Work on a major motion picture – the first to be filmed in Jerusalem – begins on Sunday, as a joint Israeli-German-French crew begin production on the film “Hannah Arendt.” The film is a portrait of the experiences of the German-Jewish philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and escaped to America when she covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 for the New Yorker. Arendt wrote her 1963 landmark work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on those experiences.
The film, with an international cast, is being directed by Margarethe von Trotta, one of Germany's most prolific filmmakers and know for her portrayal of strong female characters. Starting as Arendt is German actress Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg as her husband Heinrich Blücher, Janet McTeer as her best friend and novelist Mary McCarthy, and Julia Jentsch as her secretary and confidante. Lotte Köhler. Also starring are Ulrich Noethen, Michael Degen, and Victoria Trauttmansdorff.
The film is also the first international production that the Jerusalem Development Authority's Film and Television Development Fund has invested in, to the tune of NIS 470,000. While the Fund has partnered with Israeli producers on numerous productions, this is the first international production it has invested in, said director of the Fund, Yoram Hoenig.
Arendt, who coined the term “banality of evil” to describe Eichmann's seemingly normal attitude and behavior during his trial – a battery of Israeli psychologists could find nothing wrong with him as he awaited trial after a Mossad team arrested him in South America – was a fairly controversial figure in Israel for many years. Although her work on Eichmann came out in 1963, it was only recently translated into Hebrew. In the book, she takes Eichmann as an example of the average German, using it to explain how a modern society could slaughter millions of Jews, conscious of their actions, while living an ostensibly normal life.
The book, however, raised the ire of many Israelis, as Arendt accused then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion of essentially “kidnapping” Eichmann, and that Israel was using the trial to emphasize Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, minimizing the damage done to others. Many prominent Israelis broke off relations with her altogether, and lifelong friends refused to speak to her for many years, as a result of views that many Jews said were “extremely hurtful and insulting” for a nation where so many Holocaust survivors lived, and especially coming from someone who was a refugee herself.
In a 2008 book, noted Holocaust researcher David Cesarani slammed Arendt's opinions, stating that much of her criticism of Israel could be traced back to her roots as a “proper” German Jew, who like many of her compatriots held in contempt the “Ostjuden” - the refugees from Poland and Russia, who were now in control of Israeli society.