wolin_arendt in jerusalem

The Ambivalences of German-Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt in JerusalemAuthor(s): Richard WolinReviewed work(s):Source: History and Memory, Vol. 8, No. 2, Hannah Arendt and "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (Fall- Winter, 1996), pp. 9-34Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618704 .Accessed: 01/11/2011 19:22

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Richard Wolin

The Ambivalences of German-Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

I

In investigating the rich philosophical legacy of Hannah Arendt, one cannot help but be struck by the fierce loyalty of her disciples and intimates. One thereby gains

a sense - albeit, second-hand -

of the profound intellectual magnetism she must have exuded. She attracted not only followers, one senses, but also initiates and devotees.

In particular, Arendt's difficult confrontation with her German

Jewish identity is a topic that seems to inspire passionate reactions in her followers.1 Yet, it is certainly no surprise that several

generations of German Jews who matured in the post-emancipa tion era faced a quandary as to what role their Jewishness would now play in their lives - the reactions of course ran the gamut from radical self-denial (assimilation or conversion) to extreme self-affirmation (Zionism). That Hannah Arendt was also profound ly affected by such psychological and cultural anxieties is unques tionable. That her own conversion to Zionism and interest in

Jewish affairs was very much a result of later biographical circum stances is a fact to which she would be the first to attest. As she avows in a revealing 1964 interview: "As a child I did not know that I was Jewish.... The word Jew' was never mentioned at home

when I was a child. I first met up with it through anti-Semitic remarks ... from children on the street. After that I was, so to

speak, 'enlightened.'"2 Arendt's own Jewish identity was, as it were, first constituted by the "gaze of the other," in keeping with Sartre's

affecting portrait of this process in Anti-Semite and Jew. Only amid the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the waning years of the Weimar

Republic would she abandon her first intellectual love, the ethereal realm of German Geist, and devote her energies to what

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would prove a profoundly autobiographical labor: a study of the German Jewess and salonniste, Rahel Varnhagen.

Of course, such circuitous encounters with Judaism were far from

exceptional among assimilated German Jews of the pre-Nazi era, who found themselves overnight transformed from civic equals to

full-fledged pariahs. In his posthumously published autobiography, another Heidegger student, Karl Lowith, gives eloquent testimony to this effect. As Lowith observes with respect to fellow Heidegger student Oskar Becker:

The same person who in our Freiburg student days had studied mathematics, music and philosophy, read Dostoev

sky and Kierkegaard, and whose best friends had been a

Jewish girl and I, had not the least scruple about showing complete indifference to the universal fate of the Jews, while letting pass only those exceptions which had been

provisionally laid down by National Socialism.3

In our century one would be hard pressed to identify a more

provocative study bearing on problems of Jewish character than Eichmann in Jerusalem, a work that has spawned a voluminous

secondary literature.4 To say that its author manifested profound Germanjewish ambivalences can hardly be adjudged controver

sial.5 This does not mean that one should immediately cede to some of the more censorial claims that were made against her: for

example, that of Jewish self-hatred.6 Yet, others, such as Gershom Scholem's well-known charge that she displayed a lack of "Ahabath

Israel" or love for the Jewish people, would seem to possess no

small merit. Ironically, the validity of Scholem's claim was con

firmed by Arendt's response. "You are quite right," she rejoined:

I am not moved by any "love" of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life "loved" any people or

collective - neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love "only" my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of

persons. Secondly, this "love of the Jews" would appear to

me, since I myself am Jewish, as something rather suspect.

The Ambivalences of German-Jewish Identity

I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and

parcel of my own person.7

To return to the fabled exchange with Scholem: in retrospect, one can only say that, sadly, Arendt missed the point. Scholem was

far from advocating an unthinking Jewish nationalism (he was,

along with Buber and Judah Magnes, affiliated with the Ichud, a

small group of Palestinian Jews who sought to promote Arab-Jewish understanding). Nor was it his position (one definitely harbored in certain quarters) that by criticizing one another Jews only provided aid and comfort to "the enemy" (of which the Jews, to be

sure, had many). Instead, Scholem's criticism concerned the

unsympathetic and captious tone of Arendt's remarks as much as

their content. More than anything else, it was her rhetorical high handedness and insensitivity that ended up provoking the wrath of so many. Hence, Arendt's rejoinder concerning her imputed lack of "Ahabath Israel" - that she loved only her "friends" and never entire "peoples"

- was beside the point. Scholem was not

summoning her to love all Jews. He was pointing out what over the course of Arendt's long treatise was obvious and undeniable: from a formal standpoint her narrative betrayed no trace of solidarity with her people of origin. Instead, the obverse seemed to be true: the historical behavior of the Jews as a people had gravely disappointed her, and she was letting this fact be known. That this

people had been recently subjected to one of the most brutal

episodes of genocide in recorded history seemed to matter little from her perspective. Amid three hundred pages of analysis and

description, expressions of sympathy or compassion were not to be found. Moreover, she, who had herself been spared the worst, had

presumed to sit in judgment. As Walter Laqueur observed: "Hannah Arendt's reproaches were those of an outsider, lacking identification: they were almost inhumanly cold."8 The demarche of her book, as signaled by its notorious subtitle

- "A Report on the Banality of Evil" - could not help but raise serious misgivings even on the part of well-intentioned critics. The crux of the matter was succinctly expressed by Laqueur as follows: "Miss Arendt found mitigating circumstances for non-Jews. Everyone in a murder camp was forced to take part in the working of the machine. She did not make such allowances for her fellow

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Jews."9 We shall return to her depiction of Eichmann's evildoing as "banal," and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise.

