Arendt, Antigone, and Ambivalence as a Site of Subversion

If the hand you take is one stretched out for help, what then? A sin to take it? Or a sin to refuse?
---Hannah Arendt

On April 8th I posted briefly regarding the play Hannah and Martin. I linked this review by David Finkle and noted,

I don't agree with everything in the review I've linked -- particularly the revisionist look at the concept of "the banality of evil." That particular evil which is so commonplace as to be cliched, the academic abuse of power that turns impressionable young people into love objects for egocentric faculty isn't examined in the play. The banality of the behavior of this fount of postmodern wisdom does give the lie to his thought. His repetition of that cliched seduction of a student, an act that anyone with eyes open in academia has seen countless times, his seduction of his student as much as his adoption of fascist dogma and his weak-willed renunciation of same after his fuhrer and the reich went down in flames lend weight to the argument that Heidegger's work (and that of those who rely on him) deserves a deeper analysis for moral and structural integrity. Heidegger seems to have lacked the ethical and moral strength to differentiate himself from the banality in which he was immersed.

Indeed there was much more I wanted to say, but we were on vacation with things to do, places to go, people to see. No time then for a deeper examination of a play that affected me greatly. Here then is another pass.

Kate Fodor, the playwright, provides a bold structure for the stagecraft that floats her story. In an almost filmic suspension of temporal dimensions she freezes her characters onstage during scene changes and makes convincing use of flashbacks with simple shifts of lighting and scripted character movement. Baldur von Schirach, former leader of the Hitler Youth and on trial as a Nazi war criminal, provides the nominal reason for Hannah Arendt's return to Deutschland. Fodor appropriately understates the grim irony of the subtextual attraction, Heidegger's cry for rescue from the consequences of his own choices. But when we see them onstage together... von Schirach silent and underlit in his prisoner's box at Nuremberg and Heidegger spotlit at his desk in the foreground, the parallels are obvious. Here are two men, dominated by their own sense of moral rectitude and blind to the facts of how horrible their ethical choices have been: von Schirach, the bureaucrat and party functionary who robbed a generation of truth and innocence, who recruited the best and the brightest directly into the SS; and Heidegger, a powerful intellect who seduced generations of philosophers with a recasting of shameful Nietzschean tripe into a postmodern simulacrum of ethical certainty.

I've run across another review of the play that I like. It describes the staging, the costumes, and Sraithairn's portrayal of heidegger's descent from that embarrassing intellectual pride so typical of the denizens of academe into the self-righteous solipsism that Arendt must have pitied in the lover of her youth.

For many writers today, the well-made play is a deftly constructed collage. Ms. Fodor has chosen this form and executed it scrupulously. We hear excerpts from letters and speeches as well as dialogue and monologue. Each character is seen in more than one setting or relationship. Here are Arendt and her first husband, Gunther (James Wallert, in an underwritten part); Arendt and the philosopher Karl Jaspers (the versatile George Morfogen); Arendt visiting Heidegger and his wife after the war.

In collage, juxtaposition is everything. Past and present, fact and emotion; ideas and actions press against each other at different angles. Arendt is sent to cover the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker. When she writes about the testimony of the Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, his fervent declarations about teaching young men ideals and a love of Wagner sound like a lowbrow version of Heidegger's claims.

When Arendt visits Heidegger after the war he is a raving solipsist. Yes, he believed in Hitler because democracy and Communism elevate the masses over the masterful few, the visionaries. But the Nazis let him down. Hitler should come back and apologize to him.

David Strathairn makes a frightening Heidegger: passionate and chilly; obsessed with abstractions, but perfectly able to manage his own professional advancement and (until it grows inconvenient) a love affair.

Melissa Friedman is a strong actor, and as I aimlessly Googled for more information about Hannah Arendt, and surfed this way and that in a parallel effort to satisfy an idle curiousity about Antigone - maybe the play has something to offer Americans in these Theban days of pride and topsy turvy leadership - I found that Ms. Friedman is also a working actor. If only we lived in New York I would follow her shamelessly from off-Broadway production to off-Broadway production, inadequately blogging my impressions of her work.