This collection, the first of two that will gather Hannah Arendt’s fugitive writings, contains forty papers, most but not all of which have been published before, some in German magazines, and some in English-language journals such as Commentary, Partisan Review, and The Commonweal. Its contents are very various. There are several book reviews, half a dozen essays on philosophy (or rather, on philosophers), some pieces on religion, a dedicatory letter to Karl Jaspers, an essay about Kafka, and two or three items containing material destined to form part of what is perhaps Hannah Arendt’s most important work, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The more significant essays, however, in my view, are those about Nazism. There are eleven or twelve of these, and it can be seen from their titles that they must have formed the basis of much of what Arendt later wrote in her very well-known, her almost notorious, book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). The titles include “Approaches to the German Problem,” “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” “Nightmare and Flight,” “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” “The Image of Hell,” “The Study of Concentration Camps,” “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” “At Table with Hitler,” “Understanding and Politics,” “Mankind and Terror,” and “The Eggs Speak Up” (i.e., the eggs which make the omelette).
The collection begins with an interview given by Miss Arendt to Günter Gaus, a German journalist, in 1964, then switches back to 1930 and her first known publication, a three-page article about St. Augustine. After that the contents are ordered chronologically.
There is little to be said about the book reviews. Book reviews are for the most part as lasting or as ephemeral as the works reviewed, and I fear that those in this volume are probably only of interest to the archivists and to Arendt’s devoted editor.
As to the philosophical essays, note that in 1964 Hannah Arendt said to her interviewer: “I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession is political theory . . . I have said goodbye to philosophy once and for all.” Although this volume contains pieces on Augustine, on Kierkegaard, on Dilthey, and on existentialism, these are merely exegetical, they are not original contributions to philosophy. Arendt’s frank self-description seems correct.
In the short papers on religion Hannah Arendt throws cold water at those who take a wishful-thinking attitude to the matter. She holds that whether or not religion resembles political ideology, or is morally useful and good for mankind, we cannot evade the question of truth: we need a straight answer to the straight question “Does God exist, or doesn’t he?” Her own answer, like Hume’s, is “We cannot know.”
Arendt’s style, as other readers must have noticed, is stereotypically “Germanic,” i.e., often long-winded and a bit solemn.
Some of the essays have been translated from the German but most were originally written in English. Here I have to confess to being a rather half-hearted fan. I sometimes find Arendt’s writings difficult to understand, not so much because of their ideas but because of the prose style. Arendt’s style, as other readers must have noticed, is stereotypically “Germanic,” i.e., often long-winded and a bit solemn; and the humor, such as it is, is decidedly grim. But that is not the real problem either. The real problem is her weird way with English words. In her book on violence, for example, she defines the English word power in a manner that defies the intuitions of at least one native speaker of the language. Then she builds a whole theory on the foundation of this bafflingly idiosyncratic definition. There is nothing wrong with linguistic analysis in philosophy, but linguistic analysis is worse than useless when it generates fairy tales about meanings. On the other hand, if we treat the word power simply as a short and convenient way of referring to some strange and mysterious entity first identified by Hannah Arendt, it is possible to obtain insights from On Violence (1969).
In the Gaus interview, Hannah Arendt tells us: “I still speak with a heavy accent and I often speak unidiomatically.” Her lack of idiomatic sensibility is exemplified several times in this volume. Consider for instance the word fabricate. Arendt uses the word in place of produce, create, manufacture, thus she speaks of the fabrication of theories, of corpses, and of soap. In German a Fabrikant is a manufacturer but in English a fabricator is either one who concocts stories or a downright liar. Another example is her idea that fundament means foundation. I don’t know what the former word might or might not mean in American English but in English English it refers to a part of the body which isn’t mentioned in polite society.
Arendt’s editor, Jerome Kohn, is also rather insensitive to idiom. In a footnote to Chapter 23 (“Dedication to Karl Jaspers, 1947”), he is quite entertaining—unintentionally of course. He writes: “Lieber Verehrtester (Dear Most Honored One) . . . sounds odd and stiff in English [but] it is quite natural in German: Sehr Verehrter Herr (Very Honorable Mister) was a common salutation.” Ouch! “My dear, and respected, professor” (say) and “Honored Sir” would surely be better than Mr. Kohn’s puppy-dog translations.
Arendt’s only really well-written book in English is Eichmann in Jerusalem, and one surmises that the difference is due to the discipline imposed by the circumstances of its writing—it was originally commissioned as a series of articles for The New Yorker—and also, probably, to editorial interference (or help; call it what you will). At all events, the style there is swift and clear and usually—though not, alas, invariably—meticulous as to meanings. In other words, it is pretty much the kind of style that one expected to find in The New Yorker thirty years ago.
Let’s now consider the famous phrase and subtitle the banality of evil, a phrase which, together with certain other aspects of the book, caused something of a rumpus when Eichmann in Jerusalem was first published. In a postscript (a reply to her critics), Arendt says that to label something banal “is still far from calling it commonplace.” That might be so in Arendtese, but the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition of banal is, guess what: adj. = commonplace. Still, we mustn’t quibble, since it is not too difficult to work out what she wants to say. Essentially she wants to distinguish between the crimes of the Nazis and the men who carried them out. The crimes were indeed not common, they were unprecedented. Yet we can’t say that they were unique, since it is possible they might recur. The criminals, on the other hand, were mostly ordinary, even commonplace. Adolf Eichmann, she claims, was not a monster, not a freak, not a madman; he was an uneducated and rather stupid creature, clownish, illogical, and boastful. Quite ordinary, in fact. In the end, and in spite of her disclaimer, she does implicitly, and correctly, equate banality with the commonplace, at least when speaking about the evil of men rather than the evil of their crimes. Thus the question of meaning remains cloudy, and one wishes she had never so much as heard of the English word banality. In the essays on Nazism in the volume under review, that word does not appear.
