James Bernauer
There was wisdom in the decision to give the name “Hannah Arendt Strasse” to the road that runs alongside Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. No one has done more than Arendt to focus attention on that evil and, in a way analogous to the memorial’s abstract design itself, on its resistance to easy description, let alone facile analysis. In 1945, she had predicted that the “problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”1 Unfortunately, philosophical discussion has found numerous exits from that road. Arendt would not have been surprised by this because few thinkers have been as disdainful of the insight to which German intellectuals laid claim. She refused to ignore or excuse Bertolt Brecht’s poetic praise of Stalin, just as she had earlier analyzed the fraternity of mob and elite in the period before the Nazi years. She had separated her own effort at political thinking from the anesthetizing impact of a traditional political philosophy debate that has all too often buried her historical approaches under a mountain of irrelevant, abstract philosophical refinements. She operates as a political thinker, probing the historically contingent action of the present. The question of evil all too often gets smothered by eminently forgettable commentary, but even with that tendency, the extreme character of the twentieth century’s atrocities often breaks through the discourse that sanitizes the language of evil.
If the force of tragic events situated her thought to confront raw historical challenges, her early engagement with religious thinking gave her the spiritual category of “evil.” Her attendance at the lectures of Romano Guardini, her study of Søren Kierkegaard, and her dissertation on Saint Augustine forged a freedom for her from strictly naïve, secular analysis, and that liberty gives her work depth and originality. She had recognized that Augustine was the “great thinker who lived in a period which in some respects resembled our own more than any other in recorded history, and who in any case wrote under the full impact of a catastrophic end, which perhaps resembles the end to which we have come.”2 She was tutored in appreciation of “radical evil” far less by Kant than by Augustine’s struggle with the Manichean conviction of evil’s primordial status. And Augustine’s later recognition of evil as privation certainly foreshadowed Arendt’s understanding of the “thoughtlessness” of Eichmann, of his inability to think. Her grasp of evil in the conduct of bureaucrats has shaped the contemporary perception of modern institutions and their contribution to a “banality of evil,” that is, their fostering of an interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil activity.3 The field of evil is very wide for religious consciousness, and that range is reflected in her sensitivity to different forms of wickedness throughout her writings. For example, in her comments on the post-Eichmann trials of those who had worked at Auschwitz, she claimed that the “chief human factor in Auschwitz was sadism, and sadism is basically sexual.”4 She goes on to say that the “smiling reminiscences of the defendants . . . and their unusually high spirits throughout . . . reflects the sweet remembrance of great sexual pleasure, as well as indicating blatant insolence.”5
Over sixty years ago, Philip Rieff had the insight that Arendt’s writings possessed their power in large part because they organized historical explanations within a religious or spiritual horizon of meaning.6 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, the focus of her portrayal is not the wicked deeds perpetrated by individual men but rather a fallen state, a sinful condition, which is a feature of our age or, as the book’s original British title had it, the burden of our time. This fallen condition is described as an “absolute evil,” by which she means that it is not comprehensible in terms of wicked motives of “self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice.”7 It is the human person’s rebellion against the human condition itself, the determination to create a new man according to technologies justified by ideological claims to absolute knowledge of the laws of life and history. Cecil Rhodes’s wish—“I would annex the planets if I could”—expresses the desire of excess and expansion that is the passion of our epoch. Running through much of her work is a sense of universal responsibility for crime that has often been misinterpreted as a moral condemnation not only of victimizers but also of victims. In fact, she is describing a fallen state that makes revolt against the human condition a universal temptation. She will later pay tribute to the American Revolution’s awareness of a Christian realism that prevented its leaders from sharing the “absurd hope” that man “might still be revealed to be an angel.”8 She will praise this realism in a number of other contexts, a praise that is in some tension with her tendency to see images of unworldly innocence as also having their source in Christianity. This realism is beyond the horizon of a strictly narrow secular perspective committed to a universal innocence that is only lost by the evil actions of specific individuals. Totalitarian evil operated on a different terrain, and Arendt had recourse to a religious geography in order to capture it. For her, concentration camps represented “basic western conceptions of a life after death.”9
Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union’s labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.10
National Socialism declared the “superfluousness” of human beings and thus created those “living corpses” who inhabited death camps after the demolition of their moral status and individual identity.11
The evildoers were not the Satanic figures one might have expected as capable of inflicting such ruin and torment, but rather bureaucrats such as Adolf Eichmann. Her portrait of him still registers with students of mass murderers, even as she has been correctly faulted for downplaying his ideological passions. A dramatic example of her superior grasp of his inner life, though, is on display in a response he makes to his Israeli police interrogator on why he abandoned the ideas that guided him during the war: “I have to confess it frankly: I wasn’t able to chuck the whole thing overboard overnight. I shifted to a different stage only gradually. . . . To tell the truth, it took a rocket landing on the moon. From then on, a radical change went on inside me.”12 On the first page of The Human Condition, Arendt had reflected on reactions to the first journeys into space, and she was troubled by the initial reaction of some who applauded them as the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.”13 She went on to claim how this statement reflected the dangerous worldlessness of our age—a worldlessness that prepared for mass murder by destroying bonds of fellow feeling.14 It is as though Arendt, writing several years before the capture of Eichmann, had already entered into the essential mentality of the man she was later to confront in Jerusalem.
While Arendt’s name will always be associated with that of Eichmann, there are others whom she called to our attention that are far more worthy of remembrance: her mentor, Karl Jaspers; her friend Waldemar Gurian; and the benevolent Dr. Franz Lucas of the Auschwitz death camp. Probably most memorable for Arendt, however, was the German sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who rescued Jews and who paid for it with his life, executed by his own nation. Reacting to the hush that had settled over the Eichmann courtroom with the account of Schmidt’s heroism, Arendt wrote,
And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.15
The lesson that evil’s triumphs teach is that they result from failures of personal judgment, for example, the willingness of people who argued that it was better to stay on their jobs in order to prevent worse things from happening. That rationalization covers over the fact that it was these people who were needed to keep the system operating. And then there was the argument of the lesser evil, but, in Arendt’s view, as time passed, people would forget that their choices were being guided by that “lesser evil” and not by a superior good. The lesson for how evil might fail? One’s willingness to live together explicitly in conversation with oneself is the key commitment of a life that has challenged the movement of evil.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 134.
2 Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 390.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 3–16.
4 Arendt, “Introduction” to Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt (New York: Prager, 1966), xxvii–xxviii.
5 Ibid.
6 Philip Rieff, “Theology of Politics: Reflections on Totalitarianism as the Burden of Our Time,” Journal of Religion 32 (April 1952): 119–26.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), viii–ix, 459.
8 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 90.
9 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 445.
10 Ibid., 445.
11 Ibid., 451, 453.
12 Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll, eds., Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 281.
13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1.
14 The Origins of Totalitarianism shows how anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism are forces committed to the replacement of worldly experience: an historical people, a defined nation-state, and a pluralism of human associations.
15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company), 231.