2

HANNAH ARENDT: THE THINKER AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

ON JANUARY 29, 1946, Hannah Arendt wrote from New York to her friend and mentor, Karl Jaspers:

There is much I could say about America. There really is such a thing as freedom here and a strong feeling among many people that one cannot live without freedom. The republic is not a vapid illusion, and the fact that there is no national state and no truly national tradition creates an atmosphere of freedom or at least one not pervaded by fanaticism.¹

Arendt had arrived in the United States in 1941, as a stateless person. The connection she saw between freedom and the absence of a national state bespeaks the relief of a victim of nation-states.² The freedom she discovered in America was also a freedom of speech and that must have been its most important aspect to the vocal social and political critic Arendt already was. What she took for lack of a national tradition was reassuring to a cosmopolitan and a nontraditionalist like her. America was Arendt’s new Rome.

Intellectuals like Arendt were allowed entry into the United States not as Jews and also not as Germans, French, Spaniards, or any other nationality represented in the pool rescued by the American Emergency Committee but as individuals of exceptional talent. The designation was apt: the career she made in the United States is impressive even for someone in this elite category she occupied along Franz Werfel, Victor Serge, Siegfried Kracauer, Heinrich Mann, and others. She held academic positions at the New School, University of Chicago, and Princeton University while publishing regularly in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Commentary, Nation, Dissent, and Encounter. Her writing approached philosophical questions that were not only politically significant but also controversial in a way that fostered new ideas, clarified assumptions, and sharpened positions. Responses to her works, even when critical, brought to the fore complex and significant questions about the nature of totalitarian regimes, the mechanisms of evil as a political phenomenon, the social dimensions of racial discrimination, the purpose of civil disobedience, and the relationship between imperialism and postwar American foreign policy. The texts I examine in this chapter, “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas” and Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil (originally a series of articles published in The New Yorker), were Arendt’s most controversial writings.3 These essays surprised, excited, outraged, and disappointed many American readers as much because of their content as because of their style. It was the style of an impartial observer who readily admitted to be presenting her views as an outsider.

But just how was she an outsider? Compared to other German intellectuals who had fled to America during the war, she not only stayed afterwards but also became one of the most assimilated into local circles and came to be referred to as a member of the New York Intellectuals group.⁴ As a Jew, she worked alongside American Jews on matters pertaining to the creation of Israel and the new status of Jews in postwar America. As a European, she was difficult to pin down, inasmuch as she was as much at home in France as she was in Germany and often just as critical of Europe as she was impressed with America.⁵

Since she was already a respected scholar when she left Europe, Arendt’s challenge for gaining acceptance among American public intellectuals was not merely one of matching her own rhetorical self-image against their expectations but also one of developing a style in a language other than her native German. This was the language in which she had read the Western philosophical canon and had written her study of Saint Augustine as well as numerous articles on Jewish politics. “I write in English,” she said when she was already widely published in America, “but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it.”6 The stylistic particularities of her American writings have been noticed more than in the case of the other protagonists of this book. However, commentators have remarked mainly the uncommon turns of phrases, idiomatic idiosyncrasies, and grammatical mistakes, all marks of a foreigner, a nonnative speaker.⁷ Her style was also strange, not just foreign: she employed irony when reflecting on matters that others insisted on treating with the utmost seriousness, such as the Holocaust, or tried to convey compassion that struck readers as mere condescension. Her style reflects a perspective on American society mainly at odds with other views, and this unfamiliar thinking and expression made her ideas seem insightful and compelling at times and outrageous at others. Her stranger persona was the rhetorical expression of a political consciousness inextricably connected to being Jewish. Trained as a philosopher by mentors who became icons of German thought, Arendt turned to politics as a Jew. As she put it: “if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”⁸ She was also a German, a European, and an upholder of the Rights of Man. These affiliations functioned as “terministic screens,” funneling assumptions and expectations about who she was and what she should say.⁹ Her stranger persona emerged at the nexus of these terministic screens but was also consciously crafted by Arendt after her conception of the Jew as pariah. In this chapter, I analyze some of her most strikingly original conceptions, that discrimination need not be the product of racism and that victims—especially Jewish victims of the holocaust—can contribute to their own destruction. I do not defend her views as much as trace their connection to the stranger persona, but I do argue that these views have important positive implications for how we envision the American polis.

BECOMING A JEW

Like many other German Jewish intellectuals before World War II, Arendt came from an assimilated, well-respected family living in the town of Königsberg, where Jews occupied prominent places in the social hierarchy. She was, however, exposed to Jewish religious and cultural life as a child. Both sets of her grandparents were reform Jews who were well acquainted with Rabbi Herman Vogelstein, one of the most influential leaders of liberal German Jews in Königsberg and a convinced Zionist. She was raised by a progressive mother who had many social democrat friends and who believed that daughters should be educated for careers that were once reserved only for sons. Martha Arendt supported the Spartacist movement and was not intimidated by the growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s.10 Königsberg was not as anti-Semitic as other German cities during Hannah’s childhood yet it did provide the “opportunity” to discover that being Jewish amounted to being different:

The word “Jew” was never mentioned at home. I first encountered it—though really it is hardly worth recounting it—in the anti-Semitic remarks of children as we played in the streets—then I became, so to speak, enlightened. . . . As a child—now somewhat an older child—I knew, for example, that I looked Jewish. . . . That is, that I looked a bit different from the rest. But not in a way that made me feel inferior—I was simply aware of it, that is all.¹¹

Arendt’s awareness of being Jewish was influenced by the circles her family frequented, which placed her “at the center of attraction for a group of talented sons and daughters—mostly sons—of Jewish professional families.”¹² Her older friends had studied at prestigious German universities, and they were familiar with and talked to her about the intellectual idols of the time, including Martin Heidegger. Arendt was a precocious child and excelled in school; her intellectual abilities so powerful that even the intolerant atmosphere of Prussian schools—from one of them the fiercely independent Arendt was expelled for insubordination—could not prevent her from reaching the university level. She studied at the University of Marburg with Heidegger, who also became her lover. The (well-guarded) secrecy of this relationship is known now to have been a burden for Arendt, especially as it exposed her to the anti-Semitic remarks circulating in Heidegger’s entourage, including those of his wife, Elfriede.¹³ Through Heidegger, Arendt also met Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith, future important thinkers whose ideas were beginning to take shape, like hers, in a tense relation with their mentor’s philosophy.14 Arendt left Marburg for a semester of study with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg and never returned. She finished her academic studies with Jaspers, who became her doctoral dissertation advisor at the University of Heidelberg.

Although surrounded by increasing anti-Semitism and although she counted among her friends Jewish students who took an active interest in Zionism, Arendt herself spent her university years focusing mostly on her studies. But in 1926, she met Kurt Blumenfeld, the most influential proponent of Zionism in Germany, at a meeting organized by Jonas. As Elizabeth Young-Bruehl explains, “the lecture did not convert Hannah Arendt to Zionism, but it did convert her to Kurt Blumenfeld.”¹⁵ He became her “political mentor” and through him she became more and more involved with Zionism, especially after the Reichstag was set on fire on February 27, 1933, as pretext for a series of arrests of Communist political figures. In the spring of that year, Blumenfeld asked her to help the German Zionist Organization by distributing leaflets (which was illegal). She was arrested by the Gestapo but released after only eight days. Soon afterwards she fled Germany, first to Prague and then to Paris.

In her later reflections, Arendt took great care to present her decision to leave Germany as motivated not by a Jew’s fear of Nazi repression but by her disappointment in German intellectuals. Her “personal problem,” as she put it, was not one of fearing persecution but of discovering the political apathy or even cowardice of German intellectuals and tracing these attitudes to their philosophical interests:

The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies might be doing, but what our friends were doing. This wave of cooperation—which was quite voluntary, or at least not compelled in the way it was during a reign of terror, made you feel surrounded by an empty space, isolated. I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew many people who did not, and I came to the conclusion that cooperation was, so to speak, the rule among intellectuals, but not among others. And I have never forgotten that. I left Germany guided by the resolution—a very exaggerated one—that “Never again!” I will never have anything to do with the “history of ideas” again. I didn’t, indeed, want to have anything to do with this sort of society again.16

The German intellectuals she believed had let her down included her future colleague at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, another Jew, whom she considered in Germany as much as later in America politically naïve and philosophically as conservative as the ideologues of fascism.¹⁷ Arendt left Germany with a firm commitment to politics, which was grounded in her experience as a Jew more than in a particular ideology but did not extend to an automatic solidarity with all Jews. In this regard, a comparison between her and Heinrich Blücher, her lifetime partner, is instructive. The two met in France in 1936, where both were involved in antifascist political activities. Blücher came from a non-Jewish family, had joined at age nineteen the Soldiers’ Council, and had participated in the left-wing movement led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg before becoming a member in the German Communist party.¹⁸ While Arendt would always remain an idealist in politics, Blücher was a man of action.¹⁹ Yet they came together in their interest in politics as emancipation and social justice.

In France, Arendt did practical work for organizations that helped Jewish refugees to emigrate to Palestine but without emigrating there herself (as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem would). Commitment to the Jewish cause did not spare her some disappointing discoveries, for example, that some Jews, especially affluent ones, were convinced that assimilation would protect them from the Nazis. In her view, these Jews—“parvenus” as she would later call them—were unable to understand the real political problem posed by anti-Semitism because they concentrated on their personal welfare instead of on the Jewish situation in general. Her political experience was doubly estranged—not just from anti-Semites but also from Jews seeking assimilation.

In the French internment camp of Gurs where she was sent as an enemy alien in 1940, Arendt discovered how adversity creates its own logic that conflates and confuses levels of identification. She must have felt the same way as Lisa Fittko, the Jewish communist who was also interned at Gurs:

To the French we émigrés were simply Germans. We came from there, we spoke with the despised accent boche. Even during the years of emigration we always remained, in the eyes of many Frenchmen, the “sales Boches.” And now—we were prisoners, so we must be spies. Probably Nazi parachutists, the ones the newspapers and radio had warned them about.20

In the chaos of the early days of the Vichy government, when Germany was no longer officially an enemy, Gurs opened its gates. Unlike many prisoners who stayed at Gurs hoping that it would be easier to be found by their families, Arendt left. She met Blücher at Montauban, and they crossed the border into Spain. Soon afterward, Arendt crossed the ocean to America.

BECOMING A STRANGER

As early as 1925, Arendt reflected on estrangement as the mark of an enlightened, albeit isolating, life of the mind. In one of the early letters addressed to Heidegger in the course of their affair, she offers a self-portrait entitled “The Shadows,” which describes her in the third-person as a young woman who is keenly aware of the discrepancy between the everyday circumstances of life in a “Here-and-Now” and the “Then-and-There” of another time and place. This awareness leads to

independence and idiosyncrasy [which] were actually based in a true passion she had conceived for anything odd. Thus, she was used to seeing something noteworthy even in what was apparently most natural and banal; indeed, when the simplicity and ordinariness of life struck her to the core, it did not occur to her, upon reflection, or even emotionally that anything she experienced could be banal, a worthless thing that the rest of the world took for granted and that was no longer worthy of comment.²¹

Later in life, Arendt’s experiences would be anything but banal, but this early reflection on estrangement depicts her ability to defamiliarize as spontaneous rather than deliberate, a way of being rather than a conscious act. The state of which Arendt spoke in this letter is not merely the poetic expression of a young woman’s crush on a famous philosopher. Using Heidegger’s vocabulary, the text describes the ontological estrangement that defined more generally the Weimar Republic sensibility.22 Like other German intellectuals who shared this sensibility, Arendt became aware early on of the great fracture in German Kultur and of the disappearance of the tradition of tolerance she had studied in the works of Jaspers, her other mentor. No matter how much she was intellectually a German, this awareness made her stop identifying as one, as she relayed to the incredulous Jaspers.

