There are momentous events that shape our world, with individuals, Hitler, Napoleon, Marx -- who take the stuff of their birth world and shape it into something different. Those who capture forces and marshal them for revolutions, are both hated and loved, saviors and monsters -- and the winners write the history.
True Philosophers transcend this. They remove themselves from those who hate and admire such transforming figures, and by doing so risk becoming alienated from their own group. Thus is the case of Hannah Arendt in the period of this film. As a student she had a love affair with Heidegger, one of the great philosophers of the early 20th century - who as a human being joined the Nazis.
Arendt, being a Jew, in a covering the trial of Adolf Eichman, became the thinker, the philosopher, while those survivors of the Holocaust were in pain over their loss, and in no mood to intellectualize the perpetrators.
Although I lived only miles from Arendt at the time of this film, I was far removed from the academic culture described, and now more than a half century later, look back with a top of nostalgia and remorse. I knew some who survived the death camps, and certainly could identify with those who reviled Arendt for not loathing Eichman.
Yet these are the challenges of today. We have child terrorists such as one who just killed nine people in a black church our of the same inculcated hatred as the Nazis towards Jews. Arendt's thinking is valuable, and needed since the disease of hatred of outsiders does not seem to be fading, but rather is a constant recurrence of humanity.
True Philosophers transcend this. They remove themselves from those who hate and admire such transforming figures, and by doing so risk becoming alienated from their own group. Thus is the case of Hannah Arendt in the period of this film. As a student she had a love affair with Heidegger, one of the great philosophers of the early 20th century - who as a human being joined the Nazis.
Arendt, being a Jew, in a covering the trial of Adolf Eichman, became the thinker, the philosopher, while those survivors of the Holocaust were in pain over their loss, and in no mood to intellectualize the perpetrators.
Although I lived only miles from Arendt at the time of this film, I was far removed from the academic culture described, and now more than a half century later, look back with a top of nostalgia and remorse. I knew some who survived the death camps, and certainly could identify with those who reviled Arendt for not loathing Eichman.
Yet these are the challenges of today. We have child terrorists such as one who just killed nine people in a black church our of the same inculcated hatred as the Nazis towards Jews. Arendt's thinking is valuable, and needed since the disease of hatred of outsiders does not seem to be fading, but rather is a constant recurrence of humanity.