Pop Up Film Haus presents "Hannah Arendt"

Our Pop Up Film Haus events are free and open to the public. Each film will be shown with English subtitles and there will be an opportunity for discussion following each screening.

Goethe Pop Up Kansas City welcomes all to join us this week for a screening of Margarethe von Trotta’s film “Hannah Arendt”.

“Hannah Arendt”
Germany | Luxembourg | France | Israel 2012, 113 min
By: Margarethe von Trotta
With: Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Janet McTeer

Summary:

In April 1961 the German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt left her New York exile for Jerusalem to report on the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. She is determined to a direct confrontation with those people whose behavior under the Nazi regime she wants to understand. When Arendt’s articles appear, they unleash a worldwide wave of outrage. She sees Eichmann not as the monster world opinion does but recognizes him as a pen-pushing killer who wanted to carry out his task to the best of his ability and feels no guilt because he was merely following orders.

For her, Eichmann was the embodiment of the banality of evil, a phrase that resounds to this very day. “The trouble with Eichmann,” Arendt wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

Arendt’s courageous perception has international consequences. She is despised, vilified, loses lifelong friends. She maintains, however, her consistent posture, seeking to understand, even if that means “thinking till it hurts.”

Source: German films Service & Marketing GmbH

This event is part of the German Cinema in the Crossroads film series, an extension of the Wunderbar: A Celebration of German Film project. From “Beloved Sisters” to “A Coffee in Berlin” and “Young Goethe in Love”, from “The Blue Angel” to “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” – we are celebrating German-American friendship with our partner Kanopy by bringing 48 German films to your screens. Goethe-Instituts and Goethe Pop-Ups across the U.S. will take part in the celebration by showing films, organizing film festivals, and conducting discussions after screenings.