monster but an empty-headed fool caught up in an evil machine. She leaves Jerusalem, writes her articles, and all hell breaks loose in New York.

It is not true, as some reviewers have charged, that the film portrays Arendt as flawless. Throughout she hears complaints about her tone, from friends like McCarthy and her New Yorker editor William Shawn. She is also challenged repeatedly by her close friend the philosopher Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen), who is given some of the best lines in the movie (some drawn from Scholem’s letter). Jonas rejected the very idea of “thoughtless” murder and criticized her for lacking psychological sympathy for fellow Jews trapped in the most horrifying circumstances imaginable. Still, by and large, her critics are portrayed as irrational, defensive Jews who, unlike Arendt, refuse to think about the uncomfortable complexities of the Nazi experience, whether out of shame or omertà.

But although Arendt defends herself and the task of “thinking” deftly throughout the film, particularly in a fine public speech at the end, we don’t see her arriving at her position through thinking. Film can portray inner psychological states through speech and action and image, but lacks resources for conveying the dynamic process of weighing evidence, interpreting it, and considering alternatives. Barbara Sukowa smokes and rifles through documents and stares into space like a silent picture star, but we get no sense of the play of a mind. And so we are left with the impression that she, like Hildegard, has had a vision.

And perhaps this is how von Trotta sees Arendt. She admits in the book by Wiebel that she, like many on the German left in the 1960s and 1970s, turned their noses up at Arendt for comparing communism and Nazism as instances of totalitarianism and refused to read her books. But later she came upon Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography and discovered a strong figure, a female philosopher engaged in political debate whose personal life was also rich in friends and lovers. This woman she could admire and celebrate. The problem is that von Trotta has chosen an episode in Arendt’s life where the stakes were so high, intellectually and morally, that they cannot in good taste be treated as the backdrop of a human interest story. Though the battle may be lost, it can never be emphasized enough that the Holocaust is not an acceptable occasion for sentimental journeys. But here it’s made into one, which produces weird, cringe-inducing moments for the viewer.

In one shot we are watching Eichmann testify or Arendt arguing about the nature of evil; in the next her husband is patting her behind as they cook dinner. When Blücher tries to leave one morning without kissing her, since “one should never disturb a great philosopher when they’re thinking,” she replies, “but they can’t think without kisses!” As for the short, incongruous scenes about her youthful affair with Martin Heidegger, the less said the better.

The deepest problem with the film, though, is not tastelessness. It is truth. At first glance the movie appears to be about nothing but the truth, which Arendt defends against her blinkered, mainly male adversaries. But its real subject is remaining true to yourself, not to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In her director’s statement on the film von Trotta says that “Arendt was a shining example of someone who remained true to her unique perspective on the world.” One can understand von Trotta’s reluctance to get into the details of the Eichmann case, let alone foreshadow what we know about it now, which would have violated the film’s integrity. But something else seems violated when a story celebrates a thinker’s courage in defending a position we now know to be utterly indefensible—as Arendt, were she alive, would have to concede.

Since the Eichmann trial, and especially over the past fifteen years, a great body of evidence has accumulated about Eichmann’s intimate involvement in and influence over the Nazis’ strategy for expelling, then herding, and then exterminating Europe’s Jews. More damning still, we now have the original tapes that a Dutch Nazi sympathizer, Willem Sassen, made with Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s, in which Eichmann delivers rambling monologues about his experience and his commitment to the extermination project. These have recently been collated and analyzed by the German scholar Bettina Stangneth, and the passages she quotes in her new book are chilling:

    The cautious bureaucrat, yeah, that was me…. But joined to this cautious bureaucrat was a fanatical fighter for the freedom of the Blut I descend from…. What’s good for my Volk is for me a holy command and holy law…. I must honestly tell you that had we…killed 10.3 million Jews I would be satisfied and would say, good, we’ve exterminated the enemy…. We would have completed the task for our Blut and our Volk and the freedom of nations had we exterminated the most cunning people in the world…. I’m also to blame that…the idea of a real, total elimination could not be fulfilled…. I was an inadequate man put in a position where, really, I could have and should have done more.2

In the end, Hannah Arendt has little to do with the Holocaust or even with Adolf Eichmann. It is a stilted, and very German, morality play about conformism and independence. Von Trotta’s generation (she was born in 1942) suffered the shock of learning in school about the Nazi experience and confronting their evasive parents at home, and in a sense they never recovered from it. (She convincingly dramatizes one of these angry dinner table confrontations in Marianne and Juliane.) Even today this generation has trouble seeing German society in any categories other than those of potential criminals, resisters, and silent bystanders.

