by Tony Judt
This essay first appeared in the New Republic in 1996 as a discussion of the recently republished, three-volume autobiography of Manès Sperber.
CHAPTER IV
Hannah Arendt and Evil
Hannah Arendt died in 1975, leaving a curious and divided legacy. To some she represented the worst of “Continental” Hphilosophizing: metaphysical musings upon modernity and its ills unconstrained by any institutional or intellectual discipline and often cavalierly unconcerned with empirical confirmation. They note her weakness for a phrase or an aperçu, often at the expense of accuracy. For such critics her insights into the woes of the century are at best derivative, at worst plain wrong. Others, including the many young American scholars who continue to study and discuss her work, find her a stimulating intellectual presence; her refusal to acknowledge academic norms and conventional categories of explanation, which so frustrates and irritates her critics, is precisely what most appeals to her admirers. Twenty years after her death they see her desire for a “new politics” of collective public action vindicated by the revolutions of 1989, and her account of modern society in general and totalitarianism in particular confirmed by the course of contemporary history. Both sides have a point, though it is sometimes difficult to remember that they are talking about the same person.
In fact, and despite the broad range of topics covered in her writings, Hannah Arendt was throughout her adult life concerned above all with two closely related issues: the problem of political evil in the twentieth century and the dilemma of the Jew in the contemporary world. If we add to this the special difficulty she experienced in acknowledging the distinctive place of Germany in the story she tried to tell—a difficulty of which she was not, it seems to me, always fully aware—we have grasped the central threads of all her writings, even those that seem at first reading most abstracted from such concerns. It does not follow from this that Arendt’s various works can be reread in this light as a single, continuous, coherent theoretical undertaking—she is every bit as diffuse and muddled as her critics claim; but if we understand her main historical concerns against the background of her own obsessions, it becomes a little easier to see just what holds together the various parts of her oeuvre and why they provoke such diverse and powerful responses.
The central place in all of Arendt’s thinking of the problem of totalitarianism seems obvious.1 In a 1954 piece, “Understanding and Politics,” reprinted in Jerome Kohn’s useful and very well-edited collection of her early essays,4 she stakes out her territory without ambiguity: “If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.” As she would later express it in her “Thoughts about Lessing,” the “pillars of the best-known truths” lie shattered today, and the first task of the survivors is to ask how this happened and what can be done.2 That her own attempt to make sense of the age would not endear her to everyone was something she anticipated as early as 1946, well before the appearance of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Those few students,” she wrote in “The Nation,” “. . . who have left the field of surface descriptions behind them, who are no longer interested in any particular aspect nor in any particular new discovery because they know that the whole is at stake, are forced into the adventure of structural analyses and can hardly be expected to come forward with perfect books.”
Origins is, indeed, not a perfect book. Nor is it particularly original. The sections on imperialism lean heavily on the classic work Imperialism, by J. L. Hobson, published in 1905, and on Rosa Luxemburg’s Marxist account in The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Luxemburg’s version was particularly appealing to Arendt because of its emphasis on the self-perpetuating (and self-defeating) nature of capitalist expansion, a characteristic which Arendt then transposed onto totalitarianism; but she also found the general Marxist approach congenial, less for its broader historical claims, which she dismissed and indeed associated with the totalitarian phenomenon itself, than for Marxism’s attack on bourgeois philistinism and its adulation of the proletariat. She felt some affinity with both of these prejudices. She borrowed widely, and with rather less acknowledgment, from the works of Franz Neumann and Franz Borkenau, exiles like herself who had in large measure anticipated her account of the Nazi and Soviet states. Her debt to Boris Souvarine, a disillusioned French Trotskyist who published in 1935 a brilliant and prescient study of Stalin, is, however, openly and generously recognized, though her enduring nostalgia for a certain lost innocence of the Left prevented her from endorsing Souvarine’s root-and-branch inclusion of Lenin in his condemnation of the Soviet enterprise.3
The lasting importance of Arendt’s major work thus rests not upon the originality of its contribution but on the quality of its central intuition. What Arendt understood best, and what binds together her account of Nazism and her otherwise unconnected and underdeveloped discussion of the Soviet experience, were the psychological and moral features of what she called totalitarianism.