To say that she began to identify, instead, as Jewish, would be an over-simplification. She explored her options in the biography titled Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, which she wrote in Germany in 1933, finishing the last two chapters during her stay in France in 1938.²³ Yet the book was published for the first time only in 1957 in English translation in London under the auspices of the Leo Baeck Institute. Shortly afterwards it also appeared in America and in 1959 in Germany. This was one of the first books Arendt worked on after crossing the ocean.

Rahel Varnhagen is the story of a German-Jewish writer who hosted one of the most prominent salons in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Articulating a historically situated view of Jewish identity, Rahel Varnhagen introduces the idea of estrangement as the result of a confrontation between the two irreconcilable alternatives open to European Jews: to become accepted by the majority of the society through complete assimilation or to maintain their distinct Jewish identity at the price of remaining on the margins of that society. Arendt’s interest in revisiting this early work suggests that the ideas discussed in it still mattered to her twenty years later and perhaps that it was especially important to her in America. A rich, complex, and occasionally abstract text, Rahel Varnhagen can be read for different purposes. Arendt took great pains to explain the purpose she intended for the book:

It was never my intention to write a book about Rahel; her personality, which might lend itself to various interpretations according to the psychological standards and categories that the author introduces from outside; nor about her position in Romanticism and the effect of the Goethe cult in Berlin, of which she was actually the originator; nor about the significance of her salon for the social history of the period; nor about her ideas and her “Weltanschauung,” insofar as these can be reconstructed from her letters. What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it. My portrait therefore follows as closely as possible Rahel’s own reflections upon herself, although it is naturally couched in different language and does not consist solely of variations upon quotations.24

Seyla Benhabib finds it, quite rightly, “astonishing” that someone could presume to know another person’s story and thus, be able to narrate it just as that person experienced it. “What hermeneutical mysteries,” Benhabib wonders, “does this little subjunctive phrase, ‘might have told it,’ contain?”²⁵ For Richard Wolin, however, the mystery is easy to decipher: in recounting the story of a Jewish woman who went from desperately seeking assimilation to one who embraced firmly her Jewishness, Arendt was telling her own narrative. “In all . . . respects,” says Wolin, “Varnhagen must have appeared to Arendt as an eerily perfect doppelgänger.”²⁶

The similarities between author and character are indeed remarkable: both Jewish, both highly educated, neither particularly attractive as a woman yet profoundly influenced by the non-Jewish men who were attracted to them. Varnhagen sought to become assimilated through several love affairs and relationships to men who were inferior to her, spiritually and morally, but who were Gentiles and as such could have provided a respectable social status. All these relationships failed—a failure that in the end forced her to understand and then take ownership of her Jewishness.

Wolin believes that Arendt’s painful and humiliating love affair with Heidegger played a similar role, pushing her to face and accept her difference and to renounce her youthful naivety and hope in the intellectually egalitarian German culture.²⁷ Yet it could not have been only the therapeutic effect of her work on Rahel Varnhagen that enabled Arendt to take charge of her Jewishness but also the broader political awakening she was experiencing at the time. Benhabib argues:

In the early 1930s Arendt’s own understanding of Judaism in general and her relationship to her own Jewish identity were undergoing profound transformations. These transformations were taking her increasingly away from the egalitarian, humanistic Enlightenment ideals of Kant, Lessing, and Goethe toward a recognition of the ineliminable and unassimilable fact of Jewish difference within German culture. In telling Rahel Varnhagen’s story Arendt was engaging in a process of collective self-understanding and redefinition as a German Jew.28

Estrangement is the key aspect of this process of self-understanding. Arendt viewed the German Jew as defined by a relationship of exteriority to the dominant group, as conveyed by “a widely accepted Enlightenment precept [which] held that the Jews, a backward and uncultured people, could only gain acceptance once they shed their Jewishness, an ungainly medieval atavism.”²⁹ The exteriority of the Jew qua Jew is what leads to discrimination, oppression, and finally extermination. As an outsider, the Jew can be relegated to the role of an undesirable, unacceptable Other and subjected to political mechanisms of exclusion that claim to be legitimate because the cultural exclusion already exists and society takes it for granted. Arendt had emphasized this point in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “social discrimination, and not political anti-Semitism, discovered the phantom of ‘the’ Jew.”³⁰

To explain the distinction further, Arendt associates assimilation and conscious marginalization with the symbolic figures of the parvenu and the pariah. Through intermarriage, for example, the parvenue may hope to be accepted by society at the price of disguising or even abandoning her Jewish identity, as Rahel Levin Varnhagen hoped to become Countess von Fincklelstein. That relationship ended, and with it, Rahel’s chances for assimilation. However, even when assimilation is complete, the Jew remains in the eyes of the dominant society still a Jew, only an exemplary, “ideal” Jew whose Jewishness is deemed innocuous, reduced to an exotic feature. Thus, the parvenu is faced with a paradox, well captured by Lisa Jane Disch: “The parvenu views membership as a problem to be solved by performing the inherently contradictory role of the individual ‘exception Jew’—one who is both Jew in the sense of having exotic appeal and non-Jew in the sense of honoring no cultural traditions and displaying none of the ‘undesirable traits,’ stereotypically associated with Jewishness.”31

The Germany of Arendt’s youth had many parvenus among its Jewish intellectuals. Arendt herself was accused of being a parvenue when she criticized certain aspects of Jewish life or Jewish history—as in her report on the Eichmann trial. Her critics charged that she was acting as an assimilated German Jew “superior to Eastern Jewish ghetto-dwellers.”³² Yet Arendt herself fashioned her Jewishness as that of a pariah—and in that regard criticisms and accusations reinforced her status through the very act of marginalization and even exclusion they constituted. Benhabib explains that while the parvenue tries to hide her difference, “the pariah is the outsider and the outcast who either cannot or chooses not to erase the fate of difference.” Moreover, the pariah realizes both the risks and the opportunities difference affords. The pariah, then, “transforms difference from being a source of weakness and marginality into one of strength and defiance.”³³ Arendt’s break with the German intelligentsia bespeaks such defiance and reflects a firm rejection of the position of a parvenue. She made a similar choice in America.

Here, the figure of the pariah could have significant appeal, especially in the years after World War II and to a readership increasingly appreciative of nonconformism and drawn to rebellion.³⁴ Arendt rejected the notion of a pariah that would simply amount to “an empty sense of difference . . . in all its possible psychological aspects and variations from innate strangeness to social alienation.”³⁵ The figure of the pariah continued to interest Arendt throughout her philosophical career. In Men in Dark Times, published in 1968, she argued that

[a pariah] is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it—starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going to a sense of beauty or taste with which we love the world—that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness.³⁶

“Worldlessness” was a derogatory term in Arendt’s political vocabulary.37 It connoted apathy, escapism, and political anomie. Taken to the extreme, pariahdom could amount to merely being an outsider and “altogether incapable of public judgment.”³⁸ How, then, to change a polity in order to be recognized as a legitimate member of it while at the same time not adjusting to it? This was the question Arendt faced squarely, not only as a Jew in Europe, but also as a political refugee in America. In was a question she implicitly posed in her reflections on racism in American politics or on the legacy of the Holocaust.

In seeking an answer to guide her own political conduct, Arendt reviewed four models of pariahdom inspired by fictional characters and also by a historical figure: the pariah as “schlemihl,” as featured in Heinrich Heine’s poetry, who treats the world with indifference and withdraws from it; Charlie Chaplin’s “little man,” who plays the fool to reveal the absurdity of the world around him; Franz Kafka’s character K. in The Castle, who is the victim of an absurd and inhumane system to which he does not acquiesce; and the radical French Zionist, Bernard Lazare. Significantly, Arendt identified most closely with Lazare not so much because she shared for a while his Zionist beliefs but because she admired his courage to confront the world. Lazare—who supported Captain Alfred Dreyfuss when he was wrongly convicted of treason in France in 1894—had asked that

the pariah relinquish once and for all the prerogative of the schlemihl, cut loose from the world of fancy and illusion, renounce the comfortable protection of nature, and come to grips with the world of men and women. In other words, he wanted him to feel that he was himself responsible for what society had done to him. Politically speaking every pariah who refused to be a rebel was partly responsible for his own position and therewith for the blot on mankind which it represented.³⁹

Arendt admired Lazare for a quality aptly described by Disch as “situated impartiality,” which defines a stance informed by concrete experience and historical events rather than by abstract ideas or a political ideology.⁴⁰ Lessing, as author of Nathan the Wise, was, for this reason, another one of Arendt’s heroes. She admired his “forever vigilant partiality . . . always framed not in terms of the self but in terms of the relationship of men to their world, in terms of their positions and opinions.”41 At the same time, the pariah does not just refuse to conform to existing conventions but more importantly has the ability to critique these conventions by de-scrutinizing them with the “care and precision,” to use Schutz’s terms, of someone who does not take them for granted. By being on the margins, the pariah is well positioned to engage in techniques of estrangement.

Arendt was a pariah not only as a Jew but also as a political refugee. World War II political refugees constituted a political subject fallen outside the legal domain defined by nation-states. They lacked civil as well as human rights because, as Arendt explained, the very notion of the Rights of Man was the conceptual product of a political order based on nation-states.⁴² While refugees nominally represented the group most in need of human rights intervention, the very reinforcement of human rights depended on political institutions that could only operate within the boundaries of a nation-state. These institutions could no longer function in the era of massive displacement, and “those who were refugees or stateless thus became rightless, ‘foreigners’ beyond their borders and in strange lands where they were outside the law and denied full legal recognition.”⁴³

“We, Refugees,” published in New York in the journal Aufbau in 1943, is one of the few writings in which Arendt expressed compassion for the refugees who had lost their home—a personal as well as political loss because political participation, in her view, is possible only when one feels “at home” in the world.⁴⁴ At the same time, she mocked the refugees who make desperate, parvenu-like efforts to become assimilated in the countries that had taken them in. She sketched a sarcastic portrait of a Mr. Cohn, an assimilated Jew who is “150 percent German, 150 percent Viennese, and 150 percent French.” Mr. Cohn is a sorry figure because as a World War II refugee he is even more disadvantaged than a Jew dealing with anti-Semitism in wartime Europe. Refugees like him faced the threat of “discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction.”45

Refugees, as Arendt herself was, represent a modern type of pariah, for whom “there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nation-state.”⁴⁶ This pariah inhabits a state of liminality, and is constantly pushed to another place.⁴⁷ For Arendt’s stranger persona, liminality was an ideal stance for engaging in the exercise of defamiliarization insofar as it allowed her to position herself in one social framework in order to reflect on events occurring in another. Yet liminality also put her between the Scylla and Charibdys of conflicting images and values associated in America: being German and being Jewish, being a philosopher and being a political activist.