Arendt’s philosophical training did not protect her from a tendency to create false dichotomies.
Arendt’s philosophical training did not protect her from a tendency to create false dichotomies. She seems to think that if a man is a clown he cannot be a monster. She does not consider the possibility that a ludicrous person might be a monster as well as a clown. I am not sure I understand Arendt’s words on normality and social mores, but if I do it seems that she is tempted to regard normal behavior as equivalent, roughly speaking, to the behavior of a majority. Because of that she ignores, perhaps even rejects, the thought that if abnormality became commonplace it would still be abnormality. This is a mistake: if we all had tuberculosis, tuberculosis would still be a disease. It might be that Arendt’s account is influenced by anti- essentialist leanings. Anti-essentialism is a commonplace dogma of much twentieth-century European philosophy.
A human monster is not an animal with green fangs; it, or he, is nothing more or less than one who carries out monstrous deeds. On this simple and obvious understanding of the term it is clear that most of the Nazis, high and low, were monsters. However one defines or re-defines banality, it remains confusing to say that an individual who carries out monstrous crimes is banal. It would be equally confusing to claim that saintliness is banal. Even though one knows what is meant, it remains confusing. What is meant by banality here, of course, is: that which is humanly possible. And we know, of course, that monstrous crimes are humanly possible, just as superb courage is humanly possible, martyrdom is humanly possible, wonderful goodness is humanly possible. Knowing all this we also surely know that although monstrous evil can become common it should never be seen as normal. Very occasionally, in some times and some places, superb courage, and wonderful goodness, have been relatively common, yet it would be wrong to pretend that these human attributes are merely normal, that they are not noteworthy. To describe extreme evil and extreme good as normal is to carry anti-essentialism to a lunatic conclusion. Perhaps that is where it leads anyway.
Turning again to the 1964 interview, we should notice that Hannah Arendt has this to say about her aim in writing: “When I am working I am not interested in how my work might affect people … What is important for me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding.”
The search for understanding is a noble enterprise. Nevertheless, it is destined, sometimes, to be frustrated. In the essays on Nazism, and in the book about Eichmann, Hannah Arendt tries over and over again to explain, to understand. In one essay she suggests that men were willing to carry out the devilish work of extermination because they feared unemployment. She also speaks of the social rootlessness of the “bourgeoisie” (a catch-word, that), and the supposedly typical “bourgeois” desire to protect one’s wife and family. But not all the stone-faced young men described by Primo Levi had wives and children. Later she dwells on the “logic” of racism—as if, having once accepted its false premise, one was forced by logic to exterminate people. But plainly logic has nothing to do with it: you might as well say that anyone who thinks donkeys are inferior to horses is logically committed to killing donkeys. It is not clear, either, how the muddleheaded Adolf Eichmann can have been influenced by logic, even ersatz logic. Arendt herself then points out that racism cannot explain Nazism after all, since Hitler had plans to exterminate some groups of Germans.
Side by side, almost, with her attempts to explain, we find the thesis that when jurists and others try to understand unprecedented crimes, all categories of explanation fail, and indeed must fail. This is a sound point, a philosophical point too as it happens, which she backs up with empirical evidence. Thus she discusses those groups of intellectuals (the psychologists, the economists, the philosophers, etc.) who choose their own favored categories (psychology, economics, philosophical determinism, etc.) to “explain” the Nazi crimes. The failure of these efforts, she implies, is obvious.
In the end, it seems to me, Hannah Arendt’s own attempts to understand must also fail. Indeed she herself writes (in Chapter 30, “Understanding and Politics”) that “people say that one cannot fight totalitarianism without understanding it. Fortunately this is not true; if it were our case would be hopeless.”
They resemble the post hoc “explanations” given by people trying to answer questions about the antics they performed when under hypnosis.
The reason is that sometimes no explanations are possible. The Holocaust was senseless, ethnic cleansing is senseless, mass murder is senseless, and the senseless cannot be explained. Psychological and other explanations of Nazi crimes are quite unsatisfactory, as Arendt (sometimes) says. Moreover, the reasons produced by the perpetrators themselves are as senseless as their actions. They resemble the post hoc “explanations” given by people trying to answer questions about the antics they performed when under hypnosis. It doesn’t follow, though, that senseless actions cannot be thwarted, cannot be prevented. The connection between explanation and prevention is looser than think-tankers think. There are things that we can explain but not prevent (eclipses for instance), and human actions that are inexplicable but preventable. Anyway, to paraphrase Marx, the point about genocide is not to understand it but to stop it. Stopping it might require political will, a commodity sometimes in short supply (look at Haiti, look at Bosnia), but that’s another story.
The Nazi criminals were not literally mesmerized. Even if they acted under hypnosis in some metaphorical and highly stretched sense of that word, it was still right to call them to account. Toward the end of her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt quotes one of the Israeli judges, who in turn was quoting Grotius: “Punishment is necessary ‘to defend the honor or the authority of him who was hurt by the offense so that the failure to punish may not cause his degradation.’” Without a rational view of punishment, justice degenerates into a sham: it becomes the rule of the strong for the advantage of the strong.
Were Hannah Arendt’s attempts to understand the crimes of Nazis a waste of effort? Of course not. Her books and essays are essential as history, and as commentaries on history. They also contain sharp psychological and sociological insights, including insights about the disciplines of psychology and sociology. And there are important lessons about how far one can go in trying to understand what is ultimately senseless. From Hannah Arendt we learn that description alone can be valuable, and that perception and judgment are possible even when explanation as such cannot succeed.
