Reappraisals (14 page)

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.

If the councils were in one sense the heirs to older self-governing bodies of existing Jewish communities and thus responsible for eliding the distinction between running Jewish life and administering Jewish death, they were also the chosen device of the Nazis for pursuing their own policies.
¹⁸
Here as elsewhere it was Nazi policy to make others do their work for them, and while it is almost certainly the case that utter noncooperation would have made things infinitely harder for the Germans, the same observation applies all the more forcibly to the relative compliance of locally appointed non-Jewish authorities in occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

Arendt made things worse for herself by inserting her controversial but brief comments on this subject into a text that not only introduced the notion of “banality”—such that Jews seemed to become “responsible,” Germans merely “banal”—but also criticized Israel for having staged a “show trial” and chosen to emphasize “crimes against the Jewish people” instead of “crimes against humanity.” The irony is that the Eichmann trial
was
a show trial—much as the more recent Barbie and Touvier trials in France were show trials, not in the sense of being rigged but in their primarily pedagogical function. The guilt of the accused in all these cases was never in question. Ben-Gurion was less interested in establishing Eichmann’s responsibility, or even in exacting revenge, than in educating a new generation about the past sufferings of the Jews, and thereby further strengthening the foundations of the still fragile Jewish state.

Arendt was thus raising fundamental questions about memory, myth, and justice in the postwar world. Her critics, like Lionel Abel and Norman Podhoretz, could score “debater’s points” as Mary McCarthy scornfully put it in a sympathetic letter, but they had not a clue about what she was trying to accomplish, and probably still don’t. Like so many others in the initial postwar decades, they were dependent on what Karl Jaspers called “life-sustaining lies,” though he too could not help chiding his former student for her naïveté in failing to notice “that the act of putting a book like this into the world is an act of aggression” against just such lies.
¹⁹
Today, with much of Europe taken up with issues of guilt, memory, past responsibility, “gray zones” of compliance and collaboration, and the problem of individual and collective retribution, Arendt’s concerns are once again central.

Compared with these matters, Arendt’s properly philosophical and theoretical legacy is light indeed. This might have come as no surprise to her—in a conversation with Günter Gaus, reprinted in the
Essays
, she renounced any claim to being a “philosopher.” Her critics would agree; Stuart Hampshire once wrote, “She seems to me to be inaccurate in argument and to make a parade of learned allusion without any detailed inquiry into texts.”
²⁰
One senses a constant tension between a residual duty on Arendt’s part to undertake philosophy and a natural preference (and gift) for political and moral commentary and what she called intellectual
action
. It is tempting to see this as a tension between Heidegger and Jaspers, the dominant intellectual influences upon her. At her worst she could lapse considerably toward Heidegger; in Judith Shklar’s words, “Philosophy was for both of them an act of dramatizing through word play, textual associations, bits of poetry, and other phrases from their direct experiences.” It was “passionate thinking.”
²¹
She would slip into phrases like “world alienation,” and even in a letter to McCarthy from February 1968 could write like this: “I have a feeling of futility in everything I do. Compared to what is at stake everything looks frivolous. I know this feeling disappears once I let myself fall into that gap between past and future which is the proper temporal
locus
of thought....”
²²

In many of Arendt’s ventures into theory, the dominant impression is one of confusion. Categories tumble over one another, their meaning unclear and variable. “She rambles on in the style of an essayist who freely associates one remembered quotation, or fragment of an idea with another until it becomes time to stop” (Hampshire again). Her habit of tracing concepts genetically, which in the case of political ideas takes her back to Plato, is particularly unhelpful when applied to abstractions and mental categories like “thinking” and “willing.” One is not surprised to learn, in a 1954 letter to Mary McCarthy, that she finds Hume “not so interesting.” McCarthy herself, an affectionate and admiring friend and reader, chided Arendt over the rather misty quality of the argument in her essay on Lessing: “There are wonderful thoughts in the Lessing speech but sometimes they have to be sensed, rather than clearly perceived, through a fog of approximative translation, e.g., ‘humanity,’ ‘humaneness, ’ ‘humanitarianism,’ which are occasionally treated as synonymous and occasionally not.”