A REDOUBTABLE WOMAN

In the United States, Arendt kept her distance from other German intellectual émigrés, especially those who claimed to represent “the good Germany” that could be actively reinstated once the Nazis were defeated.⁴⁸ Rather, she contacted and worked for American Jewish organizations representing the Jewish cause. In November 1941, she became a writer for the New York–based German-language newspaper Aufbau. In the pages of Aufbau, she argued as a Jew who did not ask or expect Americans qua Americans to make sacrifices for the European Jews, targeting instead American Jews qua Jews. In her biweekly columns, she advocated the need for Jews to defend themselves and fight the war that had been waged against them by Hitler.⁴⁹ Arendt was briefly a Zionist and supported the formation of Israel, but she later insisted, against the general opinion of Jewish American circles, that it be from the onset a bi-national state. She abandoned Jewish politics after the Biltmore conference held in New York in 1942, which called for a Jewish state in Palestina.⁵⁰

Despite her disappointment with American Zionism and the complicated nature of Jewish American politics after the war, as a Jew who had experienced discrimination and had opposed and escaped the Nazi regime, Arendt carried a special authority and legitimacy with her American colleagues. This legitimacy was especially useful to her arguments about totalitarian regimes and ideological terror, which formed the basis of her most important work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, written on the heels of the war in 1945–1946. Despite some negative reviews, the book became a major success in the 1950s in no small part because it put Stalinism on par with Nazism at a time when anti-Soviet sentiment and anticommunism in America were on the rise.51 Arendt’s goal in this book was to offer, as she explained,

an insight into the nature of totalitarian rule, directed by our fear of the concentration camp, (which) might serve to devaluate all outmoded political shadings from left to right and, beside and above them, to introduce the most essential political criterion for judging the events of our time: will it lead to totalitarian rule or will it not?⁵²

In this book, Arendt emerged clearly as a critic of bourgeois society and of liberalism, which she deemed responsible, among other things, for creating conformism and thus a mob mentality that would result both in willing submissiveness and the total domination associated with totalitarianism.⁵³ One of the skeptical readers of the book was American sociologist David Riesman, who challenged Arendt using arguments that would later be often charged against her: that she was making hasty generalizations, that she had exaggerated the power of totalitarianism to take over individual minds and inhibit any kind of resistance, and that she did not have a rigorous methodology of study.⁵⁴ These were criticisms frequently made against German scholars in America, and the Frankfurt Institute members also did not escape them, as I showed in chapter one. Most importantly, the scholarly objections raised by Riesman were entangled in a complicated web of political attitudes toward communism and the Soviet Union, which I discuss more in chapter 4. The Origins of Totalitarianism made Arendt into a potential ally to the anticommunists and thus an enemy of those who remained on the left even during the Stalin era, especially after she participated in the 1951 meeting of the American Congress for Cultural Freedom and became associated with the Harvard Center for Russian Studies, which was financed by the CIA.55 Arendt herself, however, never identified her political stance as either liberal or conservative and declared herself uninterested in such distinctions.⁵⁶ Her closest friends, however, were liberals and leftists. It is not always clear whether they accepted her for being a sophisticated intellectual or because they shared similar political views.

Yet it is clear that Arendt felt most at home in America among her friends. She met most of them while working as an editor at Schocken Books in New York in the mid-1940s: Riesman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Alfred Kazin, and later Mary McCarthy. As this was a close-knit network, one acquaintance or friendship led to several others. Her philosophical training with Jaspers and Heidegger gave her political ideas a philosophical depth that impressed many of her new friends and colleagues, especially at a time when their own professed cosmopolitanism favored cultivation of European ideas. But it also turned others off, especially as she never escaped being linked back to Heidegger’s influence and never offered a public condemnation of her former teacher (quite the contrary, she resumed her correspondence with him after the war).

Whether they contested or approved of her views, and even when they were her friends and close allies, prominent liberal intellectuals in America revolved around her and were proud to be in her entourage. They also related to her as to someone who did not quite comprehend their way of life, even though she could offer interesting insights. Hyperbole is the trope that informs their depiction of Arendt. Here is William Barrett remembering his first meeting with Arendt, occasioned by a request for an article on existentialism:

She was a redoubtable woman, and that first meeting still lingers in my mind. She knew Rahv [Philip Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review] only slightly, and she was thus cast into the situation of confronting four strangers—and possibly four antagonistic males—but she never faltered. She was very hardly shy (it would be hard to imagine her ever shy), and in very short order had locked horns with Rahv. His usual authoritative manner could not pass muster with her, and he was thrown off stride by encountering an aggressively intellectual woman who talked back to him. It was a novelty for me to hear him becoming somewhat faltering and tentative in tone. He, who usually laid down the law to other people, now rather put himself in the role of the inquiring learner. . . . What impressed me was her great gusto and the vibrancy of her character. She came at things with energy and eagerness.57

This overly flattering portrait is presented in a narrative of confrontation. Arendt, emphatically gendered, confronts four prominent American men and manages to dominate them. Interestingly, Barrett refers to the Americans as the “strangers,” because his recounting places Arendt at the center. The narrative authority Barrett assigns to Arendt as a character enhances the overall impression of the hold she had over her American colleagues. In this story of power and competition, Barrett’s language is replete with terms of conflict (“locked horns,” “laid down the law,” “authoritative,” “aggressive,” “faltering,” “thrown off stride”), and Arendt emerges as the victor in a battle. Regardless that there was no actual confrontation, Barrett hyperbolizes the antagonism to emphasize Arendt’s power. The result is that Arendt is not depicted simply as an outsider to the group but as the omnipotent, dominating stranger, more powerful than even the leaders among the insiders, and thus both more threatening and impressive. This status is further emphasized by Barrett’s re-gendering of Arendt:

She was dressed rather informally that afternoon, with her hair set back loosely. And finding herself at ease with me, she was much more womanly than I had expected. She was also much younger then and more attractive than her later photographs, when she became a more public person, could show. I couldn’t help thinking throughout that she was a very handsome woman indeed. Later I reported this judgment to William Phillips, who pondered it judiciously for a moment and then declared, “I think of Hannah rather as a very handsome man.” He could only think of her in intellectual argument.⁵⁸

Juxtaposed against Phillips’s evaluation of Arendt, which de-genders her completely, the emphasis on her femininity in Barrett’s depiction reads almost as implausible, as if Barrett himself is surprised to remember Arendt as a desirable woman. Through these conflicting representations of Arendt as both unfeminine and as an attractive woman, she becomes de-gendered and symbolically disembodied. Barrett sanctions his own lingering on physical detail—her clothes and her hair—by invoking Phillips’s remark, which is hard to interpret as a compliment or not. The portrait, although focused on images of Arendt’s body, has precisely the opposite effect: not to bring to life the image of a physical person but to suggest that it is inappropriate to think of Arendt in such terms.

This description of Arendt, especially set against Phillips’s characterization, functions as a hyperbolic representation of her intellectual ability, but it also dehumanizes her. Arendt has a powerful mind but hardly a body. Such constructions of Arendt feed into other representations of her as omnipotent ruler of the New York intellectual scene. Nowhere is this depiction more evident than in Martin Jay’s recounting of his experience upon submitting in 1975 to Partisan Review an article that was very critical of Arendt’s work. Partisan Review had published harsh reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem, which led to a brief break-up between Arendt and the journals’ editors. By 1975, Arendt and the editors had reconciled. Jay’s article traced Arendt’s politics to her philosophy of existentialism and German formation, insisting on connections between her thought and Heidegger’s.59 Williams was reluctant to publish the piece because he worried that it might upset Arendt and that a new reconciliation would never be possible. When Arendt died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Phillips deemed it all the more inappropriate to publish a piece that took a negative stance toward her work. In the end, Jay’s article did get published, albeit with a modified, less acerbic, title, and adjoined by another paper that reviewed all the strengths of her political work. The incident inspired Jay to reflect on intellectual fields and power:

Although all intellectual fields are inevitably pre-structured, that of the New York Intellectuals was especially replete with the residues of previous conflicts, personal as well as intellectual, which made it impossible to enter without setting off hidden landmines. . . . Writing for a journal like Partisan Review entailed assuming the baggage of its previous history, which meant that contributions represented not merely the opinion of the writer but also to a greater or lesser degree the general line of the journal. Rather than having sovereign control over his words, the contributor was in danger of becoming a bit like a script writer in the Hollywood cinema production process.60

Even though this passage does not even mention Arendt, it relies on the same language of conflict used by Barrett, now intensified through more aggressive war metaphors. If the New York intellectuals occupy, in Jay’s view, a war zone, and the conflict is between combatants who fight for “prestige and power,” it is clear that Arendt was the ultimate authority behind the lines, a veritable general who issues orders from a distance.

In many stories about her, Arendt emerges as a rather exotic figure towering over the American-born intellectual. Yet the American criticism of her most controversial works did the opposite, dwarfing her not only through quantity, but also intensity.

THE AMERICAN DILEMMA

When her “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas” were published in 1957, The Origins of Totalitarianism had brought Arendt recognition as an important thinker, but she had never spoken on a matter so specific to American politics. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. This decision paved the way for the Court’s 1955 ruling that schools must integrate “with all deliberate speed.”⁶¹ This phrase, notoriously ambiguous, gave enough latitude to school officials trying to find ways to satisfy the Court ruling but with the minimum of compliance possible to postpone integration indefinitely, reasoning that, done too “hastily,” it might lead to social unrest, violence, and increased racism. In the fall of 1958, with the support of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch, nine black students decided to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were met by an angry mob that was backed by members of the Arkansas National Guard, who had been ordered by the Arkansas governor to prevent the black students from entering the school. In response, the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr. asked Dwight Eisenhower to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision, and the president decided to deploy federal troops to protect the black students for the rest of the year.

Arendt compared the problem of schools segregation to other domestic problems characteristic of the Cold War—such as the “security hysteria” and a “runaway prosperity” leading to “sheer superfluity and nonsense” that inevitably “wash out the essential and the productive”—to argue that unlike those, it had deeper roots in American history.62 The comparison was instructive and reveals the connection between her work on totalitarianism, with its twin focus on the rise of a mass society and total domination, and racism. As she had done in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her method was to employ a “political criterion for judging the events of our time: will it (desegregation of schools) lead to totalitarian rule or will it not.” The peremptory intervention of the federal government and the elision of a democratic consent on the matter could only worry Arendt as both failed her test.

Arendt’s position on the desegregation of schools was twofold. First, she argued against the deployment of federal troops in the South on the grounds that federal power should not trump local jurisdiction because this would violate the political principle that was at the core of the American Republic. Second, she argued that school integration represented an attempt at opposing a social practice and, as such, could not resolve the problem of political discrimination. It is hard to defend her arguments, especially against massive agreement that she was deeply mistaken, and that she had “severely misinterpreted what was at stake in some of the issues involved.”⁶³ What was at stake in the desegregation of schools in the South? According to its backers—and critics of Arendt’s position—it was the elimination of racial inequality that had plagued the nation from its inception and that contradicted so flagrantly the principle of equality on which the republic was based. According to Arendt, however, the stakes were different and concerned the preservation of diversity in a body politic founded on the “endless variety of a multitude whose majesty resided in its very plurality,” as Arendt put it, with undisguised admiration, in On Revolution. The federally mandated desegregation of schools trumped diversity by ignoring those voices in the South who disagreed and forcing them to obey. From the beginning, then, Arendt and most liberal American intellectuals were at odds.