When left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore, anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler. For the left in that period the Holocaust was not fundamentally about the Jews and hatred of Jews (in fact, anti-Semitism was common on the radical left). It was, narcissistically, about Germans’ relation to themselves and their unwillingness, in the extreme case, to think for themselves. Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt shares that outlook.

And so, in part, did Eichmann in Jerusalem. Reading the book afresh fifty years on, one begins to notice two different impulses at work in it. One is to do justice to all the factors and elements that contributed to the Final Solution and understand how they might have affected its functionaries and victims, in surprising and disturbing ways. In this Arendt was a pioneer; and, as Bettina Stangneth notes in her contribution to Martin Wiebel’s book, many of the things she was attacked for have become the scholarly consensus.

But the other impulse, to find a schema that would render the horror comprehensible and make judgment possible, in the end led her astray. Arendt was not alone in being taken in by Eichmann and his many masks, but she was taken in. She judged him in light of her own intellectual preoccupations, inherited from Heidegger, with “authenticity,” the faceless crowd, society as a machine, and the importance of a kind of “thinking” that modern philosophy had abolished. Hers was, you might say, an overly complicated simplification. Closer to the truth was the simplification of Artur Sammler in his monologue on Hannah Arendt in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet:

    Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… There was a conspiracy against the sacredness of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. Is such a project trivial?

Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust leaves no doubt about the answer to that question. At the center of it is a remarkable interview he conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish elder of Theresienstadt who survived the war. Murmelstein worked closely with Eichmann for seven years and saw through his camouflaging techniques; he even witnessed Eichmann helping to destroy a Viennese synagogue on Kristallnacht. Yet Murmelstein was also a master of the gray zone, a survivor among survivors whose reputation was anything but pristine. Lanzmann’s film plunges us into that zone and reveals more than perhaps even he realizes.

—This is the first of two articles.

想看此片已是许久，对于汉娜·阿伦特，一直有着深厚的兴趣。从极权主义的起源一书的出版到平庸之恶观点的提出，汉娜·阿伦特总是给予我敏锐深刻和强硬不妥协的印象。正好深圳有个德国电影展，恰好有此片，于是毫不犹豫地订票观看。

整个影片应该说是拍得比较闷，而且字幕的翻译也有些问题。如果事前对于汉娜·阿伦特缺乏了解，对于艾希曼审判缺乏了解的话，在观影过程中会显得比较吃力。现场观众的反应也说明了此点，大部分观众在大部分时间里都有些昏昏欲睡的感觉，只是到了最后阿伦特在课堂中的激情演说，才调动起部分观众的情绪，甚至伴随着课堂上的掌声，也有观众鼓起掌来。

客观而言，此片还是较为准确地还原了阿伦特当时的生活。作为一部德国影片，既有着德国影片硬与闷，也具有德国影片的明晰与冷峻。该片注重观点的交锋，而对趣味性重视不够。影片对于汉娜·阿伦特，只聚焦于其一生中很短一个时期，即以色列对于纳粹艾希曼审判，她发表文章为艾希曼辩护，从而引起轩然大波。影片只是通过几个闪回，将其一生的思想与行为进行了回顾。导演并不关注阿伦特个人的生活，甚至对于她与其老师海德格尔的关系，也只是在镜头前一闪而过。而是花了相当的笔墨，突出展现了汉娜·阿伦特喜欢思考与毫不妥协的性格。

