Arendt has been significant in philosophy, I remember reading her as an undergrad and enjoying her book 'The Human Condition'. Although I must admit, I should go back and read her again at some point with the mind I have now. With the movie, it would seem the controversy of her writing has resurfaced with the launch of the movie.
Her articles in the New Yorker can be read here: part I , part II, part III, part IV, part V
A revised and enlarged edition (pdf) can be found here
One of the wonderful benefits of the internet is that we have access in the public domain to things like the Eichmann trial - this way, to an extent, it is possible to witness some of the things Arendt witnessed:
This past july, Roger Berkowitz wrote a piece in the NYT: Misreading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'.
He does a good job summarizing the opinions other intellectuals have had about Arendt's assessment of Eichmann and goes on to his own clarifications of Arendt's work.
"“What stuck in the minds” of men like Eichmann, Arendt wrote, was not a
rational or coherent ideology. It was “simply the notion of being
involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.”
...
Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.
...
That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely,
alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning
that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann
finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and
sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots.
But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their
independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit
themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is
futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no
interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless
commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and
makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the
name of saving the world."
And lastly, I'll finish the post with an interview (in German, English subtitles) with Hannah Arendt:
*Update: Apparently it was her birthday a couple days ago (October 14)
a bit more here on her work 'On Violence' - how bureaucracy fuels violence
and here at leiter reports by Peter Ludlow
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