News about Hannah Arendt

A British-Palestinian surgeon who sparked controversy for his comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict said authorities in Germany had refused him entry on Friday, claiming the government was 'silencing a witness to genocide'. Professor Ghassan Abu Sittah, who received backlash after hailing the mastermind behind the 2018 drive-by killing of Rabi Raziel Shevach as a 'hero', said on Twitter/X he had been 'forcibly prevented' from entering the country to speak at a conference 'about my work in Gaza hospitals'. He was due to attend 'The Palestine Conference. We will put you on trial', an event calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, allegedly targeted by German pro-Israel organisations in recent weeks, inspiring calls for it to be banned.

Director Jonathan Glazer was not keen on the challenge of re-creating what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the 'banality of evil.' Auschwitz-Birkenau's latest film, The Zone of Concern, tells the tale of how the commandant survived just outside the death camp, where more than a million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Rudolf Höss, the deacondescent who ruled mass murder, spent his days in a luxurious home with his wife Hedwig and their five children in relative domestic bliss. Glazer and other key figures in the latest film have shared the long and difficult journeys they went to in order to ensure that the film is as accurate as possible. The filmmakers looked at photographs of the Höss children playing in the garden of their villa and then recreated those scenes in the film (bottom right). Recordings of how the site might have looked at the time, as well as gunshots that were repeated in a concrete space to imitate the executions that occurred just a short distance away. Johnnie Burn, the film's sound designer, spelled out how they listened to the 'tru sounds of people in pain' so they could be correctly recreated.

BRIAN VINER: I hear a lot about the complaint that "nothing worth going to the theater for" is something I hear a lot, and it's often impossible to refute, but it has no water at all this week, as we welcome two of the Academy Award contenders. I don't think either of them will be contaminated with the Oscar, which, according to sports analysts, would be Oppenheimer's to lose. Both of them will be worthy winners, especially The Zone Of Interest, a disturbing movie about the Holocaust. Unique, since the mass extermination of Jews, Hitler's abhorrent 'Final Solution,' is shown as a glowering yet mostly distant backdrop, while an ostensibly positive story of family life unfolds in the foreground. The film, shot in 1943, focuses on Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), his materialistic wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children. They live in a great deal of confidence, just over the wall from the concentration camp where he works with icy efficiency.

MAYBE MONITOR: Lucy Letby might have been disterred if she knew the babies were being monitored by CCTV. However, if she hadn't been, a video of her injecting them right away before their agonized deaths may have compelled even her relatives to understand what Letby herself said in her notes: 'I did this.'