艾希曼是个恶名昭彰的纳粹罪犯，负责屠杀犹太人的最终方案，被称为“死刑执行者”。很多犹太人对其恨之入骨，在耶路撒冷审判之时，为防被杀，他的前面装着防弹玻璃，也就是阿伦特所称的玻璃盒子。其实对于整个的纳粹德国来说，艾希曼绝对只是一个小人物。在审判之中，他也不承认自己所犯之罪，他认为他的一切行为只是在执行命令。他真诚地信奉着纳粹的思想，坚定地相信领袖所做的一切都是正确的。因此在执行命令时，也是不假思索毫不犹豫地执行。在他的心目中，并未将犹太人当作人，而只是杀人机器所需要吞噬的原料。在他执行任务之时，他已非正常之人，他失去了思考的能力，失去了正常人的情感，而是异化成为一台机器。

汉娜·阿伦特正是据此而为他辩护。艾希曼所犯下的当然是滔天大罪，毕竟六百万犹太人或多或少因他而死去，即使直接死于他手下的也不少。但阿伦特并不认为他应该承担被指控的责任，将其带至法庭上审判也并不公正。这样并不符合对于法庭来说最为重要的正义原则。艾希曼杀人，并非是他与所杀之人有着直接的利益关系，也非他仇视这些他所杀之人，他与这些被杀的犹太人素昧平生。他杀他们是因为要执行命令，他相信元首的话，觉得杀死这些犹太人有利于纳粹事业，有利于德国的生存与发展。

在执行命令之时，他不会去思考自己所行之事是否正义，更不会去质疑元首的命令是否有问题，而且由于没有思考，也没有了正常人内心中固有的善恶判断。艾希曼只是一个杀人机器，他按照体制或者制度的指令，机械而无情地杀死犹太人。只要这种制度不改，将谁放到那个位置上，都会执行杀人的命令，只是程度的不同而已。因此艾希曼所犯下的罪愆，并非个人的罪愆，而是制度之罪，是纳粹那种邪恶的思想或者主义带来的罪愆。

由此，阿伦特提出了她的著名观点，认为艾希曼所犯下的罪行，并非极端之恶，而是平庸的恶，是在邪恶体制之下，每个小人物都可能犯下的恶。艾希曼并非大奸大恶之人，从其法庭上的表现来看，他也是一个彬彬有礼之人。他也不愚蠢，喜欢康德的哲学，并自称以康德哲学来作为自己行事准则。他为人夫为人父，恪守着自己应尽的责任，在家人的眼里完全可能是个完美的儿子、丈夫或者父亲。如果将他放到一个正常的社会，他会是个守法的好公民，也许还会是社会的中坚。不幸的是，他生于乱世，生于一种极其邪恶的制度之下，他没有成为好公民，而是成为了杀人的艾希曼。而这，正是当时整个德国人的缩影，每个德国人都可能成为艾希曼。

艾希曼这种小人物何以会有着平庸之恶？汉娜·阿伦特指出，这是因为他们彻底放弃了思考的权利，以制度之思想代替了自己的思考。他们完全将自己当成了所服膺制度中的一颗螺丝钉，自己存在的目的，就是与这个制度步调一致，就是让这个制度完美地运转，从不去思考这个制度本身是否有问题，思考这个制度的合理性。在电影中，汉娜·阿伦特重复了她老师海德格尔的话，思考并不能给我们带来知识，而只是让我们能够判断善恶与美丑。最后，她提出，思考能带来力量。德国之所以会出现那种浩劫，恰恰是当时所有的德国人都不思考的结果。如果只是追究艾希曼个人的责任，而不去追究制度的罪恶，不去理解这种平庸的恶，那么犹太人的悲剧还会在世界重演。

其实，这种重演一直都在进行中。从纳粹德国，到红色苏联，这都是汉娜·阿伦特所经历过或者所耳闻过。当然，还有一些更平庸的恶，仍充斥于很多地方，包括我们脚下的这片土地。在这里，直到二十一世纪的今天，我们仍然拒绝思考，仍然只有一种思想，一种制度的思想，占据着我们每个人的头脑。我们天然地相信，现存的一切都是合理的，都是理所当然的，并自觉地充当着这架机器上的螺丝钉，维持着这个制度的运转。我们不也是如艾希曼那样，犯下了平庸之恶吗？虽然我们没有如艾希曼那样冷静而疯狂地杀人，但我们仍然会像他一样，坚定不移地去执行制度指派于我们的任何任务。我们没有杀人，并非我们厌恶杀人，只是我们没有被历史推到那样一个位置上。

纳粹将犹太人定义为非人类，因此艾希曼们就会不加思索地执行着命令，从肉体上去消灭这个民族。有些制度则是蔑视着人类普遍认知，仇视着既有的人类文化创造与思想成果，去追求所谓的放之四海而皆准理论，全民不也如上世纪三四十年代的德国人一样，不加思索地疯狂地去摧毁着一切。文革比之纳粹德国，其造成的严重后果，亦是不遑多让的。

当然，汉娜·阿伦特所提出的平庸的恶，并非就是为艾希曼之类的人脱罪。每个身处历史之中的人，都必须对自己的行为负责，都必须承担自己的责任。有个流传很久的故事，不论其真假，倒是可以从中体会出在恶的制度下，个人责任如何界定的问题。柏林墙倒之后，德国法庭审判开枪杀死越境者的军人，这些东德的边防军人称自己是在执行任务。法官反问他们，难道你就不能将枪口抬高一寸吗？如果边防军人抬高自己的枪，说明了他已经有了独立而深入的思考，拒绝将自己作为制度机器的一部分，从而导致人性的复苏，对于善恶也有了自己的判断。而你放弃思考，让制度的思想取代自己的思想，必然会丧失自己的良知，必然导致平庸之恶，众多的平庸之恶，必然会导致整个社会灾难的发生。

阿伦特其实并未止步于此。她在《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》一文中，不光指出了大屠杀中施害者一边的责任，同时也谈及了被害者一方的责任，这才是当时引起轩然大波、激起整个犹太社会愤怒的主要因素。她认为，之所以会发生六百万犹太人被屠杀的事件，当时犹太社区的领袖与纳粹的合作，也是因素之一。同时，整个犹太社会对于这种骇人听闻的屠杀，保持着一种沉默，而未有勇气去反抗，也应对屠杀肩负一定的责任。对于恶的容忍，对于无人性之事的不反抗，实际上也是一种平庸之恶。这种平庸之恶的泛滥，会让极端之恶越演越烈，导致灾难性的后果。

这当然是正处于痛苦之中的犹太人所不能接受的，他们认为这是向死难者亲属伤口上撒盐。在当时情形之下，也确实如此。从此也可看出汉娜的绝不妥协的态度。她本人是犹太人，正如她本人所声称的那样，她并不将自己当成犹太人，尽管她当时也差点进入纳粹集中营。然而，我们认真思考，汉娜·阿伦特的话，也并非没有道理。对于残暴制度的恐惧，只能助长这种残暴的蔓延，从大屠杀直到今天的事例，无不说明这一点。天助自助者，面对制度的极端之恶，我们还需要勇气。

勇气从何而来？汉娜·阿伦特说，思考可以带来力量。当然，思考也会带来勇气。深入而独立的思考，必然会让我们坚信正义，坚信人类普遍的价值，坚信人类的良知终将战胜邪恶，自然就会有了反抗的勇气。只有放弃思考的民族，才是最可悲的。

