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Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

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Hannah Arendt's reputation in Israel (according to this book) has suffered the consequences of her controversial views, but these are now becoming more openly discussed, witness the conference on her thought at the source of this book. This set of essays is a highly useful (and balanced) treatment of the 'banality of evil' controversy, and much else, including Arendt's prophetic cassandra warnings about what was to come in the hopeless muddle of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

There are many themes raised in this book, and I will mention only a few of them. Richard I. Cohen (p. 253) states that no single study of the Holocaust has attracted the same attention as Arendt's work on the Eichmann trial.

Walter Laqueur (p. 50) speaks of Jaspar's work as insisting on German guilt (p. 50). But shouldn't it be characterized as collective German liability rather than collective German guilt? (See the Peczkis review at The Question of German Guilt (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, No. 16)).

Michael Halberstam compares totalitarian systems: "Historians agree that the average ethnic German was not terrorized by the constant threat of deportation and death, as was even the most powerful Russian party member during Stalin's rule in the mid 1930's. Such doubts about the actual levels of threat experienced by the ethnic German population under National Socialism raise suspicions that the terror thesis--and with it, the comparative concept of totalitarianism--constitutes an apologetic for crimes committed under the Nazi regime. The terror thesis, it is argued, falsely presents the German population as passive sufferers, rather than willing participants in the murderous political cult of German nationalist supremacy." (p. 106)

What about the French? Yaacov Lozowick writes: "Their central thesis, now accepted by all mainstream historians, is that the Vichy government acted against its Jews of its own volition." (p. 388)

Without doubt, the most volatile content of Arendt's classic was her candid discussion of Jew-against-Jew collaboration during the Holocaust. Lilian Weissberg comments: "EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM was criticized by many Jewish organizations as an indictment of Jews because Arendt did not understand them as innocent victims only." (p. 154). Susan Neiman (p. 65) notes that some saw this as a confusion of who was on trial: Eichmann or the Judenrate. The editor, Steven E. Aschheim, takes this further: "Indeed, in her treatment of the Judenrate, her apparent blurring of the almost sacrosanct distinction between perpetrators and victims seemed to violate fundamental sensibilities...Moreover, very early on, Arendt warned that the uniqueness of the atrocities could create a self-righteous cult of victimization, one that indeed has occurred. (Witness the absurd current competition in comparative victimization as a tool of identity politics.) (p. 14)

Finally, Hans Mommsen puts Arendt's work in a broader context. Arendt recognized the fact that the Nazi extermination of the Jews was also expanding into the extermination of Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) and Slavs (p. 230)

HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM has 21 chapters, plus a preface and introduction, which provide papers from a conference held in Jerusalem between December 9 and December 11, 1997, 22 years after her death. Notes on the papers on pages 347-420 contain information which has not been included in the index on pages 425-428. Scholars have multiple points of view on how well she managed to tune in to the issues which made the twentieth century so exciting. I appreciate Arendt for her ability to derive lessons from Nietzsche that exceed my own powers of observation, but the middle of this book has 180 pages between mentions of Nietzsche, though these pages contain a chapter on The Intellectual Background by Hans Mommsen (an expert on German history and literature) called "Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence" (pp. 224-231). She was prone to emphasize what she had already written in THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM when she went to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial, a politically inept location for observing that "the Nazi machinery of destruction successfully turned the criminal activities involved into routine procedures that suffocated any moral protest, either from bystanders or from those who were induced to become perpetrators," (p. 231). Hans Mommsen was afraid that this context "inevitably created the erroneous impression that she intended to express contempt for the court itself." (p. 230).

Other contributors to this book who spent countless hours reading the books of letter to and from Hannah Arendt have no difficulty documenting that, as Walter Laqueur admitted, "The animosity toward Jews as a group was of long standing, and it was by no means restricted to Israel and the Israelis. . . . Perhaps she had read too much anti-Semitic literature for her own good." (p. 58). Walter Laqueur's comments on Hannah Arendt as political commentator and "the greatest female philosopher of our time, perhaps of all times, which she might well be" (p. 49) find "a fascinating discrepancy between Arendt the political philosopher and the poverty of her judgment concerning current politics." (p. 50). Comparing Arendt to Raymond Aron, "As a political thinker, he was at least her equal, and his political judgment was infinitely better than hers. He was usually right, and she was often wrong. The list of alleged fools in Hannah Arendt's letters is truly enormous." (p. 62). A review by Raymond Aron in 1954 picked the element of her work that has become so dominant, "without being aware of it, Mrs. Arendt affects a tone of haughty superiority regarding things and men." (p. 61).

The final four chapters of HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM examine her relationship with the philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. The chapter by Anson Rabinbach is mainly about a book by Jaspers in 1946 which appeared in English as THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT. Germans did not embrace the idea. Arendt's husband complained, "despite all beauty and nobility, the guilt brochure of Jaspers is a damned and Hegelized, Christian-pietist-sanctimonious nationalizing bilge." (p. 300).