By breaking up and taking over all of society, including the whole governing apparatus itself, totalitarian regimes dominate and terrorize individuals from within. The arbitrary and apparently irrational, antiutilitarian nature of life under such regimes destroys the texture of shared experience, of reality, upon which normal life depends and disarms all attempts by reasonable men to understand and explain the course of events. Hence the tragic failure of outsiders to perceive the danger posed by totalitarian movements, and the lasting inability of commentators to grasp the enormity of the events they were witnessing. Instead of admitting what Arendt called the “utter lunacy” of Stalinism or Nazism, scholarly and other analysts looked for some firm ground of “interest” or “rationality” from which to reinsert these developments into the familiar political and moral landscape.4
In the case of Nazism they thus missed the central place of genocide. Far from being just another exercise in mass violence, the plot to eliminate whole peoples and categories of people represented the ultimate in the control and dismantling of the human person and was thus not extraneous to the meaning of the regime but the very basis of it. Similarly, the Stalinist era was not a perversion of the logic of Historical Progress but its very acme—evidence of the infinite malleability of all experience and reality at the service of an idea.
It is not necessary to endorse this account in all its detail to understand that Arendt had it essentially right. At the time and for many years afterward she was assailed by historians, political scientists, and others for the excessively moral, even metaphysical quality of her approach, for her conflation of very different social experiences into a single story, and for her neglect of a variety of factors and (in the Soviet case) “achievements” that might moderate her interpretation. As Eric Hobsbawm remarked in a review of On Revolution, historians and others would be “irritated, as the author plainly is not, by a certain lack of interest in mere fact, a preference for metaphysical construct or poetic feeling . . . over reality.”5
Most of all, of course, many of her readers could not understand, much less endorse, the merging of German and Russian regimes into a single type. They quite correctly noted her annoying habit of attributing to totalitarian regimes, even to Hitler and Stalin themselves, a sort of ideological self-awareness, as though they themselves knew that they were engaged in making their own ideological predictions (about the Jewish “problem” or the inevitability of class conflict) come true; Arendt admitted as much many years later in a September 1963 letter to Mary McCarthy, where she concedes that “the impact of ideology upon the individual may have been overrated by me [in the Origins].”6
Since then, however, historians, essayists, and dissidents have done much to illustrate and confirm her account.7 Her emphasis upon the centrality of terror, which seemed disproportionate when she first proposed it, now sounds almost commonplace. As Arendt expressed it, terror executes on the spot the death sentence supposedly pronounced
by Nature upon races and persons, or else by History upon classes, thus speeding up “natural” or “historical” processes.8 Her criticism of the Jacobins, in On Revolution, for aiming at a Republic of Virtue and installing instead a reign of terror, offended many at the time for its cavalier unconcern with the classic accounts and interpretations of the French Revolution, Marxist and liberal alike. It now sounds like a benign anticipation of the historical consensus espoused by François Furet and other scholars, notably in their appreciation of terror not as an extraneous political device but as the primary motor and logic of modern tyranny.
If Hannah Arendt understood something that so many others missed, it was because she was more concerned with the moral problem of “evil” than with the structures of any given political system; as she put it in “Nightmare and Flight,” first published in 1945 and reprinted in the Essays, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental question after the last war.”