本来上午应当写论文的，结果一开电脑就变成了看电影，而且看完电影还想写点东西。好在电影拍的很好，完全值回时间。
我为什么说这个电影好呢？这并不是说它用了什么高妙的拍摄手法，或演员的演技、装扮有什么特别之处（不过还是要说，阿伦特还是学校的超级学霸时真美；而海德格尔比照片上还猥琐）。这部电影好在启人深思。若论启人深思，那么直接去读阿伦特的原文，或普及的介绍读物不是更好吗？为什么要看电影？
按昆德拉的意思讲，小说相对于哲学的意义在于，它展示人在做选择时的具体情景。更具体地说，小说、电影这些形象化的艺术形式有一个无法取代的好处，即它可以让人们在精心雕琢的情境下做虚拟的道德判断。这种艺术提供的机会无法取代，是因为日常生活并未给我们如此多的机会，而每一次新的抉择都让我们对人性认识得更深。假如没有希腊悲剧，那么我们永远也无法去设想弑父娶母的动机究竟是怎么回事，也没法思考某些内在于我们的想法究竟是不是道德的。假如没有奥威尔，我们很难只凭思辨把极端情况下的人该如何行动考虑清楚。而根据康德（以及数不尽的哲学家），做道德抉择、思考何为对何为错，是自由（或理性，或人性）的最终保障。
基于同样的简单思考，我觉得，《汉娜·阿伦特》这部电影也会使人深入思考究竟在某些情境下究竟何为对何为错，而它提供的情境恰倒好处，干净利索。电影中提供了如下几段情景：纽伦堡大审判及阿伦特发表关于“平庸的恶”的评论；汉娜和海德格尔的绯闻；在生活中汉娜与丈夫、朋友、学生的各种争论或议论。每一个都为深入思考道德抉择提供了情境基础，而每种情境都能揭示出足够重大的问题。具体来说，它们涉及如下几个问题：

【纳粹的罪责由谁来承担】
控方指责艾希曼屠杀犹太人，而艾希曼则辩驳说他只是执行上级命令，只是尽自己的职责而已。令所有人震惊的是，他竟没有感受到相应的负罪感，而（真心地）认为自己是无辜的，最多只是有一点“分裂”。法庭一再用犹太人被残忍迫害作为证据，而这并不能根本动摇艾希曼的反驳。最终艾希曼还是以通常罪名被绞死，但他难道是个毫无感情的恶魔吗，或者他真是无辜的？
阿伦特的解释是，纳粹的邪恶已经远超过去的想象，根本无法用传统法典上的罪名来衡量。艾希曼作为个人，在犯下罪行时时无意识的常人。这是一种“平庸的恶”，但在某且极端情境下却能犯下最残忍的罪行。他更大的罪行在于丧失了自我，这是反人类。不仅艾希曼，即使她的法国朋友、犹太委员会也因有这种“平庸的恶”。只有更深刻地检审“平庸的恶”，才能真正认识到纳粹究竟的罪责究竟由谁来承担，才能避免悲剧的重演。
我没有研读过阿伦特相关的原文，但这里也不需要，电影提供的情景已足够清楚，足以使人思考了。倘若承认了“平庸的恶”，那么是否意味着每个人都要经常高强度地检审自己的每一个选择，因为许多无意识的行为其实承载了最邪恶的东西？这种有点存在主义式的生活方式真的现实吗？艾希曼作为纳粹的头领，他的行为会被追究，但小人物也有与他同样的动机，也导致了同样的事情，罪孽几何？
这里当然有张力存在，但教诲已足够清楚：我们应当意识到自己是自由选择能力的人，我们在任何情况下都应考虑自己应当如此选择，而非把一切都推给下达命令的上级、家长、习俗。当然这种检审具体如何进行、责任具体如何划分、是否会让人累的身心俱疲，是值得更深入讨论的。两德统一后，向翻越柏林墙的民众开枪的军警也同样被审判，他们也诉诸于艾希曼同样的辩解——服从命令而已。而这次判罪的理由比纽伦堡审判时好了许多：他们本可以在（被迫）执行命令的同时把枪口抬高一点的。
德国人反思纳粹的深度常常超过常人想象，这部电影在这一主题上达到了这个深度。

