Chapter 19

Richard H. King

Along with her emphasis upon the necessity of solitude for thinking, Arendt also needed others to provide a context for that thinking.1 Whether it was at her university in Marburg, Germany, where her lifelong friendship with Hans Jonas was formed and where she carried on the affair with Martin Heidegger; in Paris where she met her husband Heinrich Blücher and made friends with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and a host of French intellectuals; or, finally, in New York City where, after arriving in May of 1941, she quickly became an indispensable part of the New York intellectual scene, she was always in constant intercourse with like-minded thinkers, writers, and academics. Though the term “public intellectual” is pretty threadbare by now, it was the intellectuals around the Trotskyist-modernist Partisan Review (PR; 1934–99); the American Jewish Committee’s new monthly, Commentary (1945-); Dwight Macdonald’s seed bed for the New Left, Politics (1944–49); Irving Howe’s democratic socialist, Dissent (1954–); and the more eclectic New York Review of Books (1964–) that Russell Jacoby had in mind when he bemoaned the disappearance of a certain type of engaged intellectual.²

Here it should be noted that until the 1960s, Arendt shied away from identifying with any community of scholars in America. After her experience in Germany, she was also profoundly wary of the political and moral deformation of her academic friends who let themselves be co-opted by the Nazis, though she certainly had academic friends in New York and Chicago. She preferred to see herself as a freelance intellectual who could speak actively and independently on public matters as well as cultural issues. Much of her written work in America was a response to that which shocked, prodded, or enticed her into thought and action, not the disciplinary trends and squabbles in which academics get caught up. After her arrival in America in 1941, she wrote for magazines, such as Aufbau and Menorah Journal, but began publishing (in English) in PR in 1944. PR sought to mesh a modernist literary sensibility with an independent Marxist, often Trotskyist, analysis of contemporary society. For instance, PR’s first issue in 1937 included contributions from T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Leon Trotsky. Arendt’s first piece in the quarterly in the fall of 1944 was “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” which she followed in the next issue with “Approaches to the ‘German Problem.’” Both issues contained reproductions of drawings by artists such as Kandinsky, Masson, Feininger, Miro, and Leger. The names on the cover of the two issues included Robert Penn Warren, George Orwell, and Lionel Trilling along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Other card-carrying New York intellectuals, including Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg, Nicola Chiaromonte, F.W. Dupee, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Daniel Bell, were already contributors, too.

As a group, the New York intellectuals were distinct from their contemporaries in America and Europe. The majority of them were Jews from Eastern European working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. They were trying to escape the strictures—and often the poverty—of Jewish life and traditions. Most of them had bachelor’s degrees from City College of New York (CCNY) rather than from Columbia or New York University. Far fewer earned PhDs, but by the 1960s, many had secured places in the academy. Daniel Bell’s provocative thesis about the postwar “end of ideology” grew out of his own experience as and with the emergence of ex-communists, former socialists, and ex-Marxists from the 1930s. According to Bell, the New York intellectuals found themselves in a state of belatedness, of having “come too late” to ride the first historical wave of political or cultural modernism. Though the universalist orientation of the Left in the 1930s had been liberating, the postwar years saw them move back to rediscover their prewar culture roots. They were anti-Stalinists by and large, but still very much Left-of-Center, though each decade one or more of them headed toward the center and some to the Right end of the political spectrum.3