It was not the translator’s fault. Arendt may or may not have been confused, but she is certainly confusing and it does her little service to pretend otherwise. At times she seems to be evincing an innocent nostalgia for the lost world of the ancient polis, at others she is displaying sympathy for a sort of syndicalist collectivism (while finding its nearest contemporary incarnation, the Israeli kibbutz, “rule by your neighbors” and not very appealing). She invokes the distinction between ancient (participatory) liberty and the modern (private) kind with an apparent preference for the former; yet she was unshakably against conflating the private and the public and thought that modern American “social” legislation—for example desegregation of schools—could be dangerous just because it sought to blur the distinction.

The Human Condition
, her most finished piece of theoretical writing, boils down to a single, albeit powerful, idea: that we have lost the sense of public space, of acting in concert, and have instead become slaves to a vision of human life that consists of a curious combination of “making”—the error of placing
Homo faber
at the center of political theory—and “History,” the dangerous belief in fate and determined outcomes to which she attributed so many of the woes of our age. These are worthy insights, albeit a touch unreflectively communitarian, and it isn’t difficult to see why each new generation of students thinks it has found in Hannah Arendt a trenchant critic of its times. But taken together they are in some conflict, and in any case offer neither a conceptually all-embracing nor a historically rich account of how we got where we are. They also propose no practically applicable solution to any particular political or social problem.

That is because Arendt herself was not setting out to construct any such all-embracing accounts or solutions. Most of her writings were initially conceived as separate lectures, essays, or articles, the forms at which she excelled. They are nearly all, in the proper sense of the word, occasional pieces, designed to respond to a particular event or to address a crisis or problem. And since most of the events in Arendt’s world, and all of the crises and problems, returned in due course to the issue of totalitarianism, its causes and consequences, her contributions to modern thought have to be understood as variations on a single theme: We live in the midst of a political crisis whose extent we have yet fully to grasp, and we must act (by thought and by deed) so as to minimize the risk of repeating the experiences of our century. The first need is to recapture— or at least see the virtue of trying to recapture—the old republican qualities of civility, moderation, public discourse, and the like. This isn’t a bad starting point for modern political theory—and once again Arendt came early to a position since adopted by many others. But it is, after all, only a starting point.

I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT Hannah Arendt was at her best in short bursts, when she was commenting, appraising, criticizing, or merely thinking aloud on some issue of contemporary significance. Indeed some of the essays in the Kohn collection, notably an unpublished paper from 1950 or 1951 called “The Eggs Speak Up,” seem to me among the best pieces she ever wrote and should put an end to a certain image of Arendt as a “theorist” of the cold war, or even an intellectual precursor of “neo-conservatism.”
²³
It thus comes as no surprise that her long correspondence with Mary McCarthy, published for the first time in its entirety, should be such a pleasure.
²⁴
The letters are not particularly intimate or self-revelatory on Arendt’s part, but they do show a relaxed and warm side of her; she seemed to feel that McCarthy was one of the few people who saw what she was about (of
Eichmann in Jerusalem
she tells McCarthy that “you were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria”).

She also demonstrates rather more human feeling than her correspondent could sometimes muster; following a series of highly emotional letters from Mary McCarthy in 1960 about the new love in her life (her future husband, James West) and the irritating difficulties posed by various ex-spouses and children from past marriages, it is left to Arendt to bring her friend down to earth with a gentle bump: “Please don’t fool yourself: nobody ever was cured of anything, trait or habit, by a mere woman, though this is precisely what all girls think they can do. Either you are willing to take him ‘as is’ or you better leave well enough alone. What is going to happen to these poor children? To add to the shock of parental separation the shock of separating them from each other seems a bit unwise. But how can one judge without knowing anything[?].”