Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

By: Steven E. Aschheim

Book Overview

For many years Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has been the object of intense debate. After her bitter critiques of Zionism, which seemed to nullify her early involvement with that movement, and her extremely controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt became virtually a taboo figure in Israeli and Jewish circles. Challenging the "curse" of her own title, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem carries the scholarly investigation of this much-discussed writer to the very place where her ideas have been most conspicuously ignored. Sometimes sympathetically, sometimes critically, these distinguished contributors reexamine crucial aspects of Arendt's life and thought: her complex identity as a German Jew; her commitment to and critique of Zionism and the state of Israel; her works on "totalitarianism," Nazism, and the Eichmann trial; her relationship to key twentieth-century intellectuals; her intimate and tense connections to German culture; and her reworkings of political thought and philosophy in the light of the experience of the twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520220579
• ISBN13: 9780520220577
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Legacy of Arendt's EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

There are many themes raised in this book, and I will mention only a few of them. Richard I. Cohen (p. 253) states that no single study of the Holocaust has attracted the same attention as Arendt's work on the Eichmann trial. Walter Laqueur (p. 50) speaks of Jaspar's work as insisting on German guilt (p. 50). But shouldn't it be characterized as collective German liability rather than collective German guilt? (See the Peczkis review at The Question of German Guilt (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, No. 16)). Michael Halberstam compares totalitarian systems: "Historians agree that the average ethnic German was not terrorized by the constant threat of deportation and death, as was even the most powerful Russian party member during Stalin's rule in the mid 1930's. Such doubts about the actual levels of threat experienced by the ethnic German population under National Socialism raise suspicions that the terror thesis--and with it, the comparative concept of totalitarianism--constitutes an apologetic for crimes committed under the Nazi regime. The terror thesis, it is argued, falsely presents the German population as passive sufferers, rather than willing participants in the murderous political cult of German nationalist supremacy." (p. 106) What about the French? Yaacov Lozowick writes: "Their central thesis, now accepted by all mainstream historians, is that the Vichy government acted against its Jews of its own volition." (p. 388) Without doubt, the most volatile content of Arendt's classic was her candid discussion of Jew-against-Jew collaboration during the Holocaust. Lilian Weissberg comments: "EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM was criticized by many Jewish organizations as an indictment of Jews because Arendt did not understand them as innocent victims only." (p. 154). Susan Neiman (p. 65) notes that some saw this as a confusion of who was on trial: Eichmann or the Judenrate. The editor, Steven E. Aschheim, takes this further: "Indeed, in her treatment of the Judenrate, her apparent blurring of the almost sacrosanct distinction between perpetrators and victims seemed to violate fundamental sensibilities...Moreover, very early on, Arendt warned that the uniqueness of the atrocities could create a self-righteous cult of victimization, one that indeed has occurred. (Witness the absurd current competition in comparative victimization as a tool of identity politics.) (p. 14) Finally, Hans Mommsen puts Arendt's work in a broader context. Arendt recognized the fact that the Nazi extermination of the Jews was also expanding into the extermination of Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) and Slavs (p. 230)

Very satisfying on an emotional level

HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM has 21 chapters, plus a preface and introduction, which provide papers from a conference held in Jerusalem between December 9 and December 11, 1997, 22 years after her death. Notes on the papers on pages 347-420 contain information which has not been included in the index on pages 425-428. Scholars have multiple points of view on how well she managed to tune in to the issues which made the twentieth century so exciting. I appreciate Arendt for her ability to derive lessons from Nietzsche that exceed my own powers of observation, but the middle of this book has 180 pages between mentions of Nietzsche, though these pages contain a chapter on The Intellectual Background by Hans Mommsen (an expert on German history and literature) called "Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence" (pp. 224-231). She was prone to emphasize what she had already written in THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM when she went to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial, a politically inept location for observing that "the Nazi machinery of destruction successfully turned the criminal activities involved into routine procedures that suffocated any moral protest, either from bystanders or from those who were induced to become perpetrators," (p. 231). Hans Mommsen was afraid that this context "inevitably created the erroneous impression that she intended to express contempt for the court itself." (p. 230). Other contributors to this book who spent countless hours reading the books of letter to and from Hannah Arendt have no difficulty documenting that, as Walter Laqueur admitted, "The animosity toward Jews as a group was of long standing, and it was by no means restricted to Israel and the Israelis. . . . Perhaps she had read too much anti-Semitic literature for her own good." (p. 58). Walter Laqueur's comments on Hannah Arendt as political commentator and "the greatest female philosopher of our time, perhaps of all times, which she might well be" (p. 49) find "a fascinating discrepancy between Arendt the political philosopher and the poverty of her judgment concerning current politics." (p. 50). Comparing Arendt to Raymond Aron, "As a political thinker, he was at least her equal, and his political judgment was infinitely better than hers. He was usually right, and she was often wrong. The list of alleged fools in Hannah Arendt's letters is truly enormous." (p. 62). A review by Raymond Aron in 1954 picked the element of her work that has become so dominant, "without being aware of it, Mrs. Arendt affects a tone of haughty superiority regarding things and men." (p. 61). The final four chapters of HANNAH ARENDT IN JERUSALEM examine her relationship with the philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. The chapter by Anson Rabinbach is mainly about a book by Jaspers in 1946 which appeared in English as THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT. Germans did not embrace the idea. Arendt's husband complained, "despite

The case against Arendt was not made strongly enough

I was present at the Jerusalem Conference and heard a number of the papers included in the present volume. From what I heard no one really addressed Hannah Arendt's moral failing in showing such insensitivity and coldness to victims of the Shoah in her book 'The Banality of Evil'. They too did not see two other areas in which she despite being one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century failed her own conception of the ' dignity of man' One was in her reluctant and apologetic attitude toward her own Jewishness, and the second in her deference to the Nazi - sympathizing Heidegger. I would also say the whole celebratory tone of the conference as if the world had changed and now everyone understood that Arendt was after all right about the ' Banality of Evil' conference seemed to be wrongheaded and in itself slightly immoral.

A prophecy of the Israel/Palestine conflict

Hannah Arendt's reputation in Israel (according to this book) has suffered the consequences of her controversial views, but these are now becoming more openly discussed, witness the conference on her thought at the source of this book. This set of essays is a highly useful (and balanced) treatment of the 'banality of evil' controversy, and much else, including Arendt's prophetic cassandra warnings about what was to come in the hopeless muddle of the Israel/Palestine conflict.