Concerning her fellow Jews - or, more precisely, their leadership

- Arendt's characterizations were no less blunt:

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with

the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

The overall conclusion she drew on the basis of these observations was hardly more charitable: "As a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story." She went on to discuss "the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society

- not only in Germany but in almost all coun

tries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims" -

insinuating, to say the least, a bizarre moral equation of victims and persecutors.10 Ironically, it was Arendt herself who had

convincingly shown in The Origins of Totalitarianism that one of the

hallmarks of totalitarian regimes was that they made resistance all but impossible. On many occasions, Arendt's judgments have been criticized as

lacking in historical knowledge. Perhaps such judgmental pre

sumption derives from having been trained as a philosopher in the

Heideggerian mode. Though, of course, the lofty tradition of

German idealism has been frequently satirized by those who have

cited Fichte's arrogant dictum: "If the facts fail to conform to the

idea, so much the worse for the facts." Such conceptual high handedness might prove justifiable when confined to the discourse

of speculative philosophy. In works of historical understanding, however, they can make one look foolish. In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt relied extensively (exclusively, one is tempted to say) on

Raul Hilberg's magisterial study, The Destruction of the European Jews.

Though Hilberg's work was pathbreaking in many respects, it was


hardly flawless. One of its more problematical aspects was the discussion of the Jewish Councils. In many respects, Arendt made the shortcomings of Hilberg's work her own.

In his study Hilberg relied almost exclusively on non-Jewish sources which often portrayed Jews according to the basest of anti Semitic stereotypes: Jews were pliable and servile, easily compro mised by appeals to self-interest. Thus, according to Hilberg, Judenrat collaboration was a fairly simple affair, the consummation of a well-ingrained Jewish predisposition to acquiesce in the face of historical persecution.11 Nevertheless, this rather simplistic picture has become increasingly difficult to maintain in view of

mounting evidence compiled by scholars who have relied on a wider array of historical sources. Arendt, too, in her rush to

generalize about the baseness of Jewish collaboration, seriously underestimated the complexity and variety of Jewish responses to

Nazi persecution. The strategy of the Jewish Councils was to exchange goods and

labor in the hope of saving Jewish lives. Under the circumstances it seemed a reasonable approach. It was also a course that proved effective until the final deportations, when, without warning, all other options disappeared. These tactics sought to exploit tensions

among the German high command over whether the exploitation of Jewish labor for war aims or the anti-utilitarian logic of the

"Final Solution" (i.e. extermination) should prevail. Like Hilberg, Arendt failed to distinguish the various stages of

Jewish cooperation with Nazi persecution. These gradations, however, are crucial to evaluating questions of Jewish culpability. During the initial mass deportations, many Judenrat leaders refused to hand over Jewish lives when commanded to do so by the Nazis.

When confronted with Jewish intransigence, the SS would either arrest the Jewish leaders or execute them on the spot. The Nazis themselves then proceeded to hand-pick a second generation of

Jewish leaders, about whose willingness to cooperate they could be assured. It was largely under this Nazi-selected second regime of

Judenrat officials that the deportations began to proceed. Thus, as Yehuda Bauer observes in his History of the Holocaust "The histories of most ghettoes can be divided ... into two periods: before and after the first mass murders." In the eastern Galician town of

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Stanislawow, for example, three successive Judenrat leaders were

executed because of their refusal to hand over Jews.12 In his study of the Jewish Councils, Isaiah Trunk demonstrated

conclusively how Jewish "collaboration," far from being voluntary, was predominantly a product of German coercion. On almost all

occasions, the Nazis forced the Jews to establish the Councils, coerced Jews to serve on them, and compelled their cooperation, often upon pain of the most brutal reprisals. Moreover, circum stances permitting, many of the Councils supported Jewish resistance activities. Some, such as the Warsaw ghetto, were

democratically organized.13 In Arendt's unsympathetic portrayal, however, such crucial distinctions are flattened out.

Few would deny that corruption existed among segments of the

Jewish leadership. As Scholem observed: "some among them were

swine, others were saints. There were among them also many

people in no way different than ourselves, who were compelled to make terrible decisions in circumstances that we cannot even

begin to reproduce or construct." What he found troubling in Arendt's account was what he called "a kind of demagogic will-to overstatement." "I do not know whether they were

right or wrong.

Nor do I presume to judge. I was not there," Scholem concludes.14 In general terms, Arendt's broad condemnation of the Jewish leadership seems to have displayed little comprehension of - let alone sympathy toward - the contingencies and extremes of the dire historical circumstances at issue. As has often been remarked about Rumkowski's reign in the Lodz ghetto: had the Soviet troops arrived a few months sooner, he would have gone down in history as a hero instead of a traitor.

Michael Marrus has aptly observed that as the Eichmann polemic unfolded, "it became apparent how thin was the factual base on

which [Arendt] had made her judgments." He concludes with the

following sober caveat: "The Jewish negotiations with the Nazis ...

were, in retrospect, pathetic efforts to snatch Jews from the ovens

of Auschwitz as the Third Reich was beginning its death agony. Yet

it should be mentioned that, however pathetic, these efforts seemed sensible to some reasonable men caught in a desperate situation."15

Perhaps Arendt's greatest failing as an analyst of the Jewish response to Nazism was that she came off seeming hard-hearted


and uncaring at one of the most tragic moments of modern Jewish history. Even a stalwart supporter such as the historian Hans Mommsen was forced to avow, in his introduction to the German edition of her book, that "The severity of her criticism and the

unsparing way in which she argued seemed inappropriate given the deeply tragic nature of the subject with which she was

dealing."16 That Arendt imprudently referred to Leo Baeck (the head of the Reichsvereinigung der deutschen Juden) as the 'Jewish Fiihrer," characterized Eichmann as a "convert to Judaism," claimed that Jewish cooperation "was of course the cornerstone of

everything he [Eichmann] did," and on countless occasions

stooped to compare the nationalist aspirations of Zionism and National Socialism -

thereby suggesting a macabre equation of victims and perpetrators

- did very little to temper the massive critical response she would receive.17 Her suggestion that in the 1930s the Zionists and Nazis shared a common vision and worked hand-in-hand - at one point, she went so far as to describe the 1930s as Nazism's "pro-Zionist period"