It is telling to discover from Kohn’s collection that she was an avid and careful reader of some of the great antimodern Catholic writers—in a 1945 essay on “Christianity and Revolution” she discusses not only Charles Péguy and Georges Bernanos but also, and less predictably, G. K. Chesterton. In our post-Christian world, discussion of evil has a curious, anachronistic feel, rather like invoking the devil; even when modern students of murderous regimes acknowledge the value of describing them as evil, they have been reluctant to invoke the term in any explanatory capacity. But Arendt suffered no such inhibitions, which is why, long before her controversial essay on Eichmann, she engaged the matter of evil head-on. It was not sufficient, she wrote in a 1953 response to Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Origins, to treat the totalitarian criminals as “murderers” and punish them accordingly. In a world where murder had been accorded the status of a civic duty, the usual moral (and legal) categories will not suffice.9 The following year she developed the point further in “Understanding and Politics”: “The trouble with the wisdom of the past is that it dies, so to speak, in our hands as soon as we try to apply it honestly to the central political experiences of our time. Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality which no far-fetched historical parallels can alleviate.”
This observation isn’t very helpful for lawyers (Arendt was trying to account for what she saw as the failure of the Nuremberg Trials), but it does account for her resort to the notion of “banality” when she came to address the problem of Eichmann. Her earlier inclination had been to describe the evil quality of totalitarianism as something utterly “radical”; but Karl Jaspers and others had noted the risk entailed here of making Nazism in particular seem somehow unique and thus, in an awful way, “great.” As she thought about the matter more, she developed a rather different line of reasoning: In various essays and later in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind she argues that evil comes from a simple failure to think.
If this implies that evil is a function of stupidity, then Arendt is merely indulging a tautology of her own making. Moreover, since she nowhere suggests that goodness is a product (or description) of intelligence, she probably did not mean to be taken too seriously. After all, as Mary McCarthy pointed out in a letter of June 1971, if, e.g., Eichmann truly “cannot think” then he is just a monster. But if he has a “wicked heart” then he is exercising some freedom of choice and is thus open to moral condemnation in the usual way. Here, as elsewhere, we do well not to make of Arendt too consistent a thinker.
However, as an account of a certain sort of evil person Arendt’s idea was suggestive. In a 1945 essay, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” she quotes an interview with a camp official at Majdanek. The man admits to having gassed and buried people alive. Then: Q. “Do you know the Russians will hang you?” A. “(Bursting into tears) Why should they? What have I done?”10 As she commented, such people were just ordinary job-holders and good family men. Their deeds may be monstrous, evidence in Arendt’s words of “the bankruptcy of common sense,” but the officials themselves are quite simply stupid, ordinary, everyday persons—in short, banal. There is something frustratingly, terrifyingly plausible about this observation.11 It rings true not just for Eichmann, but for other more recently prominent characters as well— Klaus Barbie or Paul Touvier—and thus suggests something important about the totalitarian state and its servants.
When Arendt came under attack for proposing this characterization it was in part because she did so too soon, as it were, but also because she attached it to a series of provocative and controversial remarks on the other subject that obsessed her, Jews. In order to understand the complexitiesof Arendt’s relationship to her own, and other people’s, Jewishness, it is crucial to remember that she was, after all, a German Jew. Like the German-speaking Jews of Prague, Vienna, and other cities of the old Empire, the Jews of Germany were different from the Jews of the East, and they knew it and felt it.
They were educated and cultivated in German, steeped in German Bildung, and quite lacked the difficult and frequently distant relationship to the dominant language and culture that shaped Jewish experience in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in East-Central Europe. They certainly knew that they were Jews and that their non-Jewish German neighbors and fellow citizens knew they were Jewish; but this did not diminish their identification with the idea of Germanness. In the words of Moritz Goldstein, writing in 1912 and quoted with approval by Arendt in her essay on Walter Benjamin, “our relationship to Germany is one of unrequited love.”12 As she wrote of Rahel Varnhagen, the subject of one of her first books, “Abroad, her place of origin was called Berlin; in Berlin it was called Judengasse.”13
This deep sense of her own Germanness is invoked by Margaret Canovan, among others, to account for the care Arendt took in her study of totalitarianism to divert attention away from the distinctively German sources of Nazism and make of it a general “Western” or “modern” deviation. This seems likely; Arendt never really confronted the fact that the worst persecutions, of Jews in particular, in the modern era took place in Germany. As late as 1964, while enjoying herself with some German interviewers, she admitted to Mary McCarthy that “in my youth, I used to be rather lucky with German goiim (never, incidentally, with German Jews) and I was amused to see that some of my luck still holds.”