Peter Baehr considers Arendt, Jaspers, and the appraisal of Max Weber primarily in the context of a letter on January 1, 1933, in which Arendt wrote:

"But I am obligated to keep my distance, I can neither be for nor against when I read Max Weber's wonderful sentence where he says that to put Germany back on her feet he would form an alliance with the devil himself." (p. 308).

Finding some theological applications, Arendt wrote a moral evaluation:

". . . it is not so certain that those who have lost their belief in Hell as a place of the hereafter may not be willing to be able to establish on earth exact imitations of what people used to believe about Hell." (p. 319).

As Peter Baehr concludes, something strange about the mixture of issues involved in communication is complex:

"That some of the most profound forms of expression and dialogue do not conform to norms of transparency, `sincerity,' and consistency may offend some philosophers. But it may also add weight to Arendt's suspicion that philosophy and human experience are constantly at war." (p. 324).

Steven Aschheim, in the Introduction, quotes a letter Arendt wrote to Jaspers on April 13, 1961, in which she complained about Jerusalem:

"Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would follow any order." (p. 7).

The contribution by Susan Neiman, called "Theodicy in Jerusalem" (pp. 65-90), coincides quite closely with an entry in the index for Immanuel Kant, 68-84, and illustrates Arendt's mix of ideas quite vividly:

"In other words, you don't have to be a student of Heidegger to be ambivalent about philosophy. Arendt's strongest expression of revulsion toward the subject occurs in discussing the intellectual embrace of Nazism: Precisely the capacity to use well-trained wit to provide interesting rationalizations of Nazism made philosophy permanently suspect. But in just the discussion in which, for these reasons, she most vehemently rejects her interviewer's inclination to call her a philosopher, Arendt undercuts her own position. Defending her claim to have bid farewell to philosophy, she appeals to what she calls philosophy's essential hostility to the political--from which she immediately excepts Kant (Gaus, V, 45). Later she would generalize to describe Kant as `so singularly free of all specifically philosophical vices' (T, 83). Be that as it may, this is fairly respectable company to keep for one who insists she has said farewell to philosophy." (p. 73).

Heidegger is such a giant in philosophy that Arendt is able to see his escape from concrete politics into a more philosophical approach than the "interesting rationalizations of Nazism" in 1933 which have become such a large part of Heidegger's reputation. See the quote of her 1953 "Heidegger the Fox" sketch on pages 344-345.

I was present at the Jerusalem Conference and heard a number of the papers included in the present volume. From what I heard no one really addressed Hannah Arendt's moral failing in showing such insensitivity and coldness to victims of the Shoah in her book 'The Banality of Evil'. They too did not see two other areas in which she despite being one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century failed her own conception of the ' dignity of man' One was in her reluctant and apologetic attitude toward her own Jewishness, and the second in her deference to the Nazi - sympathizing Heidegger. I would also say the whole celebratory tone of the conference as if the world had changed and now everyone understood that Arendt was after all right about the ' Banality of Evil' conference seemed to be wrongheaded and in itself slightly immoral.
An additional work on the Arendt failure in relation to her covering of the Eichmann trial.
Hannah Arendt is without question one of the premier political philosophers of the twentieth century. However in her account of the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem she failed miserably. She failed as a reporter, and even more importantly she failed in moral judgment. She painted a misleading portrait of Eichmann as banal clerk, pathetic ineffectual nothing. But in fact he was an embodiment of human evil. Deborah Lipstadt's recent retelling of the Eichmann trial, and the new evidence relating to what Eichmann actually thought and said at the trial show that he was a calculating deceptive monster whose intention was total extermination of the Jewish people. At the trial he was out to save his life, and so worked to present a false picture of himself.
Arendt failed in another area of her study. She in her high- culture arrogance and contempuous attitude toward the leaders of the Jewish councils in Europe- all of whom had completely impossible tasks- i.e. trying to save some portion of the people while dealing with those determined to exterminate them all- showed her own failure in human sympathy.
It is painful and ironic that Arendt who so stressed in her writing the faculty of moral judgment showed such a complete absence of moral judgment in writing this work. This work is of a piece with another shameful side of her history. i.e Her pivotal role in rehabilataing the image of her mentor and former lover Heidegger who both identified and acted as a Nazi in the German university world. These two failures of moral judgment put a tremendous stain on her reputation.
One more point about her contempt. She showed great contempt for Israel's first Prime Minister and great founding- father Ben - Gurion. She claimed he was making it a 'show- trial'. But before this 'show- trial' the Western world was largely indifferent to the horror of the Shoah. One accomplishment of this trial did was to make humanity more aware of its own capacity for Evil and Destruction.