- seemed particularly spiteful and insensitive.18 Finally, in a letter to Jaspers that was

published well after the trial, she expressed the tasteless opinion that "Ben Gurion kidnapped Eichmann only because the repara tion payments to Israel were coming to an end and Israel wanted to put pressure on Germany for more

payments...."19

II

Arendt's capacity for judging particular circumstances was distorted by her fidelity to higher principles. Principles are wonderful things, and she was without doubt and above all a woman of principle. Yet, when principles are brought to bear on circumstances where they do not quite fit, they seem imperious and clumsy

- in a word, they come off sounding tyrannical. Hannah Arendt was nothing if not judgmental, and her judg ments, owing to their inflexibility, often seemed tyrannical. As one commentator put it: "She had a great deal of intelligence but little common sense and apparently no political instinct; she was a

philosophical not a political animal."20 It was clear that she was more comfortable operating on the level of metapolitics than

politics per se (her basic "metapolitical" stance is most fully

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articulated in The Human Condition). And her efforts to judge world affairs by such ethereal standards often came to grief. Of

course, this was a terrific irony in the case of a someone who so

well understood the demands and frailties of human judgment, which was to have been the theme of her last great work.21 As a justification of his own lapses in political judgment, Martin

Heidegger, Arendt's philosophical mentor, claimed, with character istic German intellectual arrogance, that "He who thinks greatly

must err greatly." Arendt, too, was a great thinker; but she also

displayed lapses in political judgment that on occasion would

prove egregious. Though a Zionist, she was vehemently opposed to the creation

of a Jewish state. Instead, along with members of the Ichud, she favored the creation of a bilateral Arab-Jewish confederation. Her sentiments were certainly noble, but the subsequent Arab-Israeli

wars have shown, sadly, how unrealistic an option that was. Once

again, her fellow Jews had failed her, and she never forgave them. Her inability to forgive, moreover, would play a dominant role in her analysis in the Eichmann affair. Arendt also drastically misjudged the stakes of the public school

desegregation movement in the US in the 1950s, embarrassingly digging in her heels on the wrong side of the issue. "If I were a

Negro mother in the South, I would feel that the Supreme Court

ruling [concerning desegregation], unwillingly, but unavoidably, had put my child into a more humiliating position than it had been in before," she observed in "Reflections on Little Rock." With

startling ignorance of the culture and mores of the Jim Crow

South, she proffered a shocking and misguided appeal to the

tradition of "states' rights": "Liberals fail to understand," she

continued, "that the nature of power is such that the power

potential of the Union as a whole will suffer if the regional foundations on which this power rests are undermined.... And

states' rights in this country are among the most authentic sources

of power not only for the promotion of regional interests and

diversity, but for the Republic as a whole."22 As was the case with her understanding of the role of European

Jewry in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in "Reflections on Little

Rock" her analysis was hamstrung by her rigid and anachronistic reliance on the categories of the "social" and the "political." Since


she defined politics, following Aristotle, as a realm of human freedom or "action," and society as a

sphere of economic necessity or "life," their interpenetration was always fatal, argued Arendt.

Thus, she reasoned, using political means - federal enforcement of a judicial decision - to achieve social ends -

integration - would

prove disastrous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, moreover, she had identified the monopolization of the political by the social as one of the chief causes of totalitarianism. Political equality, she

argued, was all that American Blacks could aspire toward; social

equality, as mandated by the recent Supreme Court ruling, would

present the danger of a white backlash. Yet, Arendt was unable to see that in the South the social and political lot of African

Americans was inherently interrelated. She failed to realize that under conditions of segregation social equality was a necessary prerequisite for the attainment of genuine political freedom and

empowerment; and that, under the strictures of the old "separate but equal" system, political freedom, where it existed, was essential

ly meaningless. Once again, however, her myopia was, one might say, conceptually overdetermined. She had brought her precon ceived normative categories

- the "social" and the "political"

- to

bear on a situation in which they proved radically inapplicable. Nor was a willingness to admit she had erred one of Arendt's

outstanding virtues.

Arendt had also misread the Little Rock situation autobiographi cally in terms of her own experiences as an assimilated German

Jew who came of age during the Second Empire. Yet, such

experiences were fundamentally alien to the intricacies of Ameri can racism. Court-mandated integration reminded her of her own

experiences with anti-Semitism as a schoolgirl. She would insist on her "rights," but could hardly expect the prejudicial attitudes of her classmates to change. The idea that such attitudes could be

"legislated away" must have seemed, based on her own personal history, laughable. This is one of the reasons she claimed that the

Supreme Court decision had put Black mothers in a more difficult situation than before.

Yet, the social situations of Southern Blacks under segregation and German Jews were hardly comparable; they would only become so with the apartheid legislation of the 1935 Nuremberg party congress. Moreover, Arendt misconceived the desegregatio

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nist efforts in terms of the same erroneous concept she had earlier

employed to analyze the German-Jewish behavior: that of the social climber or "parvenu." Parvenuism was to her the reprehensible upshot of Jewish assimilationism. That under American circum stances the integration movement could have different and more

positive consequences for generations of downtrodden African Americans was a thought that never occurred to her. As Ralph Ellison later observed, her poor judgment with regard to Little Rock represented a "dark foreshadowing of the Eichmann blow

up."23

Ill

Those familiar with Arendt's wartime essays on the future of

Zionism will recognize that the views she expressed in the Eichmann book were merely the culmination of a decades-long confrontation - both personal and intellectual - with the precari ous position of the Jew in the modern world. Most of her wartime articles appeared in the German-language weekly Der Aujhau and were republished in the late 1970s in The Jew as Pariah. It was

during the war that her historical concern with Jewish destiny peaked; thereafter it would undergo a precipitous decline. In

many respects the key to her uncharitable evaluation of Jewish comportment during the war as portrayed in Eichmann in Jerusalem may be found in her essays from the 1940s.

