One thing leads to another, right? After reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, I wanted to know more about the life of its author, Hannah Arendt (1906-75).

A good start was Anne C. Heller's Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times, which appeared in 2015. (Actually, the only electronic version I was able to access was the Spanish one, translated by Ana Nuno, subtitled Una vida en tiempos de oscuridad, and published in 2021, but that's by the by.)

This is in many ways a model biography -- concise, insightful, sympathetic without being hagiographic, non-judgemental, and non-sensational.

It begins with that Eichmann trial and its aftermath, which never ceased to cast a shadow over Arendt's memory. (Heller, incidentally, comes down on the side of those who feel Arendt was duped by Eichmann, but argues that her central idea of the banality of evil nevertheless remains valid.)

After that opening chapter (whose first word -- "Afterwards..." -- underlines that we're starting dramatically in media res), Heller follows Arendt's life pretty much chronologically, and her account acts as a useful springboard to various other primary and secondary sources.

Below are some of the themes that emerged very strongly for me:


All the photos in this post were taken in Armenia, 2019, at the Genocide Memorial and in Echmiadzin. This is another community that is still dealing with major historical trauma

-- Rootlessness

Arendt and her parents moved from Linden (near Hanover) to Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) when she was very young. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven. The events surrounding his death taught Hannah not to show vulnerability, but rather to hide her fears, regrets, and humiliations, and come to terms with the painful "sensation of being condemned to isolation" (in a later autobiographical essay, called Shadows, she refers to the formation of an "emotional shell"). When her mother, Martha, remarries, she moves again, to join her stepfather and his children. At 15, she organizes a boycott in response to an anti-Semitic comment from one of her teachers, is expelled from school, and completes her secondary education at the University of Berlin. She goes to the University of Marburg to study theology, philosophy, and classics. But she leaves Marburg (on account of her relationship with philosopher Martin Heidegger), and goes to Heidelberg.

That's a lot of dislocation already in a young life. But it worsens. As National Socialism gains more and more of a foothold in Germany, Arendt manages to flee to Paris, via Prague and Geneva. In 1941, she is able to set sail for the United States with her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher. She remained stateless for many years. (Indeed, she once wrote to her husband: "You are my four walls.") She finally became a US citizen in December 1951 (but feared that the polemic over Eichmann in Jerusalem might jeopardize her status).



In 1943 she published a searing essay called We Refugees, which ought to be required reading for all statespersons dealing with asylum-seekers. The tone -- a mixture of melancholy, anger, and irony -- is curious. She opens: "In the first place, we don't like to be called 'refugees'", and then goes on to dispassionately enumerate the different kinds of loss that have been inflicted on these forced migrants, and to lacerate the false "optimism" that they have imposed upon themselves:

"In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries -- it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of confidence in the new homeland. Besides, how often have we been told that nobody likes to listen to all that... There is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness is based on a dangerous readiness for death."

She also skewers the migrants' temptation to embroider their previous lives, and their desperate desire to fit in: "We are willing to be loyal Hottentots, only to hide the fact that we are Jews. We don't succeed and we can't succeed; under the cover of our 'optimism' you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationists... Mr Cohen... is that ideal immigrant who always, and in every country into which a terrible fate has driven him, promptly sees and loves the native mountains."

She understands the migrant's plight -- how can she not? -- and she makes us understand it too; but she will not countenance any sentimentality.



Which links to the next theme:

-- Victimhood and prejudice

Arendt greatly disliked any depiction of Jews as defenceless pawns and victims. And she demonstrated a "German snobbery", verging on racism, in her attitude to Jews from the east... These two interlinked aspects of her personality shed light on many of the views that proved controversial in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

According to Heller, Arendt's insistence on pointing the finger at the Jewish councils "can only be explained by her reluctance ... to accept that all the Jews of Europe did in fact find themselves powerless and defenceless, a condition that during the course of her life, despite the many difficulties and uncertainties she had to face, Arendt had not recognized in herself even once".

Arendt was able, and courageous, and enterprising. But she was also very lucky, it has to be said... She was arrested in Germany, but released (at which point she fled the country). She was sent to a detention camp in France, but by taking advantage of the confusion surrounding the French army's surrender, she successfully escaped. She was able to take ship to America. There are many, many points at which -- through no fault of her own -- this could have all gone wrong, and DID go wrong for so many others.

Heller again: "Arendt's reluctance to identify with Eastern European Jews and other victims was not necessarily a sign of hypocrisy or lack of character. It is possible that it originated in her blind belief in the virtues of the pariah. In other words, perhaps Arendt went too far in her personal challenge to the expectations and conventions of others. If she couldn't admit that Jews were totally innocent, it could be because doing so would have made her a victim too. What is beyond doubt is that this attitude caused her many problems."

