Vita activa, the Spirit of Hannah Arendt

The ideas of political theorist Hannah Arendt, who died in 1974, have lost none of their potency or relevance with the passage of time. Her reflections on subjects such as the totalitarian state and the banality of evil have made her one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. draws on a wealth of source material in a detailed examination of her convictions. Correspondence read aloud in voice-over accompanies the photographs, home movies and other archive material, and these scenes are intercut with interviews with her contemporaries. What comes most to the fore is Arendt’s unremitting sense of displacement. During the Second World War, Arendt, who was Jewish, fled to the United States, where she felt herself to be living in exile. This is an important concept, given that she belonged to a people dismissed as “superfluous.” The notion of superfluity was the wellspring of her theories and views about the establishment of a state of Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust. But on another level, they can easily be extrapolated to the current refugee situation, with millions of displaced people at the borders of Europe. The American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler refers to Arendt’s work, saying that a society that tries to do away with plurality becomes genocidal. This documentary is a warning that if we ignore the helpless and reject critical thinking, we are bound for totalitarianism.