It was there, for example, that she first developed the harsh

characterological opposition between two major Jewish social types, the parvenu and the pariah. For Arendt, it seemed, all the

debilitating features of Diaspora Judaism could be traced back to

the parvenu: the Jew who denied his own Jewishness for the sake

of social acceptance, turning his back on the plight of his less

fortunate coreligionists in the process. Arendt thought she could

attribute the paternalism of Jewish social organization as well as

the condescension of Jewish philanthropy to this mentality. The

parvenu constantly sought to attain a separate peace, as it were, with the power hierarchies of gentile society. Such behavior was

allegedly foreshadowed by the court Jews of the old regime and

would achieve renewed prominence in post-emancipation Europe with Jewish notables such as the Rothschilds and Gerson von


Bleichroder. Moreover, since what the parvenu desired above all was social acceptance, it was an attitude that served to perpetuate Jewish political immaturity. Thus, one of the chief reproaches Arendt would formulate against the Jewish people was that of its

apolitical nature. Never one to mince words, Arendt expressed this

thought as follows:

Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a

people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and a well-circum scribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this

concept, avoided all political action for two thousand

years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accept ed responsibility for none.24

When viewed against the neo-Aristotelian "metapolitical" back

ground of The Human Condition, where politics -

displaying oneself in the public realm - was deemed the highest mode of human self

fulfillment, such accusations seemed especially damning. As a

people the Jews were viewed as irredeemably oikos-directed: their

sphere of operations was "society" or the "household" in the

pejorative Greek sense. As such the Jews represented a type of ur

bourgeois, who proved incapable of aspiring to the more lofty public virtues of the citoyen. Ever the aristocrat, wedded to a type of German Jewish arrogance, scornful of those who were forced to make a living via the sphere of "circulation," Arendt's portrait of the parvenu often traded in the basest Jewish stereotypes. In

France, the non-parvenu Bernard Lazare could find no fellow Jews to come to the aid of his internationalist program insofar as in that nation 'Jews who had outgrown the petty-trader's haggling"

were nowhere to be found.25 Of Jewish efforts to create a state in Palestine at the height of the Holocaust (1944), Arendt had only the following to say:

The Jews, trying their hand "realistically" in the horse

trading politics of oil in the Near East, are uncomfortably

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like people who, with a passion for horse-trading, but

disposing of neither horse nor money, decide to make up for the lack of both by imitating the magnificent shouting that usually accompanies these gaudy transactions.26

Remarks like these made Scholem's observation about her lack of "Ahabath Israel" seem like an understatement.

Arendt thought she could easily deduce the collaborationist

mentality of the Jewish Councils on the basis of her sketches of the

parvenu as a social type. This was very characteristic of her

"phenomenological" way of proceeding, but it was a method that had its risks. She would formulate an ideal type on the basis of a

few dominant physiognomic traits and instances (for example, the

disproportionate roles played by Disraeli and the Dreyfus Affair in her discussion of anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism) and then treat these typologies as infallible methodological or

interpretive keys - as phenomenological "essences." As Sharon

Muller has perceptively observed:

Given her preconceptions about the nature of Jewish leadership in modern times, Arendt's subsequent analysis of the behavior of Jewish leaders during the Holocaust was a foregone conclusion. For, if Jewish leaders were by definition bourgeois plutocrats, devoid of political virtue and capacity, parvenu assimilationists, blind to the realities of their insecure pariah existence and unable to distin

guish friend from foe, and privileged Jews, who granted special rights and advantages to the few while denying them to the Jewish people as a whole, then collaboration

with the enemy and betrayal of their own people was the

inescapable fate of the Jewish leaders of the Nazi era.27

When the facts failed to conform to her typology, however, her

procedure ran aground, as indeed proved the case in the instance at hand. To take only one example: she refused to recognize the

fact that, prior to the war, Zionist organizations, by "collaborating" with the Nazis, often acted altruistically

- not merely out of self

interest as Arendt claimed - and consequently were able to save

countless Jewish lives. Arendt herself, moreover, had enthusiastical


ly worked for one such organization, Youth Aliyah, in Paris during the 1930s. Yet, she refused to view the Zionist movement in other than highly chauvinistic and non-humanitarian terms. The

rigidities of her negative typology allowed her virtually no other

options. Instead, as evidence of Zionist folly, she was fond of citing Herzlian maxims concerning "eternal anti-Semitism" or to the

effect that "the anti-Semites were doing the Zionists' work for

them," as though Zionist sympathizers unilaterally subscribed to Herzl's Weltanschauung point for point.28

The pariah, conversely, while refusing to abandon her Jewishness, fought a battle for Jewish acceptance on the basis of universalistic moral and legal grounds. Here her ideal type was the French socialist Bernard Lazare, whose thought she helped rescue from oblivion. Other examples of pariahdom she cited in her famous

essay on this theme were more problematic: Charlie Chaplin, who denied his Jewish ancestry; Heine, who had converted to Christian

ity; and Kafka, whose political consciousness - his considerable

literary merits notwithstanding - had remained fairly underdevel

oped. Though her pariah-concept was illuminating and well

intentioned, its serviceability for purposes of historical analysis was

dubious, especially when one considers the paucity of historical instances she was able to muster in its support.29

