Study in Lund: Hannah Arendt. // Modernism and Postmodernism in the 20th Century- LUND UNIVERSITY Spring 2016

“Do you see your role among philosophers as unusual or peculiar because you’re a woman?” 

“I don’t belong to the circle of philosophers” she protests. “My profession, if one can speak of it at all is a political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers.” 

This is how Hannah Arendt introduces herself to Gunter Gaus in the opening remarks of the 1964 Zur Person interview. From the start of the interview, we see Arendt’s strong personality and character of speaking her own mind, as she states herself later in the interview – she says what she thinks.

She was born into a Jewish family in 1906 in Hanover, Germany. An assimilated Jew, she escaped Europe before the Holocaust and became an American citizen. Her works deal with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. 

The Zur Person interview (1964), which was conducted by television presenter and journalist Günter Gaus, broadly runs through many topics – they discuss philosophy and politics, feminism and racism, the Eichmann trial and the controversy surrounding her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She also briefly discusses the Zionist organisation and Israel, and finally, she mentions with fondness her former professor Karl Jaspers, drawing remarks from her work The Human Condition.

There’s a little bit of everything in the interview – how she became who she is now. She talks about her childhood and memories of mother, and why she chose to study philosophy, as she stated “the need to understand came at an early age”; at age 14 she had read philosophers such as Kant. About her youth when she was helping refugee kids to educate them, and even smuggle them through borders. This personal life story part of the interview ease the “air” of historical moments, it gave an impression of her just a human being with an experience of the horror in history and trying to do something, to leave an impact. 

She raises the nationalism question – despite being born and raised in Germany, she never considered herself as German, but she was taught by her mother to never question her identity as a Jew (from an ethnic or cultural perspective rather than a religious one); she even felt that made her special, somehow different to the other children on her street. This can perhaps be tied to her comment towards the end of the interview that “The Jewish humanity signified by their lack of homeland was something very beautiful.”

Perhaps one of the most notable aspects of the interview is her discussion of the problem of assimilation as a young girl, and the anti-Semitism that was rampant in Germany (even in comments that school teachers made to Jewish students), all of which built up to her eventually leaving Germany because she realized the inevitability that the Nazis would take over. 

After speaking of the events in her life that led to her escaping Germany, the discussion turns to Auschwitz. When she and her husband first heard about the camps, they blindly could not believe that they could be real; as her husband said, “Don’t be gullible, don’t believe all you hear.” But I feel that Auschwitz itself is not the main focus of her discussion, rather it is what happened in society after WWII. Like Theodor Adorno, she felt Auschwitz was a kind of turning point for all of the Western civilization; she states that “what happened in 1933 was not important in the light of what happened after 1945.” Auschwitz was:

“something different. It was as if an abyss had opened. We had the idea that amends could be made for everything else […] but not for this. This ought never to have happened […] Something happened to which we can never reconcile ourselves.” (T. Adorno, 2003: p. xii)

She lost friends who had invested some faith in the Nazi ideology (they simply ceased to exist to her in her mind). She speaks of the pain caused by “disloyalty of friends,” and how people in the intellectual circles which she had formerly been a part of who did align themselves with the Nazi mentality, even if it was for a brief period, were imagining and projecting things onto Hitler’s politics and “fell in their own trap.” What truly shocked her was how people could be so ignorant to ethical and moral choices, so weak in exercising good moral judgement with their own free will, so blind to what is good and what is clearly evil. Zygmunt Bauman states in his book Postmodern Ethics that “The choice is not between following the rules and breaking them, as there is no one set of rules to be obeyed or breached. The choice is, rather, between different sets of rules and different authorities preaching them” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p. 20). This was the central idea of her controversial work on Eichman – this concept of the banality of evil.

In the 2012 biographical film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, Arendt is portrayed as giving a dramatic final speech on the controversy of her work on the Eichman trial – a controversy which she also addresses in the Zur Person interview, visibly uncomfortable because of what she perceives as misinterpretations of her stance. Puffing on one of her trademark cigarettes, she denounces the “totality of the moral collapse that the Nazis caused in respectable European society.” The banality of evil that she describes is how Eichman, along with so many others, “in refusing to be a person, […] utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality – that of being able to think. Consequently, he was no longer capable of making moral judgements. This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale.” The banality of evil is how people can simply switch off their brains, follow orders so obediently and mindlessly, even when what they are doing is so blatantly obviously wrong.

