Hannah Arendt a film by Margarethe von Trotta in SF

With Yom Kippur this weekend, my memory travelled back to Lili Kahler and her respect for Hannah Arendt.  Like the Italian journalist, Fallaci, HA  played an important role with respect to the Nazi trials, in that The New Yorker asked her to let them publish the chapters from her book on the Eichmann trials.   Readers are enraged by the fact that she reveals that Jewish leaders were complicit with the Nazi extermination of the Jews to the death camps.  She, herself, was held in a "detention camp" in France, when Hitler invaded France.   We are reminded of her philosophical authoring of a book on totalitarianism, and her being a student of Heidigger.  He taught her to think, which was her goal.  His words become her own:  thinking makes us human, and gives us choice.  She finds Eichmann a "mediocre" man, one who abdicated choice and thought, and therefore, "did his job" in extermination of the Jews.  He was, in her view, a bureaucrat, not a Satanic figure, not so great as a Mephistopholes.  It is a hard truth.  She is loved by her husband, and she did love Heidigger, but not his relinquishing of his own integrity by going over to the Nazis.  A vulture (black with white breast, large raptor ) is sweeping over my retreat window  as I write; something has died...)  What a proud and courageous woman.  She did not anticipate the Truth would be so bitterly received, and chose to answer every letter of recrimination from the readers, from the faculty at her university, and stays steadfast to the end.  She persists:  to be human is to think.  To think is to regard our humanity.  The crimes against the Jews, was not only a Jewish question, but crimes against "humanity". A fine film, as well as an extraordinary story which we need to remember. .