In the end, her parvenu/pariah contrast derived from the

lexicon of existential philosophy. The parvenu's endemic social

conformity - the desire to "fit in" and be like everyone else -

embodied the ethos of "inauthenticity" so prevalent among conditions of a modern mass society. Conversely, the pariah's refusal to play along and stubborn affirmation of his own marginal ity betokened an ethic of Heideggerian "authenticity." Arendt's already tenuous Zionist sympathies underwent a defini tive transformation in 1944 when the World Zionist Organization promulgated its Atlantic City Resolution calling for a "free and democratic Jewish commonwealth" to embrace the whole of Palestine. For Arendt, this declaration sounded the death-knell of Ichud hopes for a bilateral Arab-Jewish confederation. But it also meant that in her eyes the chauvinistic worldview of the Revision ists had undeniably triumphed over the more moderate elements in the Zionist camp. Strangely, although she had vigorously argued for the creation of a Jewish army during the early years of the war,

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she viewed as illusory the idea that Jewish freedom from persecu tion depended on the creation of a Jewish state. In "Zionism Reconsidered" (1944), an embittered and polemical essay, she went so far as to claim that Zionism all along had represented "the

mentality of enslaved peoples, the belief that it does not pay to

fight back, that one must dodge and escape in order to survive."30

Ironically, with the emergence of turn-of-the-century Zionism, the

Jewish people had at last become genuinely politicized. Yet, in Arendt's eyes, they had embraced a politics of the wrong kind. It was at this point in her life that Arendt abandoned her fifteen-year interest in Zionism. Instead of acknowledging the fact that there existed a number of competing tendencies within the Zionist

movement, and that the final struggle for its outcome and direction had yet to be fought, she appeared simply to turn her back in scorn. The battle, in her view, no longer seemed worth

fighting. The insights into Zionism from her wartime essays were

incorporated into the anti-Semitism chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism. From then on, she essentially abandoned her interest in Jewish affairs

- that is, until the Eichmann controversy, when her prior condescending and summary appraisals came back to haunt her with a vengeance.

Thus, it is striking to observe that for someone who had been

struggling against the grain of a thoroughly assimilationist

upbringing ("By virtue of my background I was simply naive," Arendt once confessed. "I found the so-called Jewish question

boring")31 to define a meaningful concept of a Jew's place in the

world, Jewish concerns were entirely absent from Arendt's next two

major books, The Human Condition and On Revolution. For the same

reason it is hardly surprising that, when faced with the prospect of

revising her Varnhagen study in the early 1950s, she spoke of the

book as being "alien to me in many ways."32 In 1951, she reestablished contact with her former lover and

teacher, Martin Heidegger. It was at this point that, having abandoned her interest in Jewish concerns, she rededicated herself to the ideals of German philosophy, which in the early 1930s she

had earlier bitterly renounced. "Among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak," she claimed, looking back at the onset

of the Hitler years. "And I never forgot that.... I left Germany dominated by the idea - of course somewhat exaggerated: Never


again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot."33 At the time, it was this profound sense of betrayal that caused her to reject the ideals of German philosophy

- or "intellectual business," as she put it -

and to become passionately interested in Zionism. But the reconciliation with Heidegger in the early 1950s seems

to have changed all that. Her next major work, The Human

Condition, was saturated with the scholarly-existential themes of her

youth. In fact, she had desperately wanted to dedicate the work to

Heidegger, insinuating as much in a touching poem composed in his honor.34 In an impassioned 1946 Partisan Review essay she had

vigorously denounced her former mentor as "the last (we hope) romantic ... whose complete irresponsibility [i.e. his Nazism] was

partly attributed to the delusion of genius." Nor was her opinion of his philosophy in the least bit flattering: "Heidegger's ontologi cal approach hides a rigid functionalism in which Man appears only as a conglomerate of modes of Being, which is in principle arbitrary, since no concept of Man determines Being."35 Yet, in

1960, when the German translation of The Human Condition

appeared, she sent the Freiburg sage a copy with a heartfelt note

claiming that "the book evolved directly from [our] first Marburg days and it owes you just about everything in every regard."36 By the time Heidegger's eightieth birthday rolled around (1969),

Arendt circled the wagons around her beleaguered mentor in

opposition to those (presumably Adorno - whose Jargon of Authen

ticity had appeared three years earlier - and other members of the

Frankfurt School) who had insinuated an integral connection between Heidegger's Nazism and his philosophy. Now she claimed that Nazism was a "gutter-born phenomenon," which consequently could have nothing whatsoever to do with the pieties of German

thought.37

IV

The idiosyncrasies of Arendt's relationship to Judaism would remain a matter of limited biographical interest were she not one of the leading twentieth-century interpreters of totalitarianism and the Holocaust. However, her controversial "banality of evil" thesis, as articulated in the Eichmann book, has become the cornerstone

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of the so-called "functionalist" interpretation of Auschwitz. As

such, the historiographical and political stakes involved in

reassessing her intellectual legacy are immense.