Even in her youth, she saw a gulf between Jews like her -- assimilated, cultivated, Germanized -- and those who were uneducated and derided. Her mother tells her to leave the class if her teachers make anti-Semitic remarks (an action Martha then follows up by writing to the school). But most of the derogatory comments were aimed at "other Jewish girls, in particular eastern Jewish students". If no-one was being attacked, Hannah seemed to work on the principle that she would never allow herself to be mistaken for those Jewish girls the teachers made fun of: "She was not willing to be a victim."



We'll come back to this in a minute, because it again links in with another theme:

-- Martin Heidegger

According to Heller, it would be difficult to overestimate Heidegger's influence on Arendt's life and thought. And frankly, it's hard not to dislike him.

She was 18; he was 35. She was his student. By the standards of our day, the thing is completely unethical and unacceptable. And the relationship always worked on his terms, it seems. He determined when they would see each other; he determined when the time had come to call it quits. In response to Shadows, Arendt's melancholy self-portrait, he writes this somewhat ambiguous reply: "I would not love you if I did not believe that those shadows are not you, but deformations and illusions created by an endless self-erosion that has penetrated from without." Given Heidegger's anti-Semitism, is this, wonders Heller, a promise to ignore Arendt's Jewishness, or an implicit threat in case the shadows end up dominating her?

Heidegger later very publicly throws in his lot with the Nazi party. But after the war, he and Arendt reconnect. She helps in his rehabilitation. It sounds very much as though he exploits her. She translates for him, and acts as his unofficial agent and public defender (though possibly she never entirely believed the rationalization he produced for the denazification committee). He is openly jealous of her successes.



According to this excellent essay by Adam Kirsch, Arendt's relationship with Heidegger factored into "her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness". The Arendt-Heidegger correspondence (published in 2003) is revealing, he argues, "first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger's letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger's voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair... [He treats her] with a combination of passion and condescension... It is just possible to glimpse in the letters the pain that the affair caused Arendt -- above all, by enforcing a sense of powerlessness... The private humiliation and political betrayal she suffered at the hands of Heidegger, the living embodiment of the German intellect, only brought home to her the lessons she was already learning from her study of Rahel Varnhagen." (Arendt's biography of this salon hostess, born in Berlin in 1771, was begun in the 1930s, but not published until 1957.)



Which brings us back to the victimhood theme...

Kirsch continues: "To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls 'specificity,' the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community. Arendt had said of herself, in the Shadows letter, that 'she did not belong to anything, anywhere, ever'; so, too, Rahel was 'exiled... all alone to a place where nothing could reach her, where she was cut off from all human things, from everything that men have the right to claim.' Avoiding that helpless 'place' became the goal of Arendt's life and thought... [By the time she finished writing the book] Arendt had come to see Rahel's predicament as an early sign of the political naivete that had left European Jewry so vulnerable to Nazi persecution... And, just as Arendt's attitude toward Rahel was an unstable mixture of sympathy and criticism, so, too, her reaction to the Jewish crisis was a blend of urgent concern and haughty contempt...

"What raised Arendt's Jewish consciousness was her recognition of Jewish helplessness, both psychological and political. But if she responded to that helplessness with an insistence on self-help, she found it hard to avoid condemning those Jews who, in her view, did not or could not help themselves... Arendt's need to distance herself from Jews, and especially from Jewish victims, accounts for the ironic tone that has always struck readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's attitude toward Eichmann himself is simply dismissive... What inflames Arendt, on the other hand, is any attempt by Jewish witnesses to draw attention to what they suffered. 'I hate, am afraid of pity, always have been,' she once told [Mary] McCarthy, and she mocked anything that appeared to her to be an appeal for pity."

In her view, love and compassion are all very well as the motivators of private life; public life, on the other hand, should be the realm of respect, pride based on equality, and reasoned debate. Shining through the seemingly abstract arguments Arendt makes about politics, writes Kirsch, is a "longing for respect and recognition": "All her experiences as a woman and as a Jew, all the hard wisdom she learned from Heidegger and from Rahel, goes into her yearning for the masculine, aristocratic freedom of the Greek polis."

But ultimately this judgement carries a hard edge: "Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt's sympathy, which she could freely give only those as strong as she was."



-- Parvenu and pariah

Lauren Gottlieb Lockshin's essay is a useful introduction to the work of Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), and his identification of two strands of Jewish experience. According to Lazare, Western Jews, through "emancipation", had escaped the physical ghetto, and acquired rights, but still remained in a psychological or moral ghetto, unable to enjoy their newly acquired freedom as something owed, but seeing it instead as something that had been granted, and that they had to make themselves worthy of.