It did not take long for Arendt to be considered one of the “elders,” those who by age and achievement seemed to be leaders. Yet the New York intellectuals lacked a single charismatic figure around whom they could group; nor were they united around a single theory such as the Freudians in Central Europe and then America (or the Lacanians later in France). They lacked the philosophical cohesion of the young academics, mainly historians and political philosophers, who coalesced around Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago from the 1950s onward. The New York group prided itself on being able to write with power and verve, what Irving Howe called “the style of brilliance.”⁴ Arendt was no literary snob or purveyor of esoteric vocabularies in either German or English, but she was one of the few philosophers in the group and enjoyed the prestige of having been educated in the German tradition. Though he had attended Heidegger’s lectures in Marburg in the late 1920s, Sidney Hook was very much a disciple of John Dewey and a militant anti-communist—and not favorably disposed toward Arendt. Another philosopher, William Barrett, helped Arendt with her English in the mid-1940s and later wrote a popular introduction to existentialism, Irra tional Man (1958).5 Later, her Marburg friend, the philosopher of science Hans Jonas, came to teach at the New School for Social Research. Nor had Arendt ever been a Marxist, though her husband Heinrich Blücher was a Spartacist in postwar Germany, and three of her most powerful essays dealt with Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. She bridled at the label “anti-Stalinist,” not because she had any affection for the Soviet leader or for the Bolshevik experiment, but because her politics did not derive from the Bolshevik tradition on either side of the Atlantic. The only tradition she acknowledged as hers, she once insisted to historian Gershom Scholem, was “the tradition of German philosophy.”⁶ Her German-Jewish bourgeois background in Königsberg contrasted markedly with that of the Ostjuden among the New York intellectuals, both in intellectual and in class terms, yet the fact that she had fled the Nazis and fascists twice and risked her life to come to America gave her a certain moral prestige. Finally, though feminism was not on the political or cultural agenda for the New York intellectuals, Arendt was one among several strong and talented women who were part of the group, including her good friend Mary McCarthy and Diane Trilling, who was married to one of the other elders, Lionel Trilling, as well as writers Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick, both of whom had been married to poet Robert Lowell. The poet Delmore Schwartz once referred to Arendt as “that Weimar flapper.” All that said, Arendt and her feminine compatriots belonged to a generation just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism. This meant they were too proud to be feminists and tried to be both full-time wives and intellectuals.⁷

Though Arendt was well-grounded in German and European literature, her association with the New York intellectuals expanded her literary interests to include American writers. She admired Lowell’s poetry, which often thematized his New England heritage. Her two favorite American novelists were Herman Melville, whose novella “Billy Budd” she mined for insights about good and evil in On Revolution (1963), and William Faulkner, whose fictional exploration of the presence of the past in the present, the importance of narrative for the shaping of individual and group identity, and the memorialization of heroic figures in the past Arendt found powerfully suggestive. She was a senior editor at Shocken Press in the 1940s, and helped translate and publicize the work of Franz Kafka as it came to America. Along with other New York intellectuals, her work had the effect of weaning Americans from their steady diet of British literature and creating more space for the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century and for the classics of German-language literature—and for the expatriate Henry James over the rougher-hewn Theodore Dreiser. Another contemporary poet she admired was W. H. Auden, whom she befriended in the late 1950s in New York, and who proposed to Arendt after Heinrich’s death in 1970. (She turned Auden down, though she felt guilty about it.) Yet another poet, Randall Jarrell, was given tutorials in German poetry from Arendt since he wanted to translate as much as possible into English. In exchange, the astute poet and critic taught Arendt much about the strengths of American poetry. Of the literary critics among the New York intellectuals, Arendt was closest to Alfred Kazin, who was always one of her champions and closest friends, along with McCarthy and Macdonald. But Arendt was never much impressed by American philosophy, for example, pragmatism, and spent more time with political theorists than she did with philosophers. But she had few doubts about the importance of America’s literature, even for European literary types.

But what specifically did Arendt get from her New York intellectual colleagues and how did her presence affect them? Above all, Arendt persuaded them of the deep seriousness of the moral collapse suffered by Europe as it spiraled downward into the abyss of the war years. At the end of the war, she and Macdonald were almost alone in explicitly exploring the issues of guilt and responsibility arising out of what was later named the Holocaust.8 The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), one of the great postwar works of historical imagination, supplied her intellectual colleagues with a conceptual and moral framework for responding to the Final Solution. Overall, for them, it was always Arendt, the author of Origins, not Arendt, the political theorist of On Revolution, who struck them as the epitome of moral seriousness.

The various editors of the postwar New York journals of opinion gave her the platforms from which she could develop her thought (and, incidentally, work on her English). She belonged to that sector of the New York intellectuals who, though anti-Stalinist, fought against the attempts to curtail the civil liberties of those accused of being fellow travelers and pro-communist. Nor did she ever become obsessed with anti-communism, to the exclusion of other concerns. She spoke out clearly against McCarthyism, even though she and her husband faced possible deportation had it become known that he lied about having ever been a communist when he arrived in the United States in 1941. Her first real challenge to Northern liberal opinion was a short essay “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), which questioned the wisdom of the federal government’s imposition of desegregation on the public schools of the South.⁹ In doing so, she displayed little knowledge of American history and constitutional interpretation, not to mention the fact that she imposed the experience of Jews in Germany upon the quite different struggles of black Southerners with racial segregation. Then, and in the next decade, she never really found out how to talk about race in America or in general. Strangely, except for Nathan Glazer, few of the New York intellectuals had much grounding in the history or sociology of race in America in general or in the South specifically. Only African American novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952) and tangentially linked to the New York intellectuals, set her straight about what had been at issue in Little Rock for black Southerners. In one sense, Arendt was intellectually braver than the other New York intellectuals i n taking on such a morally and historically complex issue. But she was wrong, even in her own terms, on the substantive issues involved.