According to the functionalist approach, the Holocaust was

primarily a function of "modern society." In his analysis of

revolutionary France, Tocqueville had already shown how the democratic leveling characteristic of modern society was conducive to despotism. It produced an uneven balance between atomized

individuals, who had been suddenly deprived of their former social niches or estates, and the centralized power of the democratic leader. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt would build on

Tocqueville's approach to explain the system of organized terror - and the concomitant inability of disaggregated masses to resist - that was one of the predominant features of totalitarian society. Above all, however, the functionalist approach emphasizes the

role of modern bureaucracy in producing a qualitatively new,

impersonal form of mass death. According to this perspective, the

"machinery of destruction" (Hilberg's term) ultimately began to

take on a life of its own. Because the bureaucratic perpetrators acted at a remove from the actual killing sites, they were impervi ous to the horror of their deeds. From Arendt's perspective, the Nazis had committed "crimes without conscience." The nature of

the killing process, which was organized according to modern

principles of bureaucratic specialization and the division of labor, meant that the executioners possessed little awareness that they had actually done anything wrong. As Arendt explains:

Just as there is no political solution within human capacity for the crime of administrative mass murder, so the

human need for justice can find no satisfactory reply to

the total mobilization of a people for that purpose. Where

all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged. For that guilt is not accompanied by even the mere

appearance, the mere pretense of responsibility. So long as punishment is the right of the criminal - and this

paradigm has for more than two thousand years been the

basis of the sense of justice and right of Occidental man -

guilt implies the consciousness of guilt, and punishment evidence that the criminal is a responsible person.38


According to Arendt, the Nazi executioners displayed neither "consciousness of guilt" nor a sense of personal responsibility for the crimes that had been committed. She described the Nazi henchmen as "co-responsible irresponsibles" insofar as they were

simple cogs in a "vast machine of administrative mass murder." The uniqueness of the Holocaust was to be found in the creation of a new, peculiarly modern type of mass murderer: the Schreibtisch tater or desk murderer.

In Arendt's view, the crimes that had been committed at Auschwitz said nothing about German history or the German national character. "In trying to understand what were the real motives which caused people to act as cogs in the mass-murder

machine, we shall not be aided by speculations about German

history or so-called German national character," she remarked.39

"The mob man, the end-result of the 'bourgeois,' is an internation

al phenomenon; and we would do well not to submit him to too

many temptations in the blind faith that only the German mob man is capable of such frightful deeds."40 To punish the Germans

collectively as a people therefore, as some were inclined to do, would be misguided and senseless. Instead of being viewed as a

specifically German crime, the Nazis' misdeeds needed to be understood as a manifestation of political modernity; as such, they were of universal significance and could have happened virtually anywhere. In fact one of their distinguishing features was that they had been perpetrated neither by fanatics nor sadists, but by normal "bourgeois." Once again Arendt implicitly invoked the

Heideggerian category of "inauthenticity" to account for the

perpetrators' mediocrity-cum-bureaucratic conformism. In truth, she argued, the malefactors were merely the typical representatives of modern mass society. They were neither Bohemians nor

adventurers, nor heroes. Instead, among them predominated normal family men in search of job security and career advance ment. As Arendt affirms in "Organized Guilt and Universal

Responsibility," the average SS member is:

... a "bourgeois" with all the outer aspect of respectability, all the habits of a good paterfamilias who does not betray his wife and anxiously seeks to secure a decent future for his children; and he has consciously built up his newest

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terror organization ... on the assumption that most

people are not Bohemians nor fanatics, nor adventurers, nor sex

maniacs, nor sadists, but, first and foremost jobholders, and good family-men.... Himmler's over-all organization relies not on fanatics, nor on

congenital murderers, nor

on sadists; it relies entirely upon the normality of jobhold ers and family-men.41

"Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility" dates from 1945. But as one can clearly see, all of the elements of Arendt's contro versial "banality of evil" thesis are already present. In its original article form - minus the slogan itself - the thesis garnered little attention. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was still inclined to refer to Nazism as a form of "radical evil," despite its bureaucratic-administrative underpinnings. When the thesis was

articulated in the context of her report on the Eichmann trial, however (first published in a mass-circulation magazine, the New

Yorker, no less) - an event which became the occasion for a major

international reassessment of the criminal essence of the Nazi

regime as a whole

- the implications of Arendt's controversial

interpretation gave rise to widespread shock and dismay. How bad would things eventually become? When a French translation of Arendt's book appeared several years after the initial controversy, a leading Parisian weekly entitled a cover story on it: "Hannah Arendt: est-elle Nazie?"42

V

To be sure, there is a lot one can learn about the Holocaust by

focusing on the bureaucratic dimensions of the killing process.

Though, of course, Holocaust scholars would be quick to point out

that the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (the so-called mobilized

killing units), who, according to the Nuremberg International

Military Tribunal, were responsible for the deaths of nearly two

million Jews, were anything but bureaucratic.

However, the functionalist thesis itself, as articulated by Arendt

and others, tells only part of the story. What it fails to come to

grips with is the specificity of this particular genocide, that is, the fact

that it exclusively and explicitly targeted European Jews. Although


other groups such as Romanies and gays had also been singled out for persecution and even mass annihilation, there could be no doubt about the absolute centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi worldview. Inevitably, by relying on a generalizing explanation for the Nazi crimes, by seeking to attribute responsibility to the

leveling forces of modern mass society, such an approach loses touch with the particularity of the phenomenon it seeks to explain. Thus, according to the functionalist approach, the Holocaust could have happened anywhere; but the fact remains that it did not happen anywhere. It was not only the result of a brutal and

impersonal "machinery of destruction.,, It was also the product of the peculiarities of German (and European) history. The main weakness of the functionalist approach is that it tends

to underplay or discount one of the most salient features of Nazi rule: the prominence of ideology; more specifically, the ideology of anti-Semitism. For it would be difficult to imagine a regime more bent on total ideological control than was Nazism during its

twelve-year reign. The horrors of Auschwitz are not explicable in

strictly functionalist terms. Not all societies characterized by the

predominance of formal or instrumental reason are predisposed toward systematic mass murder. Such predispositions often have