Even before it was in print, Arendt’s article had caused a stir. Originally commissioned by Norman Podhoretz for Commentary, the article eventually came out a year later in Dissent, after Commentary’s editorial board refused to issue it. Dissent published it with an emphatic disclaimer that informed readers that the editors did not share Arendt’s position on the desegregation of schools. Dissent published the article along with two strongly worded rejoinders by David Spitz and Melvin Tumin, who both accused Arendt of failing to understand the political importance of school integration.64 Tumin even suggested, in no ambiguous terms, that her lack of comprehension betrayed racism. In the subsequent issue of the journal, Arendt published a response to Spitz only, sticking to her original position, and offered a note explaining what compelled her to write the article.⁶⁵ In this note, she described the shock that she experienced upon seeing the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine African American students admitted to Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957, surrounded by an angry mob as she tried to enter the school building. Arendt claimed that, had she been a mother, she would never have wanted to see her child used in a political battle and would have expected the government to prevent, rather than precipitate, a situation that endangered a child’s life.

“Reflections on Little Rock” was awarded the 1959 Longview Foundation Award for the year’s outstanding magazine article. Fifty years later, on the anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, the essay was still considered significant enough to inspire at Princeton University a conference focused on it.⁶⁶ There is a certain fascination with this piece in America reflected in the ongoing discussions about Arendt’s position and arguments.⁶⁷ “Reflections” is a difficult text because it cannot be summarily dismissed as racist since Arendt had expressed clearly, on other occasions, her support for the civil rights movement. Even in this piece, she did not claim that segregated schools should be allowed to exist but rather that racism had not started in segregated schools and would not end in integrated ones. Instead, she argued, to end racism requires political equality for African Americans, which, in her view, would have to start with new legislation that recognized African Americans’ human rights and repealed anti-miscegenation laws.

Arendt defined discrimination radically differently from how her American readers might have expected, and she defamiliarized its common meaning by ignoring its usual connection to racism. Indeed, she used a conceptual dissociation to separate racism and discrimination.68 Arendt viewed discrimination as the right to associate preferentially with some individuals rather than others. “If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so,” Arendt ventured. To present discrimination in terms synonymous with voluntary associations was no doubt risky because it resonated with a familiar perspective, the conservative southerners’ slogan of “equal but different.” She allowed, however, for situations in which discrimination would be “scandalously unjustified and positively harmful to the political realm,” using the example of refusing the right to sit where one pleases in a bus—clearly endorsing Rosa Parks’s protest and the acts of civil disobedience it had inspired.⁶⁹

Arendt defended her controversial position by arguing, in turn, from the perspective of a European, a Jew, and an imagined parent (first African American, and then white). These self-identifications are strategies of rhetorical invention, as each shed light on a different aspect of the issue, and inspired Arendt the distinction she made among three realms: political, social, and private. From the perspective of a European, Arendt reasons as an outsider, a theorist focused on ideas and abstractions, in this case the idea of the American Republic. The perspective of a European is supposed to lend objectivity to her analysis while the second one, as a Jew, signals her sympathy—from one victim of discrimination to another—for the civil rights movement, which she had expressed on other occasions as well.⁷⁰ It might come as a surprise that she recognized from the outset that she was an outsider. “I have never lived in the South,” Arendt admitted, “and have even avoided occasional trips to southern states because they would have brought me into a situation that I personally would find unbearable. Like most people of European origin, I have difficulty in understanding, let alone sharing, the common prejudices of Americans in this area.”71 Her confessed lack of understanding is rhetorical rather than a genuine ineptitude as it launches the defamiliarization mechanism while also trying to deflect suspicions against her as a white woman arguing against desegregation.

It is as an impartial observer that Arendt announced her worry that the scandal over school desegregation might damage America’s international reputation. If this were to happen, she continued, it would be “unfortunate and even unjust,” and would cost America “the advantages she otherwise would rightly enjoy as a world power.” At stake, for Arendt, is the integrity of an idea, that of the American Republic, now threatening to become a “vapid illusion.” Arendt distinguished racial discrimination in America from “the color problem in world politics [which] grew out of the colonialism and imperialism of European nations—that is, the one great crime in which America was never involved.”⁷² Arendt used the contrast to Europe to argue that the race problem existed within American society from its inception and is endemic to it, rather than in relation to another nation, and thus, if not impossible to eliminate then at least impossible to solve by feat. The Fourteenth Amendment, she argued in “On Civil Disobedience” in 1969, was long ignored by the southern states and only reformed American society when the Supreme Court enforced it, especially when the civil rights movement brought into the open Americans’ responsibility from their forefathers for the country’s greatest crime—slavery.⁷³ Yet, confusingly, Arendt also bracketed the violent face of this legacy of discrimination, racism, in order to focus on the violent nature of federal military intervention. She did so because she believed that the solution to the problem of racism that was specific to America could only be available “within the political and historical framework of the [American] Republic.” The political framework of the republic, she reminded her readers, “rests on the principle of division of power and on the conviction that the body politic as a whole is strengthened by the division of power.”⁷⁴ Federal intervention contradicted this principle.

Political power could not solve the problem of racial discrimination, Arendt believed, so long as it allowed the anti-miscegenation legislation in the South to infringe on African Americans’ “elementary human rights,” and thus assigned to them a second-class status. Yet Arendt’s insistence that racist legislation be abrogated is not out of concern with the human rights of African Americans but with the principle of political equality upon which the republic was founded. In this regard, she saw herself thinking just like Thomas Jefferson, who, in pleading for the abolition of slavery, “trembled not for the Negroes, not even for the whites, but for the destiny of the [American] Republic because he knew that one of its vital principles had been violated right at the beginning. Not discrimination and social segregation, in whatever forms, but racial legislation constitutes the perpetuation of the original crime in this country’s history.”75

In her 1946 letter to Jaspers, Arendt had reported with distinct enthusiasm that freedom exists in America because it is not constrained by a national tradition. Now, her enthusiasm was starting to falter. Were Americans going to stay faithful to their own founding principles? By reminding her readers of the political tenets of their republic, Arendt was seeking a rhetorical communion with her audience. She identified as a European, but she was more faithful to the political framework of the republic than even an American. To some critics, arguing as a European was what had sent her arguments astray. George Kateb, for instance, warned American readers to be wary of Arendt because she thought too much like a European and because theoretical schemes devised by European thinkers in general should be approached with great skepticism when applied to American political and social matters.⁷⁶ Insofar as she sought confirmation from other Americans, especially those in the South, Arendt settled on an unfortunate choice, William Faulkner, who had also expressed reservations about the federally enforced desegregation. For such statements, Faulkner was facing his own media battles, especially since he had made them mostly while intoxicated.⁷⁷

Most of Arendt’s “liberal critics,” as she identified them rather derisively, dismissed her arguments as philosophically invalid and politically misguided.⁷⁸ Sydney Hook, for instance, trivialized her position when he held that Arendt seemed to be arguing that “Negroes should give priority to agitation for equality in the bedroom rather than to equality in education.”⁷⁹ In the rejoinder published by Dissent, Spitz praised her method of drawing distinctions (such as between the social and the political) but dismissed her “misguided courage” to be at odds with the liberal consensus and questioned the political wisdom of the concepts she proposed. Spitz was troubled by the dissociation of discrimination and racism because it seemed to apply only when one appealed to a “standard external to society itself” and suspected that Arendt saw herself as the one holding such standard. He concluded: “she is an aristocrat, not a democrat, at heart.” The other author featured by Dissent was far more dismissive. Tumin, an African American Princeton sociologist, found it “appalling” that Arendt had “ignored the most courageous people in the nation . . . in the interest of showing up her decrepit metaphysics with even more decrepit non-facts.”80

Such vehement contestation is in part the result of Arendt’s confusing political position—was she in favor of segregation or just against federally enforced desegregation?—partly because it required more philosophical elaboration than she was able to offer in the article.⁸¹ She explained the distinction between the political and the social sphere through the use of a chiasmus, a complex and easily confusing rhetorical figure that relies on an inverted parallelism: “What equality is to the body politic—its innermost principle—discrimination is to society. Society is that curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private. . . . For each time we leave the protective four walls of our private homes and cross over the threshold into the public world, we enter first, not the political realm of equality, but the social sphere.⁸² Spitz challenged this definition with an intriguing example from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, which had been published in 1958 in the United States, after having been banned in Europe. According to Spitz, the affair between the middle-aged male character and his teenage stepdaughter is not a private matter but a case of incest and pedophilia that is relevant socially and politically, as it needs to be combated with legal action. The example of domestic violence would have been a better choice for pointing out the porous contours of the private, social, and political realms, but Spitz’s selection of Nabokov’s famous literary masterpiece reveals a social and moral conservatism that Arendt did not have. Her own tolerance made Arendt more optimistic about the possibility of a strictly benign discrimination than many Americans could have been at that time.

The America that interested Arendt was first of all a political concept, defined by both equality and pluralism. The latter, however, resides in the social realm and is maintained through what amounts to a positive discrimination, in the name of “differences by which people belong to certain groups whose very identifiability demands that they discriminate against other groups in the same domain.” Using her own example, to associate with people who identify as Jews, by this logic, one needs to leave out non-Jews. Arendt was arguing as the former activist who had worked for Jewish organizations dealing exclusively with Jewish causes. “Discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right,” as she put it, because it allows such organizations to function.83

Read in this chiasmic logic, the conception of discrimination proposed by Arendt acquires an important nuance: discrimination remains positive only under conditions of political equality. At stake, then, is “not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and the personal sphere, where it is destructive.”⁸⁴ Arendt had little to say on how discrimination might be safely contained beyond her plea for abolishing racist legislation. Granted, that was not her task in the article. The lack of a concrete solution made her seem less invested in thinking alongside Americans of a way to deal with the problems of racism and more in issuing warnings and pontificating from the sideline. Her emphasis on legal reform was not taken seriously by her contemporaries, even though half of a century later, debates about legislation regarding same-sex marriage prove that Arendt’s focus on marriage laws as a way of influencing political equality was not only valid but prescient. In 1957, however, as Tumin complained, she seemed to privilege legal reform haphazardly or almost as a strategy for drawing attention away from school segregation.