【哲学与政治的张力】
这个主题自从施派流行起来以后已经烂大街了，不过它的确值得思考。电影为我们呈现的是：不仅在民众，甚至在怀着复仇情绪的知识分子眼里，阿伦特所谓艾希曼是无知的，只是在用一种奇怪的方式为纳粹辩护。而关于“平庸的恶”的思考势必把一部分责任到作为受害者的犹太人自己头上去，这简直是骇人听闻。于是来自愤怒的民众的电话或信件接踵而至，而来自朋友决裂、劝诫、失望、不理解也影响到了汉娜的生活。
其实汉娜与朋友的争论从一开始就充斥了整部电影，他们从一开始就不能理解为什么阿伦特要以那种奇怪的态度为艾希曼辩护，只是争论在私下以种种方式被平息了。只有丈夫理解她，他也觉得审判并不正义，但却担心妻子会不会因思考回到过去的“黑暗岁月”。而阿伦特的文章在《纽约客》上发表并引起众怒后，她的第一反应是别人没有仔细读它，但这被丈夫说成天真。众人没能阅读并理解她的观点，这究竟是因为众人的愚蠢，还是因为众人根本不会真正阅读与自己意见严重相左的观点？有人说（历史主义的），使自己被排斥的最佳方式，便是不断挑战自己所在共同体的基本信念，即使它们是独断的。
影片中，更深一点的问题是：既然众人无法理解哲学，那么哲人是否应该把自己激进的观点发表出去？如果以施派的方式回应，她当然不应如此幼稚，至少该采取一种更谨慎的方式进行表达。但片中阿伦特却说激进并不就是错的，应当有勇气去发言（片中反复提到勇气）。还有一个内在问题：是否有一些观点明明是真的，但基于现实永远也不该说出来？比如最后阿伦特在大教室进行了一场精彩的演讲，阐明了自己的观点和立场，说服了所有的学生，但却没能说服自己的犹太老友，反而使他下定决心与汉娜决裂。学生被说服，是不是因为他们身在美国没能经历当年的恐怖，而犹太朋友没能被说服，是因为他经历了一切，如果再说三道四那么就是亵渎？显然，哲学的危险处境在于它对一切都想说三道四。
有意思的细节是：阿伦特觉得自己要卷铺盖走人了，但丈夫安慰她说在美国并不用担心被驱逐。但政治与哲学，或怀着情绪的大众与试图说出道理的哲人之间的矛盾并没有被消解。哲人该如何做？作为大众我们该如何看待似乎完全无法理解的思想，这都是值得深思的。

【该如何评价海德格尔】
我不是太懂海德格尔，因此不敢贸然写太多，这比评价纳粹还要复杂。无论如何，这是所有哲学学生最感兴趣的八卦，至少一睹了“女神”当年的风采。
片中每次出现与海德格尔相关的段落，都由两张旧照片引起。这些段落包括：（阿伦特还是学生时）在图书馆听到男同学对她说海德格尔向纳粹效忠、海德格尔上课给学生讲如何“denken”（思考）、阿伦特去海德格尔办公室、阿伦特和海德格尔做爱做的事；以及（战后）阿伦特与海德格尔再次相遇。实话说，这些段落并不试图使人明白为什么教会了阿伦特“如何思考”海德格尔要当纳粹、或海德格尔为什么不道歉、或阿伦特对海德格尔的态度究竟是什么。它们主要意义是引起困惑，让电影的主题更深更广。
不仅我们不理解，片中阿伦特的朋友、丈夫、甚至她自己也没能解释这个问题。每次朋友问她关于海德格尔的问题，她都会回答说最爱是自己的丈夫——这种甚至有些做作的爱，是否是为了抚平心中的困惑？先知式的哲人是否会在政治上犯如此幼稚的错误？还有，哲学家跪在女学生膝下时，他还是那个哲学家吗？我只能说不知道。

总之，这是我今年看过的有关哲学的最好的一部电影，至少比那部《维特根斯坦》强多了，尽管后者视觉效果出彩，但除了让人看出维特根斯坦是个怪异的天才外，并未带来更多原文以外的思考。

这是一部看到片名就决定必须看的电影，所以认真地写下些东西以对得起这个决定，所以以下只是自己短暂思考的拼贴，而并不是一个典型意义上的影评。

影片从艾西曼审判这个点切入是极好、极聪明的，但同时也是冒风险的，因为这件事无论对阿伦特本人还是对现代政治思想界、哲学界都是极重大的事件。加上汉娜阿伦特本人是犹太人，要想说好这个故事并不容易。