Lockshin continues: "In this way, the Western Jew became a 'pariah,' in Lazare's language, still suffering the persecutions and soft bigotry of a popular antisemitism accepted and turned against himself. He retained the status of Other in the eyes of all who saw him -- including his own. Inevitably, the Jewish pariah seeks a way to ameliorate his condition. He desperately strives to separate from his besmirched lineage and assimilate into the masses. In so doing, he becomes what Lazare calls 'un parvenu.'... But the Jewish pariah need not always be doomed -- he does not have to become a parvenu. Lazare argued that he could instead become conscious of his pariah status and own it as his true identity, thereby also regaining his power as an individual and as a member of the Jewish community."

Beginning with her work on Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt frequently returns to these pathways, recognizing that complete assimilation often had to take on an element of self-hatred, as it was possible to assimilate completely only if you also took on the anti-Semitism that was part of the entity that you were assimilating into...



In 1944, she wrote an essay entitled The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition. It concludes: "So long as the Jews of Western Europe were pariahs only in a social sense they could find salvation, to a large extent, by becoming parvenus. Insecure as their position may have been, they could nevertheless achieve a modus vivendi by combining what Ahad Haam described as 'inner slavery' with 'outward freedom.' Moreover those who deemed the price too high could still remain mere pariahs, calmly enjoying the freedom and untouchability of outcasts. Excluded from the world of political realities, they could still retreat into their quiet corners there to preserve the illusion of liberty and unchallenged humanity. The life of the pariah, though shorn of political significance, was by no means senseless. But today it is. Today the bottom has dropped out of the old ideology. The pariah Jew and the parvenu Jew are in the same boat, rowing desperately in the same angry sea."

While the "parvenu" aspiration is understandable as a survival strategy, this class has not always played a useful role in the wider Jewish context. Heller points out, for example, that while Arendt was working for the Rothschild foundation (during her time in Paris), she recognized that the "notables", the "parvenus", were hostile to politics, and therefore distant from decisions of government except insofar as they concerned their financial interests. This is what made them hesitate to offer help to the Ostjuden: They were worried that these recently arrived groups, by their poverty, religiosity, and ignorance of French and other European languages, could exacerbate the climate of anti-Semitism in France.



In We Refugees, Arendt (in somewhat essentialist terms, it has to be said) classifies all the "vaunted Jewish qualities" as "pariah qualities", while "all Jewish shortcomings... are characteristic of upstarts".

And the theme re-emerges, says Heller, in Arendt's study of the origins of totalitarianism, which distinguishes many factors that contributed to this phenomenon (the modern nation-state; marginalized minority populations; political dislocations and mass unemployment that made millions of Germans "economically superfluous and socially burdensome), but also points specifically to the existence of groups of "exceptional Jews". These were people who had obtained special privileges in exchange for special (financial) services to the state, and therefore had a kind of immunity to what was befalling ordinary Jews, and Arendt argued that they had contributed to the ensuing disaster in two ways: their wealth and narrowly focused political influence awoke the envy of non-Jews, and they acted as a wall between the less fortunate Jews and their political experience of the state -- including the experience of claiming their rights. She was convinced that European Jews "always had to pay for social glory with political poverty and political success with social insult".

It is easy to understand why this kind of diagnosis might have made uncomfortable reading for others in the Jewish community, and to see in this resolute determination to UNDERSTAND, without too much regard for sparing anyone's feelings, a precursor to the statements in Eichmann in Jerusalem that were to generate such furore.



-- The responsibility to think

Shining like a beacon through everything Arendt writes is the conviction that human beings have a profound, life-long responsibility to THINK. Under the terms of Kant's categorical imperative (carry out only those actions that you would want to see converted into universal law), every individual is a legislator, and thinking and reflecting become indispensable practices. Eichmann's primary crime, then, was not thinking. (And Heidegger, too, she says, quit "the residence of thinking" -- temporarily, she adds, perhaps too kindly.)

In light of all this, you can't help wishing that there were more "thinking" going on right now... When Arendt finally revisited Europe, Heller tells us, she was struck by the self-deception of the German people. The totalitarian regime seemed to have left behind a general conviction that "all facts can be changed and all lies can become true", and a cynical assumption that any opinion about what happened under Hitler was as good or as bad as any other.

Sounds all too horribly familiar...

_*_*_

Heller's concluding words are these: "Hannah Arendt never ceased to be a stranger willing to examine the world from the vantage-point of her strangeness, even in times of darkness and danger."

There is much food for thought in her life and work, and I have the feeling that I'm far from finished with it...