Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s influence on twentieth and twenty-first century thought is beyond doubt. Her ability to interrelate politics and the ways in which a given society establishes relations between individuals within the public space with the relations of power and domination that also develop within a given community has been of great relevance in order to approach, from reflection and the need to recognize ourselves in the past, some of the most dramatic events that have occurred in the history of mankind. Her courage to study the Jewish Holocaust in a straight way, and to try to understand how the death of so many millions of people could be undertake in a mechanical and organized way reflects the capacity of this thinker not only to approach the other, the different, but to try to maintain a memory of the past that serves as a framework of understanding to replace, facing the present, the confrontation between enemies by a dialectic between adversaries. In this paper, we will try to present how Arendt’s work interrelates with her aesthetics, through the analysis of memory and otherness. To do so, we will analyze how these aspects are presented to the viewer in Margarethe von Trotta’s feature film Hannah Arendt (2012).

Keywords: Hannah Arendt | Margarethe von Trotta | Otherness | Holocaust | Memory studies