But it was the controversy over her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) that clearly had the most disruptive impact on the New York group, even more so than the McCarthy episode of the 1950s. Arendt felt betrayed when the editors of PR, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, gave her book to Lionel Abel to review, since he was known to be hostile to Arendt. Public debates were held in New York and around the country, mainly at universities, about the “banality of evil” and Arendt’s charges against the actions of the Jewish Councils during the war. Some, though, stood up for her: the gentiles, McCarthy, Macdonald, and Lowell, wrote strong defenses; Daniel Bell and historian Raul Hilberg, along with Kazin, defended her at one debate before several hundred people; and Hans Morgenthau and Bruno Bettelheim also wrote in praise, not just in defense, of her Eichmann book. She suspected Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss of stirring up feeling against her, something that the Israeli government actually did. Beyond the merits of the arguments on both sides, it was the class-cultural tension between German Jews and Eastern European Jews among the New Yorkers that helped turn the mood of the controversy into something so nasty. Irving Howe, who had worked for Arendt at Schocken, turned on her with a vengeance, while historian Barbara Tuchman and political theorist Judith Shklar were vicious in their criticisms of Arendt and her book. Many who had sought to escape the smothering clutches of Yiddishkeit and the stetl mentality in the 1930s had rather suddenly arrived at a greater appreciation of what Irving Howe called “the world of the fathers,” including Howe and novelist Saul Bellow, who translated works from the Yiddish. To people like them, Arendt’s German-Jewish arrogance, with its heartless criticism of Israel and of the Jewish leadership during the war, was unbearable. By the mid-1960s, some referred to her as a “self-hating Jew.” Beyond that, the fact that Arendt was a woman setting straight a lot of male intellectuals and had publicly criticized Israel’s handling of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem helped make this issue even more explosive and divisive among the New Yorkers.

Arendt’s former invincibility was further compromised by a piece on Martin Heidegger she published in The New York Review of Books in October 1971 that avoided any serious condemnation of his flirtation with the Nazis in the 1930s (and later it emerged that she had carried on an affair with Heidegger when she was a student). Furthermore, Arendt had no use for the New York intellectuals such as Irving Kristol who became neoconservatives after 1968. They were sometimes called “Ex-Trotskyists for Nixon.” They took their distance from the New Left, the anti-war movement, Black Power, and even the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s. One of their number, Nathan Glazer, wrote a stinging criticism of Arendt’s supposed drift to the Left in foreign policy terms.10 But, unlike several of her New York colleagues, she never let her hostility to Marxism and communism define the range, importance, or strength of her moral commitments. At the time of her death, she was clearly worried about the political drift to the Right rather than to the Left, represented by the persisting strength of consumer capitalism and a weakening sense of the public good. Her last public contribution was a speech that later appeared as a short, sobering article in the New York Review of Books. Its title, “Home to Roost,” clearly indicates that she remained concerned with the fate of the republic.

Notes

1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 476.

2 R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

3 Arguing the World, dir. Joseph Dorman (New York: Thirteen/WNET, 1997); Daniel Bell, “The Mood of Three Generations” and “The End of Ideology in the West: An Epilogue,” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 286–99, 369–77.

4 Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals (1969),” in Selected Writings 1950–1990 (San Diego, CA: Harvest/HBJ, 1990), 240–80.

5 W. Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1962).

6 Hannah Arendt, “A Letter to Gershom Scholem,” July 24, 1963, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ronald H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 466.

7 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CN: Yale, 1982); D. Laskin, Partisans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

8 D. Macdonald, “The Responsibility of Peoples,” in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1958), 33–72.

9 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent VI (1959): 45–56.

10 Nathan Glazer, “Hannah Arendt’s America,” Commentary 60 (1975): 61–67.