Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. She is frequently referenced as a philosopher, while she thought of herself as a political theorist. Two different plays were recently premiered in Germany that focus on this historical person. Arendt: Denken in finsteren Zeiten [EN: Arendt: Thinking in Sinister Times] by Danish dramatist Rhea Leman (b. 1954) premiered in Odense in August 2023. The first German language production, in a translation by Henning Bochert, premiered at Thalia Theater Hamburg on the 11th of October 2025, directed by Tom Kühnel. Die drei Leben der Hannah Arendt [EN: The Three Lives of Hannah Arendt] is based on the graphic novel by American novelist Ken Krimstein (b. 1958), its translation into German by Hanns Zischler, and adapted for the stage by dramaturg Bernd Isele and stage director Theresa Thomasberger. It premiered at Deutsches Theater Berlin on 25th of October 2025.
Tom Kühnel’s Hamburg production of Leman’s play was set in an abstract, white space with wooden flooring sloping upwards, where floor and back wall served as screens for projections – mainly to suggest an interior of a hotel room with double bed (partly projected, partly as part of the set). Other projected walls of that room were shown at distorted angles, indicating that much of what we saw was happening inside Arendt’s mind. The framework for the performance was Arendt spending an evening and a night in a hotel room, ahead of receiving a major award and having to write her speech for the occasion. She briefly remembered major stages of her life; others that can be found in her biography were not picked up at all. A focus on her relationship with her husband, who appeared to her as a ghost five years after his death, served as a dramatic device to present her way of thinking and her more personal side. The play kept looping back to her relationship with her husband, and the framework of the evening before the award ceremony. In terms of her life and her writing, the play focused on the two things that were placed at the core of her life: her loss of German citizenship and, with that, essentially a loss of identity, and her attempt at understanding the nature of evil at the core of the Holocaust, by writing for the New Yorker about the trial of Eichmann, which led to her developing the concept of the banality of evil.
According to the play, both positions, being so deeply affected by loss of identity that came with citizenship, and the very concept of banality of evil as being in some strange way apologetic about evil, or relativizing it, were, are, and should be questioned, interrogated. The concerns raised seem to imply that she shows weakness in feeling as she does about the displacement, and that her explanation of evil is not appropriate. I find those concerns themselves quite problematic, and I want to share this train of thought provoked or triggered by the play and its performance. In the ongoing “me too” debate, or debates about sexual violence against children, there has been widespread consensus that if a person considers any behavior of another person as transgressive, then that consideration is axiomatic: the subjective perception is factual, and beyond doubt. This may be different in terms of legal considerations in court, but the individual’s perception is factual, and no comparisons with other people’s real or assumed feelings in comparable situations are valid. When I was in my early teens, I played the boy in Waiting for Godot in a production at the theatre where my mother was employed at the time. The theatre was a Landestheater, regional theatre, which involved touring to smaller venues in cities without their own theatre company. The theatre had its own bus with driver for this, and, after returning, from one of those bus trips to perform elsewhere, while leaving the bus, the old actor who played Lucky faced me and very slowly stroked my right cheek with his hand. A few seconds, that was all. I was startled, I did not like the feeling of being stroked in this way, the deliberate, perceived endlessly long duration of his hand on my cheek. I instinctively felt that something about this was very wrong and it should not have been happening. That was “all.” Nothing further happened then or after that. By comparison, something very minor, perhaps. Not worth talking about. A storm in a teacup. Don’t make a fuss about nothing. All fair enough. But for me it was a major event, and some 50 years later I still feel that awful, warm hand on my cheek as if it had happened a few moments ago. It was a traumatic experience. Based on this experience: who are we to judge another person’s experience? We do not have the capacity or the right, coming back to the play and its production, to judge the historical person of Hannah Arendt in terms of how she felt about being displaced, and in terms of how she felt about the nature of evil. This is the position the play raises in relation to its character of Arendt.
The level of Arendt’s feelings is thus beyond and above judgmental debate as such, as is any feeling of any real person or fictional character. What the play then offers is a consideration, in Arendt’s case at a very high level of intellectual rigor and sophistication, of contextualizing her particular traumata of displacement and the encounter of evil in the form of the Holocaust. Here the play may offer opportunities for readers and audiences of the production to relate Arendt’s positions to their own lives. It did that for me. Displacement first. In 2007, a newly appointed head of the theatre studies department I had been working in since 1994, summoned me to his office a month after taking up his role and told me: “I do not wish my department to be associated nationally or internationally with Theatre and Consciousness.” This was my then already well-established research focus. He proceeded to offer me a sabbatical, “to realign your research interests to the established strengths of the department.” The previous year, I had edited a Festschrift for German theatre director and politician Heinz-Uwe Haus, who had worked at the forefront of theatre in the so-called German Democratic Republic and had been a member of the political organization that was instrumental in bringing about the end of that regime. From this work I realized that, in my department, I was witnessing the beginning of a totalitarian regime in miniature, with the whole range of responses, from real or feigned not noticing anything amiss, via a conscious accepting a role in the opposition but without the option of leaving, all the way to seeking immediate escape. I escaped, to a professorship elsewhere, signing my contract only three months after that memorable meeting with the new head of department. I had escaped, yes. And I am still grateful for this opportunity. It still took a good number of years until I was able to think about these events and talk about them to others, without clearly noticing that I would start sweating and that I could feel my heart beating in my chest. At some point I felt I had achieved closure. However, watching Arendt: Denken in finsteren Zeiten made me realize only now, almost twenty years later – and for the very first time –, that the need to leave my employment for a new one was also a context of displacement: the new role in the new environment felt like exile, felt like a development forced on me against my will. Unconsciously, this context was arguably behind my interest in the concept of exile, which I discussed with several colleagues (an account of that discussion even became a chapter in a 2013 book). I also believe that, in complex ways, too personal to address here, being pushed into exile, and not coping well with some important aspects of it, led to the breakdown of my marriage.
Observing Eichmann at the trial led Arendt, in her attempt to understand how the Holocaust could have happened, to develop her concept of the banality of evil: she found Eichmann to be a disturbingly ordinary, mediocre bureaucrat, unable to consider another person’s perspective, lacking profound wickedness or monstrosity. We are fascinated by evil, by human representatives of it – which explains the popular success of documentary series about serial killers on TV, interviews with “famous” serial killers in their prison environments, or fictional TV crime series such as Criminal Minds or Dexter. Many comments about real life and about fictional serial killers point out the surprise at the people’s or character’s criminal activities given that they were perceived by neighbors, acquaintances, work colleagues, friends and family members as ordinary, average, nondescript, withdrawn or socially well integrated people. The play made me realize, in further considering the concept of the banality of evil, however, that exceptions do exist, certainly in fiction, but also in real life (hopefully statistically much less frequently than the unassuming people or characters). I have known only one person in all my life so far whom I would go near calling evil. A person I sought to avoid as much as possible, even if that meant taking the back staircase down from the fifth floor rather than risking being cornered and drawn into an exhausting psycho-grilling so intense there was no escape and which left me physically exhausted and mentally drained. I did not and still do not know what precisely happened, the details, the approach, the procedures, the processes, the mechanisms, and I can understand Arendt’s urge to find out in terms of the Holocaust and those responsible for it, when the opportunity of attending the Eichmann trial offered itself.
The play’s selection of material from Arendt’s life and work made sense and worked well within the ninety-minute performance. The evening before the awards ceremony, and the memories triggered by the need to write a lecture in the short time, before the event, provided strong frameworks. The selection of excerpts from her texts, and more casual, personal moments, found a good balance to allow us some insight into the person of Arendt, as well as her thinking. A scene when she is getting to know her future husband was striking. The two exchanged intellectual views at breakneck speed, relishing each other’s presence and surge of thinking. I overheard a man in the audience mumbling “You cannot understand any of this,” to which the woman next to him replied very sharply: “That is hardly the point here, is it?!” Corinna Harfouch was brilliant as Arendt, rendering highly complex intellectual thoughts as personal considerations, and shifting easily between argument at the highest levels of intellectual rigor, complexity, originality, and passion, and aspects of personal wit and quicksilver thinking. Oliver Mallison played Eichmann and others; as Eichmann he was almost too creepy. André Szymanski played Arendt’s late husband, Heinrich Blücher and several other roles.
With Arendt – Denken in finsteren Zeiten, the combination of a leading 20th century thinker, a well-crafted play, an overwhelmingly good actress, Corinna Harfouch, strong supporting actors, and a solid production combined into an intriguing, dense 90-minute performance that for me was more deeply thought-provoking and insightful than much of the theatre I have seen for decades.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.