从实际效果看，影片试图着重在汉娜发表文章后的面对压力上用力，但其实仅仅表面描写了其众叛亲离的境况，个人觉得还太肤浅。而这就要牵涉到另一层，在影片前半部分，汉娜思考并写作纽约客这篇文章时，电影也没有很好的描写出她的思考过程。我指得不仅是她作为亲历集中营的犹太人在思考“平庸的恶”这样开创性观点时内心的挣扎，我更希望看到的是她在艾西曼审判的过程中，如何从观察、思考到最后得出结论来的那个推论过程。这可能需要编导有很深的政治哲学功底并对汉娜阿伦特研究极深，似乎有些过于勉为其难了。但其后果就是在这个惊世骇俗的理论那么轻易地横空出世之后，汉娜所受到的孤立与痛苦在观众看来也变得不那么严重了。

导演的难处我能理解一点，毕竟要厘清一个思想家原创性的思想形成脉络以及这个过程中的心路历程简直是不可能完成的任务，而另一方面，汉娜这个特殊人物在艾西曼审判这么戏剧性的事件中所可能产生的情感冲击与个人遭遇又是如此有诱惑力地摆在导演面前，其避难就易的选择也便可以理解了。但这样一来，跻身一流电影的可能性也成了泡影。

其实我发觉，导演应该是意识到这个问题的。因此为了在汉娜的个人情感压力与文章（观点）发表的深层剖析之间摆摆平，导演安排了汉娜在阶梯教室的演讲。必须承认，这个演讲非常清晰扼要的讲清楚了汉娜的思想精髓（我不清楚历史上是否真有此次演讲），但也因此而显得过于简单化，而失去了其思想本身应有的复杂性。更重要的是，在接近结尾时安排的这一桥段，依然让影片有着头轻脚重的感觉，这就是叙事的技术问题了。

事实上，叙事与结构在本片中一直处于很纠结的状态，比如海德格尔，这么重要的一个人，和汉娜又是有着那么著名的关系，但是如何表现，在这样一个不是以他们为主线的影片里，其实是个很尴尬的事情，就现在的结果来看，依然有些脱节和多余。而导演又在汉娜与丈夫海因里希的恩爱感情上大动笔墨，这多少也有点莫名其妙。同时，它更是冲淡了汉娜阿伦特作为20世纪最伟大思想家在这一促成其最具原创性思想产生的重大事件（作为影片主体）中所应引发的深刻的思想性和戏剧性。说难听一点，——变得有些平庸和媚俗了。

下面还有一些看豆瓣评论后的琐碎想法。

1、豆瓣上有朋友在疑惑为什么导演要安排三个关于语言的环节。我的理解，汉娜在德国人朋友间说德语，可吊诡的是他们所处的环境是美国，甚至就有美国朋友在身边，以致他们不得不注意改为英语；同时，作为一个德国人在美国大学，用德语授课而用英语写文章发表，她的内心该是时时刻刻会意识到自己身处他乡，对她来说自己无论怎样都是外来者。甚至在耶路撒冷，汉娜依然是个外人。了解一点汉娜阿伦特一生的人会知道，这种境况固然是客观造成的，但也是汉娜自己想要的一种存在状态。因为这正是她摆脱身份、情感干扰，站在人类理性层面进行思考的先决条件。影片里汉娜对以色列朋友说的话，大意是“我不爱任何民族的人，我只爱我认识的朋友”，就很值得玩味，影片安排语言问题的情节，也正是想说明汉娜站在人类立场而非犹太人立场上的惊人观点，其产生是其来有自的。

2、关于思考的勇气问题。阿伦特明确指出思考的惰性和怯懦是如此有害。“究竟是不能还是不愿去思考”是所有尚未自觉开始自我启蒙的蒙昧者都应警醒的问题。回到阿伦特当时的语境中，我觉得崔卫平老师的评论是最中肯的——“对于阿伦特来说，重要的不是“是”什么，而是去“做”什么；“是”只是一种状态，而只有去“做”才能提供一种说服力。只有去行动才能表明一个人是怎样的、他是谁。她的立场与理论成果，可以看作是对于欧洲那场灾难的全部回应，尤其是对于犹太人悲惨处境的回答。不是她不把自己放到犹太人的脉络中去，而是犹太人必须把自己放到当代政治生活中去，放到与他人一道的行动中去，以解决他们的“无世界性”来解决他们的问题，以参与这个世界的社会政治事务来表明自己是怎样的犹太人，以改变这个世界的政治格局来改变犹太人的历史命运，以及其他民族和人民的命运。”——回看当下，便可知我们正处身的是一个何其两难的神奇境地，一方面大多数人丧失了独立思考（自我启蒙）的能力；另一方面少数有独立思考能力的人却无法做到知行合一。这才是我们这个时代最可耻、可悲的地方。

