The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin, New York, 2000)

Hannah Arendt ignited controversy for writing what has become the best known addition to this anthology of her work, her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and a recent film seems to have rekindled the whole debate. Her detractors have charged her with giving succour to that most evil of enemies, the Nazis, or at best that she was a good philosopher but a bad historian.

Until I have time to read her critics in detail, I personally thought I had better start by reading Arendt in her own words. It is beyond the scope of a general reader’s review of an anthology to quote the chunks of her writings that would be required to refute her critics point by point, or at least put their critiques in context, but I can now at least say that her conclusions are demanding, and that often leads to misunderstanding or misquoting.

To fully grasp her ideas would in fact require reading shelves full of books, especially when it comes to her academic texts, although Arendt helps the reader by adeptly summarising in order to share her easy familiarity (she read Kant at 14) with centuries of thinking while she develops her arguments, step by step.  One other thing that transpires from her works is her consistency and intellectual honesty, and any rebuttal of them needs to be well grounded indeed.

First of all, I think reading her essay on the oft-forgotten Rosa Luxemburg ought to put paid to any notion that Arendt was a poor historian. It was interesting to learn not only about the Polish-born revolutionary’s life here (yes, I used to have a poster of her on my wall), but how her work brought her into conflict (but not enmity) with Lenin – somewhat surprising for a Marxist, one might have been tempted to think -- and anticipated many of the failings of the Soviet Union.

But that’s not all, by any means. Arendt points out that Luxemburg’s murder (and that of Karl Liebknecht) in 1999 was sanctioned by the Weimar authorities and thus marked a tipping point that led to Hitler. She explains this far better than I, so if you want to know more, read the book.

Now for her famous series of reports in The New Yorker on the 1961-2 trial in Jerusalem of Eichmann, who had organised the deportation of millions of Jews from across German-occupied Europe to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.

In her subtitle to the piece Arendt coined the now famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ because she concluded Eichmann was a not a born monster, but rather an utter non-entity as a person who came to do monstrous deeds in a monstrous society. Indeed, Eichmann comes across as a pettifogging bureaucrat in the archive footage used in Margarethe von Trotta’s much-maligned biopic.

Eichmann was well aware of what he had done, and even used to boast about it, but he was simply thoughtless, incapable of thinking beyond Nazi clichés and even when the hangman slipped the noose around his neck. To have depicted Eichmann as a monster would have been akin to the Devil appearing in a medieval morality plays, which reminds us that Shakespeare’s Iago was far more terrifying precisely because he was human (although Arendt says Eichmann was duller than Iago, but that proves her point).

That went against the grain for many, who effectively said – and still say – that that was tantamount to letting Eichmann off the hook. What raised even more hackles was her contention that there was “cooperation between the Nazi rulers and Jewish authorities” (N.B. by no means Jews as a whole) leading to the destruction of the latter’s own people, because Eichmann negotiated with Jewish leaders over who was to be deported from each community. Only one such leader testified in Jerusalem, and Arendt charged the court with “the gravest omission” in not devoting more time to the issue.

One riposte to her report included in the anthology is from the American playwright Lionel Abel, who “charged that Arendt had made Eichmann aesthetically palatable and the Jews aesthetically repugnant”.  

While nobody is above criticism, I submit the obvious point that Arendt suffered from persecution and nearly found herself on one of Eichmann’s transports. The point is often elided and it is one Arendt never dwells on (incidentally, I think it’s to von Trotta’s credit that she resists the temptation to recreate Arendt’s escape from Camp Gurs). In this light, it is highly unlikely Arendt would have failed to sympathise with anyone who has suffered persecution, let alone her fellow Jews, including countless close friends and relatives.

Besides, Arendt had already given her reasons for focussing on the Judenräte:

“I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem court failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society."

Tragically this rings true, because the Nazis were perversely and infamously capable of making others do some of their dirty work for them, including Jews such as the Kapos and the Brenners chillingly portrayed by Russian war correspondent Vasily Grossman in his epic work Life and Fate.

As to the hand-wringing testimony of the former community leader who rhetorically asked the court, “What could we have done?” Arendt answers that while resistance was impossible, it would have been better for the Jewish leaders to simply do nothing. Chaos would have been more helpful and such people as were able to flee before boarding the transports had at least a chance to survive.

In her own words again, she summed up her approach as fiat veritas et pereat mundus, which translates as ‘let the truth be told, though the world may perish’, or to put it another way, issues cannot be ducked just because they are thorny. If that sounds trite to anyone, then I invite them to read Arendt’s thirty-page disquisition on the inevitability of truth winning out.

If I have one criticism to make of the anthology, it is that her academic work is often less readable than the Eichmann report, but as I said earlier, the former is inevitably demanding but always thought-provoking and illuminating.

For instance, it was by no means immediately obvious what the point is of her long exposition on the differences between the public and private domain, until I next read a passing reference to the theme in ‘The Social Question’. As an example of her consistency, it crops up again in her discussion of forced desegregation in the 1950s, which she said was none of a government’s business, and as a non-American I wouldn’t mind reading more about that.

If my reading of other texts is correct, Arendt believes the French Revolution to have paved the road to hell with good intentions, namely to have paid too much attention to the pressing needs of the destitute masses, which she deems to be a private rather than a public matter.

The American Revolution, she adds, was superior to the French one because it was not swayed by such inappropriate and self-defeating aims. She does recognise that the American Revolution was open to charges of hypocrisy because its claims of equality before the law did not apply to the 20% of the population who were slaves, but says slavery was Europe’s fault. I beg to differ with this latter point, because the new Republic was much slower than the mother country in ending it.

Another quibble I have was the short space devoted to her views on Heidegger, but maybe that is more personal and not central to her work. My main beef with the anthology, however, concerns the preface, which is leaden and dispensable.

Above all, I was left wondering what happened to such readable repositories of vast learning like Arendt? Here was someone who could deftly quote from Plato in Greek, from Heine in German or Shakespeare in English, and describe her approach to the truth by paraphrasing medieval Latin axioms. All of this, mind you, from someone whose chosen field was philosophy.

Again, this does not make her infallible, but it certainly makes her arguments compelling and very readable.