The notion of the social realm distinct from the political and the private domains was a conceptual stopgap for many critics, and it has continued to prompt negative assessments even in response to a far more carefully elaborated version presented in The Human Condition.⁸⁵ Arendt’s stranger persona not only made her conception of discrimination seem removed from the everyday experience of an average American but also made Arendt seem removed from the social realm, any social realm, and only concerned with conceptual problems. She admitted not to know the South, but it was also clear that her familiarity with African Americans was limited to newspaper photographs. But in the segregated South, white and black Americans faced one another every day. They were already neighbors and played together as children. Even in the North, many American intellectuals’ perspective on racism was deeply informed by their experience of sharing the social sphere with African Americans (or parts of it), rather than inhabiting it in a segregated manner. Podhoretz’s essay published in Commentary, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,”86 provides a stark contrast to Arendt’s “Reflections.” Podhoretz recounts his childhood in Brooklyn, “beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated” by black children who were physically stronger and psychologically freer to do whatever they pleased,” and describes his feelings about African Americans as “twisted” and in conflict with the moral convictions he had developed as an adult.⁸⁷ The article has a shocking bluntness about it as Podhoretz admits to having a deep-seated dislike of many African Americans. His reflections end with an unexpected confession: despite such dislike, he would not oppose his daughter’s decision to marry a black man. Podhoretz comes off supporting interracial marriage—in his own family—just as much as Arendt, precisely as a political duty, and despite his personal feelings. Podhoretz, in other words, illustrates precisely the argument Arendt had made: he was committed to political equality even though he seemed to believe in discrimination in the social realm.

Yet the rhetorical difference between Arendt and Podhoretz is important: her detachment and impartiality contrast with his pathos and sincerity. His autobiographical style gives him an air of authenticity while she sounds aloof and arrogant even when referring to her experience as a Jew. Their arguments, while reaching the same conclusion also take a different conceptual route: the frame of the republic and the law, abstract and impersonal in Arendt’s case, or in contemporary American society and family, concrete and deeply personal in Podhoretz’s case. The result is that Arendt seems to be lecturing her readers while Podhoretz’s voices many of their fears and experiences. She had constructed an elaborate and interesting argument as an impartial observer while interventions like Podhoretz’s reminded American readers that they cannot be impartial in such matters.

By defamiliarizing discrimination, she removed the term from the reference shared by most Americans in their social experience of racism. This removal played a conceptual role but is also reflected in a language that troubled her readers because it had a rather awkward ring, such as when she referred to racism as “the country’s attitude to its Negro population.”88 This is a strange construction not only as a euphemism but also because it breaks the link between the American nation and African Americans. Calling African Americans “population,” awkward as it seems, emphasizes their position of exteriority to the nation. For Arendt, this is the position of the pariah. Rosa Parks had behaved more as an Arendtian pariah than the leaders of the NAACP did when supporting the Little Rock Nine because Parks had confronted a discriminatory practice in the political sphere and one manifested publicly. By refusing to give up her seat in the section of the bus that was for black people, Parks had acted as a pariah and had mobilized wide support. It was such support, from the ground up, Arendt wished to see in Little Rock, not federal intervention.

Arendt’s defamiliarization of discrimination was connected to a metonymic representation of African Americans in the image of Elizabeth Eckford as the “unwanted child.” By looking at the picture of Eckford metonymically, as that of the unwanted, Arendt seemed not to see real African Americans as much as her own political abstraction. Arendt believed that by forcing a child into a world that rejects it will lead to the child’s internalizing of its own undesirability and create the instinct of a parvenu rather than a pariah.⁸⁹ Critics have charged that Arendt “failed to see that African-Americans seeking to integrate public schools were not parvenus, striving for acceptance where they were not wanted. Instead, they were escaping the master’s house, struggling to get out from under their enforced servility and to emerge into the light of the public realm as equals.”⁹⁰ Along these lines, the most devastating criticism came from Ralph Ellison, who accused Arendt of not understanding the historical specificity of the African American experience. In Ellison’s view, this experience, a simultaneous confrontation of “social and political terrors” was a rite of passage for African American children. The parents who risked their lives facing angry mobs in front of Central High School were “aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish that the problem didn’t exist) the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American.”91

This was the only criticism to which Arendt conceded. In a personal (unpublished) letter sent to Ellison, she admitted: “it was precisely this attitude of sacrifice that I did not get.”⁹² But this was hardly a concession, and it did not cancel her arrogant dismissal of the NAACP’s position in support of school desegregation over the abrogation of racist legislation. “Oppressed minorities have never been a good judge of their own situation,” she proffered, clearly implying that she was a better judge.⁹³

Elizabeth Eckford’s photo played an evidentiary role in Arendt’s arguments about the importance of maintaining the social realm separate, by introducing another distinction, from the private sphere. Arendt thought that the government had violated the privacy of family by making decisions she held that only parents are authorized to make, such as what school a child attends.⁹⁴ Her own mother had decided what schools the young Arendt should attend, even in difficult times when such a decision was drastically limited by anti-Semitic legislation. Arendt believed that Eckford and the other eight black students had been used as pawns in the political battle of adults. “The girl, obviously, was asked to be a hero,” Arendt continues, “that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be.” “Have we now come to the point,” she asked rhetorically, “where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?”⁹⁵ She did not comment on the fact that the students and their families had been advised by the NAACP not to go to school on that day. Tumin took this to be evidence of how unfounded her arguments were: “Ms. Arendt obviously knows little or nothing about what actually happened in Little Rock.”⁹⁶

Arendt’s arguments on the desegregation of schools in the American South reflect her commitment to the American political tradition—as she understood it—rather than a concrete America—the society in which she herself lived. Her cultivated impartiality came across as uncaring detachment and undermined the solidarity she was trying to convey for the civil rights movement. The “Olympian authority”97 of “Reflections on Little Rock” was especially troubling to an audience struggling with the realization of their most difficult “dilemma of difference.”⁹⁸ To American readers who were incensed, worried, or scared by the events taking place in the South, the problem was not conceptual as much as practical, and their own attitude was not detached and analytical but intensely emotional.

Did Arendt think that her persona was responsible for creating confusion over some of her arguments and for alienating her American audience? Nothing she said in response to criticisms—not even in the concession she made to Ellison—suggests any interest in adjusting her style. Her main strategy of defamiliarization, to dissociate discrimination from racism, played a key role in the distinction she made between the social and the political sphere, which is one of the best known, if controversial, contributions of her political thought. At the time Arendt wrote this article, relationships between the African American and Jewish American communities were tense. Ernest Green, one of the nine black students admitted to Central High, recalls the exchange he had with a friend who was the son of a Jewish family who frequented the Jewish country club where Green worked as a towel boy: “He came up to me and said, ‘How could you do it?’ I said, ‘what do you mean, how could I do it?’ He said, ‘you seem like such a nice fellow. Why is it you want to go to Central? Why do you want to destroy our relationship?’”⁹⁹

This exchange would not have surprised Arendt. The relationship—no matter how awkward and inadequate the term seems here—that was being “destroyed” by giving a black student access to a white school is based on the right to difference. It is disturbing to think of it as a right, and not to be incensed in our moral instinct by the words of this white young man. But his response reveals how difficult the American dilemma can be: how to maintain plurality and equality at the same time, without allowing one to rule insidiously over the other, either compromising equality or eliminating plurality? As James Bohman has argued, the main point of “Reflections” is “a warning about the use of political power,” which can maintain the balance between equality and plurality.100 Whether Arendt was mistaken about the importance of desegregating schools, she was right about the dilemmas of difference in American politics. On this front, as one commentator acknowledges, “Arendt broke the ice.”¹⁰¹ Assessing her arguments decades later, Bohman claims that they were dismissed too easily by her contemporaries. Arendt was “urging us to accept clear-mindedly the real moral costs of holding both diversity and consent as necessary political values.”¹⁰² Nonetheless, she clearly failed to convince most readers, even the most well intended and sophisticated, that she was sufficiently in favor of civil rights for them to accept her morally neutral notion of discrimination. The one way in which she tried to establish communion with her readers not at the level of a political ideal defining the American Republic, but in the social sphere, was as a Jew. But this was far from a guaranteed successful strategy of identification. When she first submitted her article to Commentary—a journal with a predominantly Jewish readership—Arendt hoped that her credibility would be enhanced by the fact that she had experienced discrimination as a Jew. She asked her readers to accept that she would naturally have empathy for “oppressed minorities everywhere.”¹⁰³ That most did not make this allowance is the result of more than the fact that these were different kinds of discrimination. There were also different kinds of Jewishness involved.

A GERMAN JEW IN NEW YORK

At the time of her arrival in America, mainstream political discourse frequently featured arguments that the Nazi problem only concerned Jews and Europeans and not average Americans. Public sentiment was reflected in official immigration policy, as until the end of World War II very few Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime obtained entry.¹⁰⁴ Arendt was a European Jewish immigrant at a time when most Americans opposed increases in immigration quotas to aid Jews from Austria and Germany. She, however, was not any Jew. Ezra Pound would not have seen her, to use his disturbingly anti-Semitic language, as a “small Jew” because she was too prominent and a survivor.105 Nor did American Jews, in all likelihood, picture someone like her when they thought of their relatives killed by Hitler in Europe. “The line-up was always before my eyes,” wrote Alfred Kazin. “I could imagine my father and mother, my sister and myself, our original tenement family of ‘small Jews,’ all too clearly—fuel for the flames, dying by a single flame that burned us all up at once.”¹⁰⁶ Arendt was probably not in this line-up despite her close call at Gurs.

At a time when many New York intellectuals were both learning more about the destruction of the European Jews in extermination camps and reflecting on and learning more about their own Jewish roots, Arendt struck many of them as more German than Jewish. Kazin depicts her as “more influenced by Christianity than by Jewish tradition. . . . Even her acquired taste for republican liberty rather than social meliorism reflected her basic conditioning in the profound sense of the self at the heart of German Protestantism and German philosophy.” This portrait of a Jewish woman as a German Gentile prioritizes her identification as European to present her as quintessentially different from most Americans:

The real drama of European exiled writers in America—I limit myself to Mann and Arendt—is the contrast between their instinctive European sense of history and the optimistic American belief—should I call it the old American optimism?—that the future is as real as the present. . . . The America that began to rearm in 1940, miraculously recovered from the Depression, had a bounce, a new faith in progress as its destiny, that contrasted with the exhaustion and fearfulness of many exiles.¹⁰⁷

Thomas Mann was commonly seen as the very symbol of German Kultur—a new Goethe revered but clearly different from most Americans, intellectuals or not. Placed in the same category as Mann—an association that would not have pleased Arendt, who disliked Mann’s novels and even more so his political writing—she becomes German by association and non-American by implied dissociation.

The perception of Arendt through the terministic screen of German culture occurred within the broader context of the reception of other German exiles, not all Jews, who had fled to America during the war.108 Long after the war, the complaints that the exiles changed American culture for the worse came from some prominent academics, not merely uninformed xenophobes. In 1963, “exposing” the German contamination of American cultural life—from the thematic of films to the spread of psychoanalysis—Allan Bloom accused the inevitable clash, as he perceived it, between the American spirit and German thought:

German thought [post-Hegel] tended not toward liberation from one’s own culture, as did earlier thought, but toward reconstituting the rootedness in one’s own, which has been shattered by cosmopolitanism, philosophical and political. . . . We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had as its starting point dislike of ours and our goals.¹⁰⁹

By contrast to what Arendt had written to her friend Jaspers in 1946, for people like Bloom there was an American national tradition, one that was incompatible with the German one. Such a condemnation may not have been shared by the sophisticated cosmopolitans among New York intellectuals but the premise was. Writers like Kazin, for example, would not have easily succumbed to such oversimplification. Nevertheless, the more they positioned Arendt as German (admiringly or not), the more she remained foreign, especially to the American intellectuals for whom Jewishness was not merely a common ethnic background but also a collective ethos, which extended even to those who were not Jews. Barrett, who was not Jewish, felt so much at home in the “pervasively Jewish” circle of the New York intellectuals that he was not completely surprised when told by Sydney Hook (who was Jewish) that he (Barrett) “had more of a New York Jewish intonation than he [Hook].”¹¹⁰ Arendt not only had a thick German accent, but after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was excommunicated by her own people.

