A highlight of our TIFF this year clearly was to have Margarethe von Trotta and her co-writer Pamela Katz in our Goethe Directors Talk, moderated by Marc Glassman, a day after their world premiere. Until you can find the full video of our talk on our new YouTube channel in October, here’s a quick recap of the most important thought lines of a dense hour-long discussion that could have gone on much longer:Von Trotta laid out how her film Hannah Arendt really started with her film Rosa Luxemburg --both played by the inimitable Barbara Sukowa, who won Best Actor at Cannes 1986 for the latter portrayal-- and after the Communist utopia. While Luxemburg looked forward to a brighter, more just future, Arendt looked back to “the dark times”. Von Trotta described Sukowa as a “severe” and intellectual actor, who researched alongside the authors and even got a philosophy tutor in order to get every nuance of Arendt’s controversial arguments on “the banality of evil” right. The script was based on a lot of published and unpublished correspondence and extensive witness interviews, among others with Hannah Arendt’s assistant (played in the film by Julia Jentsch) and former students.
Barbara Sukowa needed only three takes for the (incredible) 8-minute one-shot scene of Hannah Arendt’s final speech, which also served to bring the intellectual and emotional elements that the film develops throughout finally together (and thus needed to close the film, although von Trotta was urged to use this impactful scene as an opener).
Asked about her portrayal of that particular time and environment of the New York of the New School, the director vividly described how she wanted to recreate the unique “melting pot” that was Hannah Arendt’s apartment – where the European Jewish intellectuals-in-exile switched back to German for all heated political discussions (and with Barbara Sukowa, who has lived in the USA for decades, having to relearn a subtle German accent). Von Trotta gave multiple reasons why she focused on the 1950s and the banality-of-evil argument: She adamantly did not want to reduce Arendt, as is so often the case, to her infamous love affair with Nazi philosopher Heidegger, which von Trotta doesn’t consider a defining moment in the Jewish philosopher’s life, but show her at a time of her second exile, after having left Germany, having fled France and having settled in the USA. Also, she said, for her as a German, the Eichmann trial was and is crucial, with the German burden of the (actually 12-year) self-proclaimed “1000 Year Reich” indeed lasting for a thousand years. Eichmann also made a good foil to Arendt: German Nazi and German Jew, non-thinking vs. quintessential thinking. The film thus takes the viewer down the same path that Arendt took in recognizing and analyzing the treacherous mediocrity of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann.
In the Q&A, when asked about the perceived close historical accuracy of the film, the filmmaker stated that she was rather “fond of the truth” (certainly not interested in political correctness): “You sometimes have to invent scenes to create vividness, or you amalgamate several characters into one to densify.” Challenged whether Hannah Arendt really “changed the world”, as the film’s marketing headline has it, von Trotta laughed and said she certainly changed her world.
Queried about how she positions herself on the political left vis-à-vis Arendt, von Trotta interestingly dissected how her early leftist New Wave movement hardly read Hannah Arendt’s writings, and how only after the fall of the Wall they started to acknowledge Arendt’s immense foresight.
Finally, as often, von Trotta was asked whether she minds the label “feminist filmmaker”. Her simple response: “No, I am. But I don’t do ‘women’s films’. I make films.”
Very much looking forward to the next one now.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
