Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political philosopher who escaped the Reich, lost a husband, a country and a language, and spent the rest of her life trying to understand what had happened. She is on this site as a survivor because she lived through it as a refugee, was interned in France, escaped on a forged visa in 1941, and reached New York in May of that year, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her work, including the report she filed for the New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, has shaped how the catastrophe is thought about in the English-speaking world.

Arendt had been a student of Heidegger and Jaspers in the 1920s. She fled Germany in 1933 after a brief arrest by the Gestapo for Zionist work. In Paris she worked for Youth Aliyah, helping move Jewish children to Palestine. She was interned at Gurs in southern France in May 1940 along with thousands of other German Jewish refugees. She walked out during the chaos of the French collapse in June, made her way to Marseille, and obtained a US visa with the help of Varian Fry’s emergency rescue committee. She, her husband Heinrich Blücher and her mother sailed from Lisbon in May 1941.

Her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was published in 1951. It argued that Nazism and Stalinism shared a common political form, totalitarianism, that was new and that emerged out of the breakdown of European nation-state politics, the rise of imperialist racial thinking and the rootlessness of large modern populations. The book was widely read and remains an unavoidable reference. Some of its specific historical claims, particularly about the relationship between antisemitism and imperialism, have been criticised. The conceptual structure has held up.

The book that made her reputation outside the academy was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963. Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for the New Yorker in 1961. The phrase the banality of evil, which she used to describe the figure of Eichmann as she observed him in the dock, became a slogan that has often been misunderstood. Arendt did not mean that the catastrophe was banal. She meant that the man in the dock was not a mythic monster but a clerkish careerist who had organised the deportation of millions while telling himself he was following orders. The argument was directed against the popular view that mass murder requires sadistic personality. Arendt’s argument was that it requires a system of meaningless conformity in which the killer thinks of himself as a competent administrator.

The book also contained passages on the role of the Judenrat, the Jewish councils imposed on the ghettos, that drew sharp criticism. Arendt argued that the councils’ cooperation with the Germans had increased the death toll. Her critics, including Gershom Scholem, argued that the councils had been faced with impossible choices and that her judgement was unfair. The argument has continued for sixty years. Arendt did not soften her position.

She taught at Berkeley, Princeton and the New School. She died in New York on 4 December 1975, at the age of sixty nine. Her work has been criticised, restated, attacked and defended continuously. The most recent biographical scholarship, in particular Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in German in 2011 and in English in 2014, has argued that Arendt was significantly wrong about Eichmann himself, that he was a more committed antisemite than the trial performance suggested, and that the banality of evil thesis as applied to him is therefore weaker than Arendt thought. The thesis as a description of the bureaucratic structure of the Reich has held up better.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards