Jag såg Margarethe von Trottas film Hannah Arendt tidigare i år och tyckte om den, kanske mest för att jag lärde mig mer om Eichmann-rättegången och Arendts rapporter från rättegången (först serialiserat i The New Yorker och sedan i bokform som Eichmann in Jerusalem) och den kontrovers som uppstod i samband med det. Mark Lilla skriver dock i en längre artikel i The New York Review of Books om dess tveksamma moral, om man får kalla det så. Kanske bäst sammanfattat i det här stycket:
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.
Hela artikeln rekommenderas för den som vill få en fördjupning om Arendt och Eichmann efter att ha sett filmen.
En andra artikel av Lilla kommer att handla om Claude Lanzmanns dokumentärfilm från i år, The Last of the Unjust, som beskrivs så här:
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.
Jag hoppas Lanzmanns film kommer att gå att se på en svensk biograf eller liknande.