Originally published as a series of reports written for the New Yorker, Eichmann in Jerusalem was released as a book in 1963. The deluge of criticism prompted Arendt to publish a revised second edition in 1964 in which she corrected some factual errors while leaving the controversial theses of the book unchanged. She had been accused of having offered an outrageously flawed historical account: one critic counted 665 mistakes, possibly an exaggeration, yet still indicative of the magnitude of the problems raised by the text. Jacob Robinson, one of the harshest critics, devoted an entire book to identifying Arendt’s errors and meticulously refuting her arguments.111 Yet disagreements over factual inaccuracy do not explain the proportions of the controversy. The criticism issued against Eichmann in Jerusalem was exceptional in intensity and scale. The book was controversial primarily because of how Arendt portrayed Adolph Eichmann, SS lieutenant colonel in charge with overseeing the deportation of Jews to extermination camps, as a common family man and a good employee in the Nazi bureaucracy. She portrayed him as someone who merely did his job without fully understanding or worrying about consequences. Also controversial were her claims that the Jewish Councils should have done more to prevent the extermination of their people. Even more problematic was her claim that the Jewish Councils had actually collaborated in some instances with the Nazis in implementing the Final Solution. Overall, the book shocked all the more because its author was a Jew.

Among her critics were lesser known and arguably opportunistic authors who profited from the controversy by using it as an occasion to lobby for interventions that otherwise would have gone unheard. Even so, these were joined by people who were once her friends and were prestigious scholars, such as Gershom Scholem, or by well-known American intellectuals and political commentators, such as Lionel Abel, Irving Howe, and even by her erstwhile political mentor Kurt Blumenfeld.¹¹² The Council of Jews from Germany and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith both publicly denounced the book. Nonetheless, the book did have supporters, who comprised an equally diverse group, including prestigious intellectuals, such as Mary McCarthy, Stephen Spender, and Daniel Bell, and, perhaps most important among them, camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim.113

Eichmann in Jerusalem remains one of the fifty most influential books written after the war according to Time magazine. The phrase used in the subtitle, “banality of evil,” has become almost a cliché in journalistic and political discourse. In more or less simplified form, some of Arendt’s arguments in this book have become standard in conversations about the Holocaust. Regardless how vilified it was by its critics, the book has made a deep impact on political consciousness especially in America, not only because Holocaust survivors represented a significant number in this country, but also because of the political moral of Arendt’s account: if a totalitarian regime like the one responsible for the Final Solution relied, not on monsters, but on an effective ideology and a bureaucracy, totalitarianism could take root in any advanced bureaucratic society—even in America (or especially here, Marcuse would argue). Similar to “Little Rock,” the stranger persona in Eichmann in Jerusalem is a powerful epistemic tool that leads to striking conceptual originality. Unlike “Little Rock,” Eichmann in Jerusalem did not deal with a specifically American matter so there seemed to be less risk for overstepping boundaries. But the implications of her main theses were deeply significant for American politics at a time of major turmoil when the Vietnam War had reached its escalation under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s leadership and the increased violence in the conflict between Palestinians and U.S.-backed Israel. Irving Howe deplored the influence Arendt’s depiction of the Jewish Councils would have on “hundreds of thousands of good middle-class Americans [who] will have learned from those articles that the Jewish leadership in Europe was cowardly, inept, and even collaborationist.”¹¹⁴ But so many more middle-class Americans were outraged by the book and offered not only full support to the Jewish victims but also to the Israeli state. A reviewer of Margarette von Trotha’s 2013 cinematic rendition of the controversy complained that Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann as a small-minded bureaucrat turned many Americans against Vietnam veterans, who had also followed orders.¹¹⁵

I will not review in detail the objections marshaled against the book, or indeed the defense, as both have received comprehensive coverage elsewhere.116 I will focus instead on Arendt’s persona and its connections to the book’s ideas and style, both of which so many of her critics found offensive. Her style was not just an expository choice among others possible but the hallmark of her stranger persona and indeed the key to her conception of evil, which was now modified from the notion of a “radical evil” she had advanced in her work on totalitarianism. Arendt’s stranger persona in Eichmann in Jerusalem has been perceived by many of her American readers as a betrayal of her Jewish origins. Scholem deplored her “frequently almost sneering and malicious tone” and her “flippancy” and “overtones of malice.”¹¹⁷ She had written the book, he concluded, as though she was not really a daughter of her people, without any love for the Jews. Indeed, there are few indications in the entire book that the author is Jewish and no indication of any special compassion for or solidarity with the Jews qua Jews. Arendt distanced herself from her Jewish identity to create an analytic vantage point from which to report the Eichmann trial. This distancing relies on narrative omniscience and uses Eichmann’s viewpoint to examine the Final Solution. Arendt deliberately spoke at times in Eichmann’s voice—as she imagines it based on both historical documents and her observations during the trial—to narrate critical events in which he played a role, such as in the deportation of Jews to extermination camps, in organizing shooting campaigns, and in implementing the last stages of the Final Solution. That does not mean, however, that she also agreed with Eichmann’s perspective.

In response to Scholem’s criticism, Arendt explained, “If you missed the irony of the sentence—which was plainly in oratio obliqua, reporting Eichmann’s own words—I really can’t help it.”¹¹⁸ But it was precisely irony and other stylistic choices that contributed to the controversial nature of the book. According to Walter Lacquer, “Miss Arendt was attacked not so much for what she said, [as] for how she said it.”¹¹⁹ The expository techniques Arendt chose—the use of irony and indirect free speech, instead of, for example, a tragic tone combined with narrative techniques that would convey a distancing from Eichmann and emotional identification with the victims of the Holocaust—are the specific techniques associated in this case with her stranger persona. They can also be explained within the broader context of her political philosophy with its deep-seated suspicion of the tragic mode.120

Arendt’s conception of tragedy is Aristotelian, in that it emphasizes the audiences’ cathartic identification with the victims as a way of “understand[ing] and accept[ing] the existence of painful realities they cannot change.”¹²¹ But she also believed that cathartic identification leads to resignation rather than action and thus cannot help us really learn anything from a troubled past. She held that emotional involvement does not encourage lucid analysis. Instead, she argued that “those young German men and women who every once in a while—on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial—treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the weight of the past, their father’s guilt; rather, they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.”¹²²

Instead of a narrative technique that would clearly convey compassion for the victims, and condemn the murderers, Arendt muddled the very distinction, by using “the fiction of a non-partisan, distanced point of observation, and assumed the fictional voice of a mobile observer who was also concerned with the voice of the observed murderer.”¹²³ This position of a mobile observer gives her stranger persona, which was already known to be that of an impartial observer, a new dimension of moral indifference equally distant and detached from both the victims and their killer.

Arendt was present for the court proceedings as an American reporter. Nevertheless, she observed alternatively as a Jew, a war survivor, an opponent of the Israeli state, and an objective journalist. The only two times when she refers specifically to herself in the entire book appear at the very beginning. In the first instance, she describes the entrance of the three judges presiding as the court usher shouted “at the top of his voice,” “Beth Hamishpath—the House of Justice . . . making us jump to our feet.” Here, she introduces herself as a member of the audience present in the courtroom but without clarifying to her readers that she herself was Jewish, a former inmate at an internment camp, and a political refugee. Presumably the readers of the New Yorker would have known some of that and may even have been familiar with her work. Her decision not to make a discursive space for herself in such terms is, nevertheless, interesting. By contrast, she describes the setting of the trial very carefully, identifying all of the participants—the court stenographers, the translators, the accused, the witnesses, the prosecutor with his staff of four assistant attorneys, and the counsel for the defense (accompanied for the first weeks of the trial by an assistant). This careful reconstruction of the stage of the show and of its protagonists is issued from the perspective of an impartial spectator whose observations are unobstructed by any physical, psychological, or symbolic constraints. Indeed, when referring to the multi-language translations of the proceedings, Arendt sounds as though she could hear all of them at once: “the radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German.”124 Indeed, she spoke all three languages and could make such an assessment, but the polyglot comes across as equally detached from any of the languages (and communities) spoken at the trial.

The multilingual discourse of the trial was designed to acknowledge its international significance, but this is precisely why Arendt saw it as a staged political melodrama: “there they were, seated at the top of the raised platform, facing the audience as from the stage in a play. The audience was supposed to represent the whole world,” united in its condemnation of the Holocaust. But this goal, she thinks, was not achieved:

If the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings, the reality was falling short of expectations and purposes. The journalists remained faithful for not much more than two weeks, after which the audience changed drastically. It was now supposed to consist of Israelis, of those who were too young to know the story or, as in the case of Oriental Jews, had never been told it.¹²⁵

With this shift, Arendt’s own argument shifts toward a critique of Israel rather than mere objective coverage of the trial. If the press is no longer the audience, intended or real, where does Arendt herself fit?¹²⁶ She finally introduces herself in the story, not just as one of the few journalists who stayed beyond the first weeks of the trial (obviously, not the entire journalists’ camp had left), but as a Jew. In making such a self-identification, however, Arendt simultaneously distances herself from other Jews:

The trial was supposed to show them [the intended young audience members] what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life. . . . But in this audience there were hardly any young people, and it did not consist of Israelis as distinguished from Jews. It was filled with “survivors,” with middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself, who knew by heart all there was to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions.127

While Arendt does not mention explicitly the professional role in which she was attending the trial, as a journalist and reporter for the American media, references to other journalists place her in that category and attribute to her the associated ethic of objectivity and impartiality. Indeed, she identifies herself first as a sort of disembodied spectator who surveys the scene and the agents from a bird’s eye view and then places herself in a position of moral and epistemic authority. She is one of the survivors, and as such, someone who already knows “all there was to know.” Combined with what critics perceived as lack of compassion for the victims, this claim to omniscience could easily seem arrogant.

Much of the negative reaction to the book was caused by the confusion created by its narrative style, which alternates between recounting Eichmann’s activities during the war as told by Eichmann himself, Arendt’s assessment of that account, and historical evidence available at the time about Eichmann. The story is assembled from three sources that have different degrees of verisimilitude and epistemic authority: his own autobiographical version, which was obviously designed to exculpate him; a third-person view that reflects not only on events and facts but also on Eichmann’s own perspective on them; and a historical view that places Eichmann in the broader context of the Nazi apparatus. These three perspectives are interwoven in a way that makes distinguishing one from the other difficult. Consider the overlap of Eichmann’s perspective and Arendt’s, fusing in free indirect speech, in the following example, in which Eichmann is discussing his role as the official appointed with the handling of the paperwork for the Jews who were being deported from Germany:

He and his men and the Jews were all “pulling together,” and whenever there were any difficulties the Jewish functionaries would come running to him to “unburden their hearts,” to tell him “all their grief and sorrow,” and to ask for his help. The Jews “desired” to emigrate, and he, Eichmann, was there to help them, because it so happened that at the same time the Nazi authorities had expressed a desire to see their Reich Judenrein.128

The use of quotation marks is clearly designed to differentiate Eichmann’s own words from Arendt’s, but the citation is inserted in a third-person narrative where the scare quotes can be easily missed. It is Eichmann who believes that he helped the Jews, not Arendt. Arendt preserves and highlights the euphemisms Eichmann uses to describe the situation, as a mere coincidence between the Jews’ own wish to leave Germany and the Nazi policy, precisely because she wants to focus readers’ attention on Eichmann’s point of view—to get them to see the Nazi’s treatment of Jews as he saw it.