more to do with the cultural-normative deficits of the nation in

question than they do with its modernity. The distinctive feature of Auschwitz was not its bureaucratic character. Instead, it was the fact that modern bureaucratic methods were placed in the service of a totalizing and fanatical racist ideology: the ideology of anti Semitism. Arendt ruled out such considerations by her idiosyncrat ic focus on the bourgeois paterfamilias, which, some eighteen years later, she would restyle into the banality of evil thesis. Of course, this focus was perfectly consistent with the "phenomenological essence" of Nazism she had painstakingly constructed. Whether it did justice to the ultimate motivations of those who master-minded and carried out the killings is another question. Ultimately, Arendt's methodological decision to concentrate

exclusively on the bureaucratic aspects of Nazism, not to mention her astounding (though hardly unique) claim that the crimes that had been committed at Auschwitz said nothing about "German

history or so-called German national character," itself needs

explaining. Although in her response to Scholem concerning the

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Eichmann book, she denied having hailed from the milieu of the German left, she was not being entirely honest. It was clear that the influence of her husband Heinrich Blucher - an ex-commu

nist, autodidact, and non-Jew - on her thinking about totalitarian

ism and the course of European history was enormous, perhaps to

such an extent that Arendt herself could barely recognize it.43 In

fact, a December 1963 letter from Jaspers indicates that the

banality of evil thesis was originally Blucher's idea. There Jaspers remarks that, "Heinrich suggested the phrase *the banality of evil' and is cursing himself for it now because you've had to take the

heat for what he thought of."44 An emphasis on the so-called "structural" aspects of Nazism has always been a distinguishing feature of left-wing analysis of fascism, from Franz Neumann to

Raul Hilberg to Hans Mommsen. Conversely, the telltale blind spot of this approach has been "soft" ideological factors (e.g., racism) which pertain to the "superstructure" instead of the social "base."

But there is perhaps another biographical reason why Arendt

opted for a functionalist approach. By emphasizing the "universal"

constituents of the Final Solution at the expense of their specifical ly German qualities, she also managed to avoid implicating her

country of origin - and thereby, in an act of narcissistic self

protection, herself. Perhaps, therefore, at an unconscious level, it

would have been too troubling to admit that Auschwitz was in some meaningful sense a German invention; for such an avowal

would have implicated all of her earliest cultural and intellectual attachments and beliefs as a highly assimilated German Jew, not to

mention networks of friends, professors (above all, Heidegger), and so forth. In her excellent study of Arendt's political philoso

phy, Margaret Canovan has identified this aspect of Arendt's

interpretation of the Holocaust quite well when she observes: "By

understanding Nazism in terms not of its specifically German

context but of modern developments linked to Stalinism as well, Arendt was putting herself in the ranks of the many intellectuals

of German culture who sought to connect Nazism with Western

modernity, thereby deflecting blame from specifically German

traditions."45 As Steven Aschheim points out in the same regard: "Arendt appears almost as a philosophical counterpart to the

analyses of the more staid conservative German historians such as

Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke who argued that the rise


of Nazism had less to do with internal, 'organic' German develop ment than with the importation of essentially alien and corrupting modern mass practices and ideologies."46

Thus at the time of the Eichmann trial, Arendt, following Jaspers' lead, preferred that the accused be tried before an international court rather than by the Israelis, since she believed - once again in a generalizing mode - that Eichmann had committed crimes

against humankind and only secondarily crimes against Jews. Yet, one of the problems of the original Nuremberg trials was that nowhere in the indictment was the particularity of the Holocaust as a 'Judeocide" recognized.47 Instead, this specificity was lost amid the general charge of "crimes against humanity."48 Arendt's supporters have long sought to make her banality of evil thesis plausible by pointing out that, though Eichmann himself

may have been banal, the evil he was responsible for certainly was not. The problem is that such helpful corrections remain at odds with the dominant tenor of Arendt's narrative. Moreover, by choosing "A Report on the Banality of Evil" as the subtitle of her

book, she herself had opened the floodgates to misunderstanding. Arendt certainly did not consider the Nazis' crimes to be banal. But by relying on a generalizing narrative emphasizing the

centrality of unemotional Schreibtischtdter, she confused the issue.

Though she insisted time and again that Eichmann was not a

monster, that he was "terribly and terrifyingly normal," one always suspected she had been hoodwinked by his unassuming courtroom demeanor. In fact, while rewriting her story from the New Yorker version to the book version, she came across some fairly damning countervailing evidence: prosecutor Gideon Hausner's revelation

that Israeli psychiatrists had found Eichmann to be "a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill," "a pervert ed, sadistic personality."49 But she decided these claims were of

negligible significance and her thesis remained unaltered.

Ultimately, if one is to historicize Arendt's axiom concerning the

banality of evil, one must realize that she chose a narrative framework for the Holocaust that was consistent with her own

profound cultural-biographical ambivalences as an assimilated German Jew. Thus, one of the salient traits of her various attempts to come to grips with the Jewish catastrophe

- from The Origins of Totalitarianism to Eichmann in Jerusalem

- is a studied aversion to

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attributing specifically German responsibility to the events in

question. It was as though Arendt had looked everywhere else than the place that was most immediate and obvious: those "deforma tions" of German historical development that facilitated both

Hitler's rise to power as well as the acceptance of his rule by broad strata of the German people. In her mind, conversely, all other

hypotheses were welcome and worth exploring: Jewish political immaturity, the excrescences of "modernity," the rise of "mass

man," bureaucracy, "thoughtlessness," and so forth. That the Final Solution to the Jewish question was conceived, planned and executed by her countrymen was a thought that remained

psychologically insupportable to her; hence, nowhere was it given any weight in her reflections and analyses. In the end, as Dan Diner has remarked, "her line of argument seems to have more in common with the self-exonerating perspective of the perpetrators, than with the anguish of the victims."50


