Rose-tinted lens

Daniel Nemenyi reviews the film "Hannah Arendt", directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Von Trotta is astute in having looked to Arendt as the topic to succeed her films on Rosa Luxemburg and the Rosenstrasse rebellion, the women-led demonstrations against the deportation of Berlin's remaining Jews on Rosenstrasse in 1943. Arendt offers von Trotta a certain way of comprehending a meeting point between such distinct figures of recent German history, besides their political ambitions: as bearers of private consciences turned public. Arendt herself attempted to manifest such a public conscience throughout her adult life. After assisting refugees in the 1930s, she used her pen to campaign on a variety of matters relating to German and Jewish issues, notably within the pages of magazines rather than academic journals. Arendt's apprehension of a catastrophic Zionism, then being born, is perhaps more pertinent than ever. As such, Nemenyi thinks that it is lamentable that von Trotta's "Hannah Arendt", basing itself on the Eichmann period, effectively skirts around all questions concerning Israel's relations with the Shoah. Instead, it represents only the ad hominem self-hating Jew attacks against her.