HANNAH ARENDT starring Barbara Sukowa premieres throughout Germany
Margarethe von Trotta portrays another towering female figure on film
After playing the protagonists in ROSA LUXEMBURG (1986) and VISION (2009), Barbara Sukowa—once again working with the director of Margarethe von Trotta—now takes on the role of the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. At the center of the film, which does not seek to be a classic biopic, is Arendt’s report for the New Yorker on the trial of former SS officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961. As director of Department IV of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, Eichmann was the leading “bureaucratic perpetrator” of the deportation and systematic murder of European Jews. The film begins with Mossad’s abduction of Eichmann in Argentina, where the war criminal has gone into hiding. Hannah Arendt, a Jew born in Germany, attends Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The five articles she writes, later collected in a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, trigger a wave of protest. Arendt’s intent is to unmask and de-demonize an artless perpetrator, who continues to insist that he is not guilty as charged. Flashbacks to Arendt’s own earlier life explore her relationship during the 1920s to her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, from whom she has now long distanced herself. The film explores Arendt’s approach to these contradictions, her concern with her own possible and real mistakes and her ability to consider positions counter to her own. HANNAH ARENDT is the portrait of an investigator of totalitarianism and a towering thinker of her time, a film that rightly attempts to foreground the courage of its protagonist.
Barbara Sukowa was initially daunted by the role. “Even the thought of playing such a woman was frightening. She is a great intellectual and I am just an actress. A blonde,” she joked at the film’s world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2012. The cast includes Axel Milberg in the role of Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher, and Julia Jentsch as her assistant Lotte Köhler. Arendt’s close friends Hans Jonas und Mary McCarthy are played by Ulrich Noethen and Janet McTeer.
Asked about the intention of the film, Margarethe von Trotta responds that, following Arendt herself, she trusts in the process whereby “the viewer moves via ignorance and astonishment to a desire to understand and finally to understanding itself.”
Photos: © NFP media rights GmbH & Co. KG / Heimatfilm