Notes

1 I experienced a telling confirmation of such fanatical devotion to both

her thought and person when I published a retrospective evaluation of

her work in the New Republic. Taking some recent revelations concern

ing her long-standing emotional ties to her former mentor and

paramour Martin Heidegger as my point of departure, I attempted to

disentangle the various threads of Arendt's relationship to Jewish concerns. Of less importance to me were the specific material

objections to my account than the emotional pitch of the ensuing denunciations. It was as though I had breached or violated a sacred

portal. See my article, "An Affair to Remember: Hannah and the

Magician," New Republic, 9 Oct. 1995, 27-37. See also Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger (New Haven, 1995). Reservations

concerning Ettinger's interpretations of Arendt's correspondence with

Heidegger have been expressed by Ursula Ludz in "The Arendt

Heidegger Correspondence: A Preliminary Report," delivered at the

conference "Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later: A German Jewess in

the Age of Totalitarianism," Harvard University, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, 22-23 Mar. 1996.

2 Hannah Arendt: Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn

(New York, 1994), 6. 3 Karl Lowith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933, trans. Elizabeth

King (Champaign, IL, 1994), 12. 4 See for example Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight:

The Eichmann Trial, the fewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt *s Narrative

(New York, 1965); and F. A. Krummacher, ed., Die Kontroverse: Hannah

Arendt, Eichmann und die fuden (Munich, 1964). 5 Arendt's so-called German Jewish ambivalences have been confirmed

to me recently by a number of persons who knew her well during the

last couple of decades of her life.

6 A charge made by Marie Syrkin in "Miss Arendt Surveys the Holo caust," fewish Frontier 30 (May 1963): 8.

7 Letter to Gershom Scholem, 24 July 1963, in "'Eichmann in Jerusalem': An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah

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Arendt," in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics

in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York, 1978), 246-47.

8 Walter Laqueur, "Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem," in Lyman Letgers, ed.,

Western Society after the Holocaust (Boulder, CO, 1987), 119. 9 Ibid., 110.

10 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

(New York, 1964), 125, 110. 11 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1985),

3:1030-44.

12 Yehuda Bauer, History of the Holocaust (New York, 1982), 166-67. 13 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi

Occupation (New York and London, 1972). 14 '"Eichmann in Jerusalem': An Exchange of Letters between Gershom

Scholem and Hannah Arendt," 243.

15 Michael Marrus, "A History of the Holocaust: A Survey of Recent

Literature, "Journal of Modern History 59 (Mar. 1987): 149.

16 For the English translation, see "Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann

Trial," in Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German

History, trans. Philip O'Connor (Cambridge, 1991), 271. Mommsen

notes that the Eichmann book "contains many statements which are

obviously not sufficiently thought through. Some of its conclusions

betray an inadequate knowledge of the material available in the early 1960s" (p. 255).

17 For the remark about Eichmann as a "convert to Judaism," see

Eichmann in ferusalem, 40. The reference to Baeck qua "Jewish Fuhrer"

was omitted from the second edition of the book. It is quoted in

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New

Haven, 1982), 363.

18 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 58.

19 Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler

and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1992), 586.

20 Laqueur, "Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem," 109. Laqueur's views are

echoed by Mommsen: "She remained a child of German existential

philosophy and its markedly elitist and apolitical outlook." "Hannah

Arendt and the Eichmann Trial," 275.

21 For an indication of how she planned to approach this subject, see her

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, 1982).

22 Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6, no. 1 (Winter

1959): 46. 23 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), 108. 24 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), 8.

25 Hannah Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered," in The Jew as Pariah, 130.


26 Ibid., 133-34.

27 Sharon Muller, "The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt's

Interpretation of Jewish History, "Jewish Social Studies 43 (1981): 249-50. 28 See, for example, Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered," 141ff.

29 Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition," in The Jew as Pariah, 67-90.

30 Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered," 150.

31 Letter of 7 Sept. 1952 in Hannah Arendt-KarlJaspers Correspondence, 197.

32 Ibid. 33 Essays in Understanding, 11.

34 The poem read as follows:

The dedication of this book is left out.

How could I dedicate it to you, my trusted friend, to whom I remained faithful

and unfaithful,

And both in love.

35 Hannah Arendt, "What Is Existenz Philosophy?" Partisan Review 18, no.

1 (Winter 1946): 46, 48. 36 Cited in Ettinger, Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger, 114.

37 See Hannah Arendt, "Heidegger at Eighty," in Michael Murray, ed.,

Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, 1978), 293-303. 38 Hannah Arendt, "Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility," in The

Jew as Pariah, 230.

39 Ibid., 231. 40 Ibid., 234.

41 Ibid., 232.

42 The publication in question was Le Nouvel Observateur, cited in Young Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 398.

43 As Dan Diner has remarked: "Blucher's inspiration and influence on

Hannah Arendt is still a subject for research.... Especially in the last

and third part of Origins, the discursive structure of an ex-communist

narrative makes itself conspicuous." "Hannah Arendt Reconsidered"

(unpublished manuscript), 11. In a 1963 letter to Jaspers, Arendt

remarks that Blucher's "opinion of the Jewish people is not always what

one might wish." Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 511.

44 Ibid., 542.

45 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political

Thought (London, 1992), 20. 46 Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish

Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (Basingstoke,

Hampshire, 1996), 111-12.

47 The controversial term 'Judeocide" was introduced into the discourse

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of Holocaust studies by Arno J. Mayer in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York, 1988).

48 A similar dilemma has been noted by Alain Finkielkraut in the case of the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie. See his Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity (New York, 1992).

49 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 22-23.

50 Diner, "Hannah Arendt Reconsidered," 8.

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