Arendt guides readers through narrative technique to a particular perception of reality. Usually, this narrative technique, focalization, can be character- or narrator-based. When we follow the logic of the story, we tend to associate the character-bound focalization with more authenticity because we assume that a perspective “from the inside” is more accurate and reliable.¹²⁹ Yet the question still remains—the question that upset Scholem and others to the point of repudiating their friend—why did she not report Eichmann’s claims at the trial using only direct speech, thus preserving intact the first-person perspective and signaling a clear distance between her view and Eichmann’s? Why blend third-person accounts with the first-person perspective?

The answer is that she wanted to guide the readers, through indirect free speech, into the mental universe of Eichmann. Her manner of reproducing Eichmann’s comments functions as a strategy of defamiliarization because it allows Arendt to introduce a perspective that is radically different from the one her readers would have already known. She presents this perspective without explicitly qualifying it as perverse, precisely because Eichmann did not see himself as perverse. In fact, several times during the trial, he insisted that he had tried to help Jews.

To consider the possibility that a man accused of being responsible for the death of millions of Jews actually helped them requires, of course, a morally uncomfortable leap of imagination. But it was precisely this effort that interested Arendt because it allowed her to introduce the idea that the Nazi criminal was not a murderer in the common sense of the term—someone who sets out to kill and knows that he is killing—but a new historical character that no longer sees the murder for what it is. The psychological mechanism of such a character is not mere self-deception but a more complicated process of being detached from the world around him.

For Arendt, Eichmann is primarily a man incapable of perceiving reality accurately because he is unable to think for himself. Thus, he was the ideal candidate for serving a totalitarian regime that took over his consciousness and controlled his perceptions to the point where he could see deportations as emigrations, thinking in the language of euphemisms used by the Nazis. This is the discourse of a regime that deliberately veiled the meaning of its actions—such as deportations as a preliminary step to mass murder—in terms designed to allow avoidance of responsibility for such actions. Arendt explains, “those who were told explicitly of the Fuehrer’s orders were no longer mere ‘bearer of orders,’ but were advanced to ‘bearers of secrets,’ and a special oath was administered to them.” For the rest of the members of the Nazi apparatus, a special set of “language rules” were designed to replace “bald words as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’” with “prescribed code names for killing [such as] ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderhandlung).”130

According to Arendt, Eichmann had internalized these “languages rules” to the point where he could not see what they were hiding. Arendt shows the impact of “languages rules” on Eichmann by using direct speech, sometimes quite extensively, as in the case of one of Eichmann’s stories featuring his relation with the Jewish Councils. In reporting the exchange he had with one of the representatives of the Vienna Jewish Council, an older man named Storfer, who had requested his help upon being sent to an extermination camp, Eichmann presents his response as the compassionate reaction of a helpless friend. Arendt introduces the narrative in her own voice and then shifts to Eichmann’s voice:

Eichmann had received a telegram from Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently requested to see Eichmann. “I said to myself: O.K., this man has always behaved well, that is worth my while . . . I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says—I remember it only vaguely—“If only he had not been so clumsy; he went into hiding and tried to escape,” something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done, neither Dr. Ebner nor I not anybody could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz and asked Hoss to see Storfer, “Yes, yes [Hoss said], he is in one of the labor gangs.” With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow: I said: “Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!”131

Storfer, the narrative continues, asked Eichmann if he could at least be relieved of work at Auschwitz. That turned out to be impossible as well. Eichmann arranged to get a special task (an easier one, in his view) for Storfer, swiping the gravel paths with a broom. This, and the fact that he had had such a friendly exchange with him, gave Eichmann a “great inner joy.” After quoting Eichmann’s account in its entirety, Arendt reverted to her own voice to bring the story to closure: “Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead—not gassed, apparently, but shot.”¹³² Her tone is neutral, and it is up to the reader to be moved and outraged at the tragic fate of one of Eichmann’s victims.

Arendt’s use of character-bound focalization allows her to challenge the master plot of the pathologically cruel and demonic Nazi officer who takes pleasure in seeing his victims suffer. By letting Eichmann narrate the events, she introduces a radically different perspective on these events, stressing that it is his but making it nevertheless coherent. The events are emplotted as if they followed not just a chronological order but also a logical one. The order is such: as representative of the Jewish council in Vienna, Storfer had been cooperative, and Eichmann wanted to express his gratitude. It was not, however, possible to help him, especially as Storfer had put himself in a bad situation by trying to flee arrest. Unable to help, Eichmann conveyed his regret and arranged for a less demanding task for Storfer at Auschwitz. This sequence appears coherent only because Eichmann sees it as such. By recounting the events as Eichmann saw them following one another, Arendt forces the reader to adopt Eichmann’s perspective, including the perspective of himself: a reasonable and even compassionate man who is doing his job, dutifully following orders while trying to be helpful.

Narrative coherence acts as a form of explanation—in this case, an explanation for Eichmann’s behavior—for not saving Storfer’s life. Usually, coherent stories are more likely to be deemed credible but only insofar as they are consistent with other, culturally shared plots. Narrative explanations not only justify the occurrences of certain events, but they can also function as scaffolding for anticipation, or “structures in terms of the reader, listener, or viewer’s possession of a range of possibilities. We accept a narrative ‘explanation’ by reacting emotionally to the events recounted in a story. A narrative explanation is believable within the confines of the story-world created in the narrative.”133 Because Eichmann’s story does not resonate with a culturally sanctioned master plot, its coherence becomes morally outrageous. The effect of retelling Eichmann’s story using his own words is one of identifying the gulf between his first-person perspective and a third-person one, Arendt’s, not in order to ratify one or the other as much as to use this difference for pedagogical purposes. Eichmann’s story allows Arendt to offer an alternative portrait and with it an alternative explanation for what made crimes such as Eichmann’s possible. To this end, entering Eichmann’s mind becomes crucial. The reader also hears the voice of a Gestapo official called Dr. Ebner, quoted directly by Eichmann. In the narrative reproduced by Arendt, Eichmann quotes Ebner to support his own claims, hoping that they would seem more credible. By maintaining the quotes from Ebner, Arendt was trying to show that the only authority Eichmann recognized, and took to be universally valid, was that of Nazi officials. Through direct speech, Arendt recreates Eichmann’s mental universe in which compassion is replaced by bureaucratic politeness and judgment by bureaucratic servitude. In such a mental universe, events lack a tragic dimension because there is no moral or emotional context in which they could be identified as tragic. Eichmann could only focus on events isolated from the sequence to which they belong—arrest-deportation-death. In using direct speech, Arendt can also show what is completely absent from the world of this consciousness: the victim. Missing from Eichmann’s account is Storfer’s voice. This is the voice that he never quoted, only paraphrased.

The defamiliarization offered by direct speech and character-bound focalization marks a clear departure from the mainstream explanation of the Nazi criminal as the radical embodiment of evil. Arendt conceptualized evil not in Kantian terms as violation of moral norms but in Augustinian ones as absence of moral norms, as a fracture in the moral bone of humanity.134 Defamiliarization reveals an important characteristic of the world of the Nazi, which is devoid of pity or compassion, not because its people are diabolical but because they do not see or hear their victims.

The impartiality of Arendt’s stranger persona is illustrated by the double estrangement working in the example analyzed above. On the one hand, she seeks to distance herself from the common plot of the Nazi madman. On the other hand, she also distances herself from Eichmann’s perspective, not only by relegating it to him through the use of direct speech but also through the irony contained in the final, concluding sentence, which adopts Eichmann’s own words—after this “normal human encounter”—only to signal their absurdity. The impartiality feature in Eichmann in Jerusalem works through irony, which was repeatedly identified as one of the most offensive qualities of the book, as revealing a cold, unsympathetic Arendt. Yet Arendt only used irony to express her attitude toward Eichmann, not toward his victims. Irony is an apt trope for estrangement because it is predicated on a double discourse, a literal one and its negation (saying one thing and meaning the opposite). Irony is also a figure of judgment because the negation of the literal discourse has an evaluative component.135

Arendt’s impartial observer is an ironist who judges events and situations after she has recreated them from the perspective of their main characters and after she has entered these characters’ mental universe. Irony defines a moral framework for her because it enables judgment and condemnation. However, it does not make her into what Richard Rorty would call an ironist, a moral relativist who can entertain several worldviews at the same time and subscribe to different vocabularies without strict preference for one of her own.¹³⁶ Rather, Arendt writes, to use Berel Lang’s distinction, as a romantic ironist, “cast as a transcendent knower of ironic reversal from a position outside it . . . in principle outside any [and every] particular setting.”¹³⁷

Arendt’s most irate critics pointed to the irony in Eichmann in Jerusalem as a sign of her being too willing to excuse Eichmann. Indeed, she had used irony to achieve proximity to Eichmann, yet not as a way of excusing his perspective but as a strategy for making this perspective appear banal, rather than extraordinary. Consider her analysis of Eichmann’s use of euphemisms in describing the fate of Jews during the war:

Eichmann’s distortions of reality were horrible because of the horrors they dealt with, but in principle they were not very different from things current in post–Hitler Germany. There is, for instance, Franz-Josef Strauss, former minister of Defense. . . . Strauss asked a widely publicized and apparently very successful question of Mr. Brandt—“What were you doing those twelve years outside Germany? We know what we were doing here in Germany”—with complete impunity, without anybody’s batting an eye, let alone reminding the member of the Bonn government that what Germans in Germany were doing during those years has become notorious indeed. The same “innocence” is to be found in a recent casual remark by a respected and respectable German literary critic . . . reviewing a study of literature in the Third Reich, he said that its author “belonged with those intellectuals who at the outbreak of barbarism deserted us without exception.” This author was of course a Jew, and he was expelled by the Nazis and himself deserted by Gentiles. . . . Incidentally, the word “barbarism,” today frequently applied by Germans to the Hitler period, is a distortion of reality; it is as though Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals had fled a country that was no longer “refined” enough for them.138

By reproducing statements made by prominent politicians of the day, and then commenting on them ironically, Arendt makes it possible to compare different perspectives on reality. Once established, the comparative mode can be carried beyond a discussion of Eichmann. It prompts readers to criticize not just Nazis, but Germans; not just acts committed during a war but in times of peace as well; not just Germans, but also Americans. The ironic stance thus becomes a platform for moral evaluation extended beyond the task at hand to a more general reflection and condemnation. The purpose of this condemnation is not to indict all Germans (a generalization Arendt considered, following Jaspers, untenable), but to show how responsibility can be shifted and guilt avoided.¹³⁹ The Jerusalem tribunal had sought to absolutize guilt to the point where it could not be attributed to anyone in particular. It was the trial itself that made arguments like Eichmann’s possible, showcasing in its disturbing nuance the process through which evil can be justified. As Arendt pointed out, the purpose of the trial was not so much to establish whether Eichmann was guilty but to show the magnitude of his guilt. Arendt called it, for that reason, a show trial.