She also had some of the characteristic German prejudices of her youth, notably with respect to the less fortunate peoples to the south and east; in a piece dating from 1944 she scornfully dismissed the European émigré press in the U.S., “worrying their heads off over the pettiest boundary disputes in a Europe thousands and thousands of miles away— such as whether Teschen belongs to Poland or Czechoslovakia, or Vilna to Lithuania instead of to Poland!” No “Ost-Jud” would have missed the significance of these disputes. Of the Ost-Juden themselves, Arendt wrote dismissively in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “These East European conditions, however, although they constituted the essence of the Jewish mass question, are of little importance in our context. Their political significance was limited to backward countries where the ubiquitous hatred of Jews made it almost useless as a weapon for specific purposes.”
This almost snobbish, High German quality also contributed to her troubled relations with American Jewry; as William Barrett put it, “one part of her never quite assimilated to America.” With her classical education and memories of youth in Königsberg and student days in Marburg and Heidelberg, she probably found many of the American Jews she met, intellectuals included, rather philistine if not positively autodidacts.14 They in turn could not grasp how one might be so assertively and proudly Jewish and yet (and above all) German at the same time. For she most certainly was Jewish. The titles of the closing chapters of Rahel Varnhagen give the clue: “Between Pariah and Parvenu” and “One Does Not Escape Jewishness.”
This unambiguous identity did not of course preclude a certain distance from Jewishness—far
from it; Arendt was always most critical of her own world and its tragic political myopia. In Rahel Varnhagen she notes that “the Berlin Jews considered themselves exceptions. And just as every anti-Semite knew his personal exceptional Jews in Berlin, so every Berlin Jew knew at least two eastern Jews in comparison with whom he felt himself to be an exception.”15 In her essay on Rosa Luxemburg, another exceptional Jewish woman with whom she felt a close affinity, she makes the same point in a different key: “While the self-deception of assimilated Jews consisted in the mistaken belief that they were just as German as the Germans, just as French as the French, the self-deception of the intellectual Jews consisted in thinking that they had no ‘fatherland, ’ for their fatherland actually was Europe.”16
Her critical distance from official Zionism was consistent with such attitudes. Hannah Arendt had become Zionist in Germany, had passed through a neo-Zionist phase in which she was drawn to binationalism in Palestine, and was never anti-Israel; as she wrote to Mary McCarthy in December 1968, “Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else.” But she was quite firmly antinationalist, Jewish or any other kind; hence the impossibility of her position for many American Jews, who could not readily imagine a strong secularJewish consciousness divorced from any sympathy for the “national solution.” Moreover her deeply held belief, as much aesthetic as political, in the need to separate the private from the public meant that she found something distasteful (and perhaps a little “oriental”?) in the confident political style and self-promotion of many of the leading figures in North American Jewry, including certain intellectuals of her own acquaintance.
It was this cultural abyss, as much as the substance of the work, that explains the otherwise absurd furor over Eichmann in Jerusalem. At thirty years’ distance the book seems much less controversial. Copious research on the Judenräte, the Jewish councils of Nazi-dominated Europe, suggests what should have been obvious at the time: Arendt knew little about the subject, and some of her remarks about Jewish “responsibility” were insensitive and excessive,17 but there is a troubling moral question mark hanging over the prominent Jews who took on the task of administering the ghettos. She was not wrong to raise the matter, nor was she mistaken in some of her judgments; but she was indifferent, perhaps callously so, to the dilemmas Jews faced at the time, and was characteristically provocative, even “perverse” (as the historian Henry Feingold put it) in insisting on the powers of the Jewish leaders and neglecting to call due attention to their utter helplessness and, in many cases, their real ignorance of the fate that awaited the Jews.