3、影片最后，阿伦特站在窗台前抽着烟说，别人都没有指出的、自己唯一的错误在于，“并没有什么又平庸又激进的恶，恶只能是极端的，只有善才会是激进的。”——我的理解正因为恶是平庸的，因此它只可能是消极的，哪怕是极端的消极——思维的惰性和怯懦；而善正因为有道德优越感在那里，因此更容易积极作为，从而走向激进。

人类的确是思考的动物吗？

拜校友赠票看了上海国际电影节的参展影片，知道了汉娜-阿伦特这个人和关于她的这一段历史，激发了一些无意义的思考。

在40多年后的今天，当年造成轩然大波的阿伦特观点“平庸的邪恶”已经成为看待参与过纳粹德国活动的无数德国人和其他人的主流观点。前两年的获奖影片《Reader》讲述的就是这样一个故事。但是在当时，一个从纳粹集中营中逃出来的犹太人提出这样的观点——即某名具体的纳粹军官并非自主拥有邪恶的思想和行为，只是通过盲目地执行命令协助了邪恶的实现——却被犹太人群看做是一种背叛。

在我看来，这是对思想家的双重讽刺：即群众不能理解思想家的思想，同时群众对其思想做出的情绪反应正是思想家极力想要指出的问题：纳粹德国的民众是随着从众的惯性和莫名的对犹太人的偏见而默认了纳粹对犹太人的灭绝；而战后的犹太人是抱着从众的复仇的情绪和同样莫名的民族主义仇恨阿伦特“为纳粹开脱”的观点。

在情绪驱使的两段历史潮流之上，思想家在孤独地阐述着她的观点，年轻的学生听进去了，因为他们没有过去的包袱，没有个人的历史遭遇，作为一种思想他们貌似理解了；但是所有其他人，都被情绪席卷着，完全听不进去。

思想家说，独立的思考（和判断），是人之所以为人的基本条件——这听起来很美的话，无疑是一种理想化的误导。如果要落实到具体的个人的话，我们来猜一下，当今地球上的60亿人口，有多少是能够思考的，又有多少是能够独立思考的。

理性，这是自启蒙运动以降的至高目标和不懈追求，带领西方世界在300多年的时间里创造了空前的人类福祉，但是残酷的一战和二战让这一追求遭遇了空前的失败，造成了理想的崩塌。我私下认为，这就是为什么战后的所有艺术都如此丑陋不堪，因为（视觉）艺术最能直观反映当代心灵的面貌。

如果说对理性的追求在西方遭到了重挫，那么我们中国人就太幸运了，因为我们从来就没有追求过那个东西。

在人类的所有属性中，理性算是非常纯粹和崇高的，但却也是最脆弱的。古今中外，茫茫人海，有多少人像阿伦特这样，把一生投入理性的思考，又有多少人像她一样，为理性做出过牺牲？相比之下，人们为其他的东西不懈追求，奋勇牺牲前仆后继：金钱、权利、爱情、性、爱国主义、民族主义、宗教——所有这些，很不幸的，都跟理性没有什么关系，如果不是对立的话。

从前读MBA，印象最深刻的是一个教Organization Behavior的教授讲的一句话（他正好也是美国犹太人）：永远不要设想人们是理性的（不论是在股市里、谈判桌上或者会议室里）。而近年来在金融领域一个热门的研究课题就是心理状态和情绪对投资行为的影响。

总而言之，如果阿伦特的思考有任何缺陷的话，那就是她对于人类的理性程度和对理性追求的热情都估计过高了。在我看来，这个人类，离理性的光辉殿堂，还有半个世界的距离。