The relation between different perspectives compared within the framework of irony is a hierarchical one, as indicated by the following example: “What for Hitler . . . was among the war’s main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.”¹⁴⁰ Here, the first two designations of the Final Solution, as a military objective and as a bureaucratic assignment, acquire a tragic dimension because they contrast so powerfully with the third designation of an apocalypse. Using three different names for the same event is, in part, necessitated by the frame of the trial, which requires that words that convey judgment be avoided until the end. The conventions of the trial prescribe an avoidance of a clear-cut terminology that would reflect the legal and moral assessment available only after the verdict has been issued. Yet this was an unusual trial, and it was precisely such an avoidance that was impossible, indeed even undesirable for the Israeli officials. At the time Arendt was writing, the third designation of the Final Solution—the extermination of Jews—operates as the default term. Any other use functions as unexpected.

Arendt’s technique of defamiliarization was to alternate perspectives, by using different naming devices, in order to create an awareness of the Nazi, or totalitarian, mind. Its cruelty and inhumanity lie not in criminal intention but in the very lack of recognizing criminal actions as such. Read in the inverse order—which is the actual order in which one makes sense of the depictions—the characterization of the Jewish genocide (“literally the end of the world” for Jews) as a job dutifully executed toward reaching a military objective sounds like an indictment. It brings out precisely what the Nazi regime did not have: a moral conscience that distinguished between criminals and their victims. Without such a distinction, pity or humane treatment becomes impossible. The Nazis, by this logic, did not just dehumanize their victims (as many regimes do) to gives themselves permission to annihilate; they did not even recognize the category of the victim. Why, then, judge the Nazi regime from the viewpoint of a victim?

Irony affords an avoidance of the victim-standpoint because it tips the scale: it is no longer the Nazi world represented as the ultimate power crushing the completely powerless. Instead, the ironist is now the one who asserts power by dominating the target of her ironic discourse. But such detachment and empowering through irony required avoiding being in the position of the Jew as victim. This was the position Arendt avoided in her own life and career—a position she argued against as morally and politically pernicious. She would have agreed on this issue with Edward Said. I will return to this issue in chapter 5, where I discuss Said’s criticism of Zionism as a politics of victimhood.

Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann and of his victims had profound consequences for the understanding of political evil, especially in an age when confrontations between nuclear world powers required new entries in a rhetoric of blame. Removing evil from the moral realm (as thus from particular nations or individuals) into institutional and bureaucratic machinery made it possible to indict the Nazis rather than Germany, or Israel rather than the Jewish people, and it would make it possible for Marcuse to indict capitalism instead of just America. But in targeting totalitarianism as an amoral and super-individual entity, Arendt also de-emphasized, as Deborah Lipstadt has argued, the role played by individuals’ beliefs and attitudes. These coalesced over centuries, Lipstadt claimed, into anti-Semitism. For Lipstadt, a Jewish American historian who faced in court Holocaust denier David Irving, anti-Semitism is, even now, the backdrop of her life, as it was for Arendt’s. Both Lipstadt and Arendt worry, though at different historical moments, that the Holocaust could be repeated. Yet their worry has a different source. For Lipstadt, it is anti-Semitism, for Arendt, it was totalitarianism. How one resists anti-Semitism and how one resists totalitarianism differ widely, and here Arendt’s commitment to the political potential of the pariah becomes again relevant. Resisting the total domination of totalitarianism requires an oppositional stance that can challenge the very mechanisms of that system, as she had done in Eichmann in Jerusalem by first identifying those mechanisms. While Arendt would have wanted the Jewish councils to act in such defiance, as pariahs, she outraged readers who only saw those Jews as victims, rather than potential, dead heroes. More importantly, this vision of resistance enforced, albeit indirectly, her perspective on the limits of resistance as presented in “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas.” Both essays condemn accommodation and praise strategic rebellion.

Upon publication in The New Yorker, Arendt’s reports on the Eichmann trial were compared to James Baldwin’s article, “A Letter from the South,” which had been published a little while before.141 In contrast to Arendt, Baldwin employed a highly emotional rhetoric to describe the despair in the life of African Americans who felt in the South like strangers in their own country. As Anson Rabinbach puts it, “many (Jewish American intellectuals) were uncomfortable with how Arendt had attempted to tell the story of the Holocaust in a way that markedly departed from Baldwin’s ‘melodramatic’ story of black victims and white perpetrators.”¹⁴² Baldwin made a dramatically clear distinction between the black victims and their white oppressors. By muddling that distinction, Arendt was also making it hard to understand what kind of redress was necessary. Furthermore, the Eichmann controversy unfolded at a time when American Jews represented a “model of ethnic assimilation” to be adopted by other minorities as well, including the African American. Arendt opposed assimilation by representing its extreme consequences in the alleged collaboration of the Jewish councils. Her arguments in “Reflections” amounted to a similar attitude; by identifying Elizabeth Eckford as a potential parvenue, Arendt was also ominously predicting the suffering the parvenu can never avoid completely. It was an unacceptable position to many Americans, not only because it threatened the moral stature of the victims of the Holocaust and ignored the struggles of African Americans but also because it questioned a key American principle of social integration.

Arendt’s stranger persona came across as an oppositional stance that made her commitment to a shared polis often go unnoticed. After the publication of his devastating review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Podhoretz went to visit Arendt in her small Morningside Heights apartment to discuss with her, point by point, his objections to the book. While insisting that he made good faith efforts to explain his position and convince her that she was wrong, Podhoretz presents an inflexible Arendt who does not offer counterarguments but merely dismissals.143 Most telling, however, is a seemingly minor detail in the narrative: Arendt neglected to turn on the light as the conversation continued into the evening, which caused increasing discomfort to Podhoretz. Inflexible and surrounded by dark, Arendt comes across as an ominous force, invisible yet powerfully present, arguing in ample exposes accompanied by long periods of silence and becoming increasingly hostile. Podhoretz felt ambushed, even though he was the attacker and Arendt had been the target of his devastating criticism.

In von Trotha’s cinematic account of the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, Arendt comes across as stubborn yet passionate about ideas, and more than anything, determined to understand a fundamental aspect of the human experience: the evil. Renounced by some of her closest friends and demonized by her critics, she is alone with her books, looking pensive and melancholy. The film ends with Arendt lying down next to her books and smoking with eyes half closed, engaged in the vita contemplativa she praised in her philosophy, Arendt strikes a pose that is an interesting variation on the visual trope of the thinker from Lorenzo de Medici’s to Auguste Rodin’s representations. This calm and self-confident, yet also concentrated and troubled, Arendt captures well the stranger persona that inspired the brilliant ideas presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as their detraction.

CONCLUSION: THE THINKER IN POLITICS

In the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, Scholem accused Arendt of lacking ahavat Yisrael (love of the Jewish people). Instead of protesting against the accusation, surprisingly, she agreed:

How right you are that I have no such love. . . . I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective—not the German, French or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else might exist. The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. . . . We would both agree that patriotism is impossible without constant opposition and critique.144

It was a patriotism of “constant opposition and critique” that connected Arendt to America. She insisted that racism cannot be stopped through military intervention and that genocide is not the product of evil minds but that of bureaucratic machinery. These were two of the most disturbing forms of political evil of the twentieth century, but they remain a cause for alarm and vigilance. Her take on these subjects differed markedly from that of other American commentators, and Arendt realized the difficulty of taking on such a task. The very fact that she did it bespeaks a determination that is, more than intellectual confidence, civic courage.

If she did not “love” the American people, she was certainly enamored with the political idea of America, to which she remained committed, sometimes against Americans themselves. At odds with most all other scholars and intellectuals of her time, Arendt spoke from an “alienated consciousness,” to use an apt phrase offered by Dana Villa.145 In the interview granted to Günter Gaus, she insisted on presenting herself as a political thinker, and not a philosopher proper.¹⁴⁶ This is not mere rhetorical self-effacement for the well-established philosopher she already was. Taken seriously, it reveals her concern that philosophers do not belong in the polis. Some of her American critics thought the same, and indeed rejected her political insights as too steeped in the “great Western” tradition in philosophy, and therefore incompatible with the “moral distinctiveness of representative [American] democracy.”¹⁴⁷ Arendt’s distinction between a philosopher and a political thinker goes back, as she herself points out, to a founding moment not only in Western philosophy, but also in Western politics. “The gulf between philosophy and politics,” she reminds us, “opened historically with the trial and condemnation of Socrates.” Yet she felt no sympathy for Socrates because, in her view, “he was not only unable to persuade his judges but could also not convince his friends.”¹⁴⁸

Neither did Arendt convince all of her friends, but she impressed upon all her American readers the importance of a politics dedicated to human plurality.¹⁴⁹ Anthony Grafton remembers the conversations around his family dinner table, during the Eichmann controversy, and credits Arendt with inspiring the emergence of a public and political discourse in which intellectuals could play an important role.¹⁵⁰ Grafton does not think Arendt was right, nor did his father, who had tried to interview her for Life magazine. So the question always remains: were Arendt’s views right or wrong? One of the legacies of Plato is a conception of truth as the opposite of mere opinion. Philosophical discourse (dialectic), in this view, is the opposite of political discourse, which can only aim at persuasion. Yet in contemplating whether to choose the side of politics or philosophy, Arendt refused to get caught in the opposition between truth and opinion, or dialectic and rhetoric. Instead, she revisited the Socratic notion of opinion, doxa, and tried to reinvigorate its moral value:

To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, of what appears to me. This doxa had as its topic not what Aristotle called the eikos, the probable, the many verisimilia (as distinguished from the unum verum, the one truth, on one hand, and the limitless falsehoods, the falsa infinita, on the other), but comprehended the world as it opens itself to me. . . . The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it; and that the “sameness” of the world, its commonness . . . resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the world—and consequently their doxai (opinions)—“both you and I are human.”151

Arendt’s political positions and arguments were shaped by the worlds that had opened up to her, from Königsberg to Berlin, Paris, and New York. Yet she also insisted that experiences and opinions must add up coherently in a compelling image of a shared world. The role of a political thinker is to distill the different opinions of a community into an articulation of their common world, “not to rule the city but to be its ‘gadfly,' not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful.”¹⁵² This was her version of the Socratic ideal, and she tried to emulate it in the figure of the pariah.

In “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas” and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt questioned the American doxa of that time (which remains, in part, our doxa today). Her arguments came from observing the uncommon in the most familiar occurrences, of which the young Arendt wrote to Heidegger. She argued, as Villa aptly put it, with the originality of “a radically estranged theorist . . . whose work reflects the consciousness of the exile rather than of the connected critic.”¹⁵³ She was politically engaged but also emotionally detached. To the “culture of sentiment” enveloping patriotic discourse in America, Arendt responded with theoretical abstractions, or with irony.¹⁵⁴ In her view, there was no room for the “heart in politics.”¹⁵⁵ And this was the most important lesson she had learned from America’s Founding Fathers as she explained in On Revolution. She was justified in reminding her critics that “in political matters I am as much a native as any other American.”¹⁵⁶