Hannah Arendt: Philosophical and Moral Anchor

I had the great privilege to know the late social philosopher, historian, and chronicler of
totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. In the spring of 1965, when I was barely 23, I was in a seminar with her at the University of Chicago. She has been my philosophical and moral anchor since that time.

Arendt was a German Jew who had escaped once from Germany, in 1933, and again from Vichy France in 1941, in both cases having been “detained” by authorities — detained in Germany because she spoke and wrote against German antisemitism, detained in France because she worked for Zionist groups, brought attention as she could do the growing catastrophe of European Jewry, and worked to get Jews to Israel.

In 1941, with the grip of Vichy (collaborationist) France tightening, Arendt along with the artists Max Ernst and Marc Chagall, the writer Horace Mann, and many others, was spirited out of the country by the journalist Varian Fry and diplomat Hiram Bingham. Those two men secured exit papers and American visas and were responsible for moving some 2,000 refugees through Marseille to safer grounds.

Arendt came to the US in 1941, and continued working with Jewish groups to bring attention to the horrors in Europe. She also continued to pursue philosophical interests. Her genius would link the politics of the day with older thought, culminating in the 1951 publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, said Arendt, was something new, something beyond old concepts of autocracy and dictatorship, because it was “total,” its reach extending to the all-encompassing remanufacture of truth.

In Nazi Germany, where children were encouraged to spy on parents and the “truth” was
as mercurial as the leader’s daily pronouncements, Arendt said that “The thousand-year Reich” became as believable as the idea that your neighbor would still be your neighbor the next day.

In 1961, Arendt went to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. One of the primary architects of Germany’s “final solution” of the “Jewish problem,” Eichmann had escaped the Americans at war’s end and made it to Argentina, where he worked at a Mercedes-Benz factory. In 1960, he was discovered, apprehended and taken to Israel to stand trial.

Arendt’s coverage immediately caused ripples, especially in Jewish communities. Eichmann, Arendt told her readers, was judged by the psychologists to have a “normal mind.” They could find no locus of evil in the mind of a man who had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, and homosexuals. “Normal” people could be made to do terrible things, said Arendt, and she called her account “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Jewish intellectuals and politicians, and most of her readers were not ready to admit that this could be true, that atrocities could come from “following orders.” They were further outraged when Arendt said that Jews could have done more while in the grip of German totalitarian power; and further that there had been Jewish accommodations that only made the Nazi grip stronger.

World Jewry was loudly critical. Arendt’s counter was the Warsaw uprising, where Jews had organized and revolted. Although thousands were deported to the killing factory at
Treblinka, thousands more were killed during the month-long resistance as the Germans
tightened their grip and starved and killed. As many as 20,000 Jews from the
Warsaw ghetto survived. More importantly, their stories survived.

I invite you to compare these stories with the lame denials of Bibi Netanyahu and the sycophant American ambassador Mike Huckabee. Ask why so many Palestinian journalists have been killed, and why foreign journalists have been denied access, and why the un-doctored photos and videos of starving Palestinians are believed by most of the world but not, apparently, enough of Israeli and American politicians to make a difference.

The truth, I wager, will out. It will take time, and Jews around the world will suffer from a
backlash from the rest of the world for their government’s prosecution of the Gaza war. Or they and we Americans will ultimately admit our complicity in what are called now and will be judged in the future as “war crimes.”