In a new documentary, Hannah Arendt becomes the patron saint of anti-fascism
‘Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny’ details the main beats of the philosopher’s life, but leaves out the controversy
Hannah Arendt and her husband, poet Heinrich Blucher. Courtesy of Getty Images
By Mira Fox June 10, 2025
Since Trump’s first term, Hannah Arendt has loomed large in op-eds and political commentary; the German-Jewish thinker’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism has made for a handy resource in comparing Trump’s tactics to Hitler’s strategies for taking power. Her most famous phrase — on the “banality of evil” — feels like it comes up about once a week.
As brilliant as her observation on the nature of evil was, however, this narrow focus has had the effect of branding Arendt as a Holocaust philosopher, at least in the eyes of the general public. A new, somewhat hagiographic documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny, from filmmaker Jeff Bieber, who was once her student, sets out to rectify that simplified, Holocaust-focused understanding of the influential philosopher.
The documentary’s timing feels like a pointed response to Trump’s recent deportations and increased exercise of executive power; its title makes that critique even sharper. Yet the film is, in fact, not particularly focused on Arendt’s response to fascism, or at least not more so than anything else; it marches through her entire life, from childhood to death. And it spends equal time on each era instead of driving home points from her writing on totalitarianism, Nazism or authoritarianism in the U.S.
Her personal experience fleeing the Nazi regime, of course, is detailed, alongside quotes from her various writings about totalitarianism. Importantly — and relevant to today’s invocations of Arendt — the last third of the film is focused on her critical reactions to authoritarian politics in the U.S. once she immigrated to New York, including sharp criticism of McCarthyism and the Nixon presidency, and her concerns over the removal of naturalized citizens from America. (“If you try to make America more American, you’ll only destroy it,” she wrote.)
But the documentary also spends time on the thesis she wrote while a student of philosophy and theology at the University of Marburg; her focus not on a Jewish luminary like Maimonides or Rashi, but on the concepts of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. The film also considers her little-known work on Rahel Varnhagen, a socialite in the 19th century who struggled with her Jewishness, and explains how Arendt’s interest in Varnhagen provides a lens onto the philosopher’s own relationship with her ethnic identity.
It details her work with the World Zionist Organization in Germany, which nearly got her arrested by Nazi police, and her trip to British Mandate Palestine. And it covers the controversy that arose from Arendt’s famed account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann’s excuse that he was simply following orders — but also, to the dismay of many, discussed the evil of the Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Nazis.
The film also touches on one of the most controversial and confusing parts of Arendt’s personal life: her years-long affair with the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. The affair, while now a well-known part of Arendt’s history, didn’t break into the public consciousness until well after both philosophers’ deaths; when it came out, thanks to a sensationalized 1995 book by Elzbieta Ettinger called Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt, it spurred a hot debate. People wondered if Arendt’s philosophy on totalitarianism on antisemitism was suspect in light of her enduring love for Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi party throughout Hitler’s reign.
While the documentary briefly covers the controversy in the wake of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the film doesn’t consider the accusations of antisemitism against Arendt that came thanks to her affair with Heidegger. Yet much was made of the affair vis a vis Arendt’s own philosophy. Scholars see in Arendt’s impatience with “parochialism” a disdain for her own ethnicity, close-read her writing on totalitarianism to find affinity for Nazi historians and cast doubt on her intellectual foundations.
Arendt and Heidegger’s affair began when she was the philosopher’s 19-year-old student; Heidegger was a married 35-year-old professor widely considered a genius. There are all the normal reasons to look askance at such a relationship, but the older man was not yet part of the Nazi party. The more controversial part of the relationship came later, after the war, when a now-married Arendt met up with Heidegger again, and both were “overwhelmed by their feelings.” (Her husband, Heinrich Blucher, had “no choice but to accept the situation,” writes her friend Hans Jonas.) Arendt worked to get Heidegger’s work translated and championed it, returning the philosopher to the intellectual mainstream after he had been ostracized for being a Hitlerite.
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny feels like a neutral account of the philosopher’s life, a chronological reporting of the facts. However, the fact that it omits much of the more critical reaction to and suspicion of Arendt’s work makes her come across as almost saintly. It focuses on her many actions that showed her deep identification with Jews and Judaism, details her work on behalf of the Jewish people and quotes from her writing about antisemitism. But it does not get into her discomfort with her own Judaism, which is woven throughout much of her work.
All of this is, in many ways, a fair portrait of Arendt; she was a brilliant scholar, and her insights on the common threads between totalitarian regimes are invaluable. But she was also flawed and controversial. By avoiding some of the pushback that arose after her death, the film, just like any op-ed flippantly referencing the banality of evil, denies the complexity of her work. She can be a wise and almost prophetic expert on totalitarianism and still be flawed; she can offer some of the deepest insights into antisemitism and still have a complicated relationship with her own Jewishness. After all, Arendt, like every other Jew, was first and foremost a human.
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny premieres June 27 on PBS.