The most humanitarian part of her in the interview was when she is asked about her book on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. This book caused a lot of controversy in America, especially amongst Jews. People were especially offended by the question she had raised in her book of the extent to which Jews are to blame for “their passive acceptance to Holocoust”.I think it is the most controversial subject of the whole interview as you can notice her uncomfortable way of sitting, and her searching for a remedy – cigarette, as soon as Gunter mentions this “propaganda” as she refers it to him, and she even admits that this subject might make her angry. Arendt “in her friendliness,” says that he himself has become a victim of this campaign which accused her of the lack of love to Jews. “Nowhere in this book I accused the Jewish people of failing to resist persecution, but somebody else did that” she states. 

The misinterpretation of her work that she has been challenged with, and which makes her so uncomfortable in the Zur Person interview, is that she somehow blamed the Jews for what happened in the Holocaust. However, she objects that she never said such a thing – rather she was talking about human nature and our tendency to passively accept systemic evil, to the point that it can be seen as some sort of participation. As Zygmunt Bauman states, “Relying on the rules has become a habit” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p. 20). When asked by a student why she says Eichman’s crimes were against humanity when only the Jews were persecuted, she answers: “Because Jews are human, a status the Nazis tried to deny them. A crime against them is by definition a crime against humanity.” Bauman states that “When confronted with the facts of the matter, every reasonable person must accept that doing good to others is better than doing evil” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p. 27).

In light of all of this talk of good and evil, of morals and ethics, I found Arendt’s firm rejection of the label “philosopher” (despite how much Gaus wants to call her a philosopher) is quite interesting for two reasons that relate to the postmodern era she inhabited; firstly, the issue of feminism. She comments that she objects to being referred to as a female philosopher in such a masculine circle not necessarily because of a gender issue – she states that “You say philosophy is generally considered a masculine occupation. It need not remain a masculine occupation. It is possible that one day a woman will be a philosopher.” This is interesting as I feel that feminism is one of the central issues raised in the postmodern age. She continued to separate herself from the philosophical tradition; even though she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, she insisted on calling her work “political theory” rather than “political philosophy.” She concludes by stating that “I want to look at politics with an eye unclouded by philosophy.” Later Arendt briefly adds in the conversation about gender and philosophy the subject of female emancipation, that to men “it doesn’t look good if a woman gives orders.” You get a feeling that she is scornful towards philosophy, philosophers and the intellectuals. Arendt states “I have said goodbye to philosophy for once and all.”

Secondly, her rejection of the label “philosopher” is interesting when compared with Adorno’s opinions on the possibility of the existence of philosophy after WWII: As stated before, she does not consider herself as a philosopher. In the introduction to Can one life after Auschwitz? Rolf Tiedemann says “Philosophy, which, according to Hegel, is ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts’ has failed abysmally in its efforts to comprehend the rupture that civilization has experienced, let alone to give it any ‘meaning’”. (T. Adorno, 2003: p. xiii). It could be that Arendt denies being a philosopher because she doesn’t believe that philosophy has survived after the atrocities of WWII. According to Bauman “we no more expect the wisdom of the legislators or perspicacity of philosophers to lift us once for all from moral ambivalence and decisional uncertainty” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p. 32).

In conclusion, Arendt is a very interesting person to listen to – above all I respect her uncompromising efforts to understand the world around her. She believed that humans had a responsibility not necessary to forgive what has happened or excuse humanity, but to at least try to understand, to interpret history and try to find meaning. In consideration how can one continue living after the war “in Adorno’s mind the impossibility of authorities answer was identical to an impossibility of philosophy after Auschwitz. […] What took place in Auschwitz and the other death camps implied the collapse of the existing civilization […] It also spelt the revocation of what Adorno ironically termed the “Western legacy of positivity”, in other words, the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The “universal cheerfulness” that unwaveringly assigns “meaning”, no matter what, to existing reality should by rights have been banished from philosophy for once and for all by the sight of the station ramp and the gas chambers” (T. Adorno, 2003: p. xii-xiii). 

However while Arendt agrees that Auschwitz is something we can never recover from, she continues to try to understand and try to see the truth without illusions, even if it is ugly. I believe like Bauman says “human reality is messy and ambiguous” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p. 32) and to live in this sort of world knowing the truth of history, and the evil moral and ethical choices that a society can collectively make is a dreadful burden. Yet in some way, it feels like contemporary society is ignoring the true facts of civilization in the past, in order just to live and get by their own everyday lives. Arendt, on the other hand, was striving to look back to modernity to see things clearly, with vision unclouded by the positivity we naturally strive for. Tiedemann states that “Theory finds itself compelled to reinterpret history by going right back to its archaic beginnings” (T. Adorno, 2003: p. xx) – this can perhaps be linked to her inclination towards classing her work as “political theory” rather than philosophy. This also, I feel, is essentially what marks her so firmly as a kind of icon of the postmodern age. She was aware that, as Bauman puts it, “we demonstrate day by day that we can live, or learn to live, or manage to live in such a world, though few of us would be ready to spell it out […] Knowing that to be the truth […] is to be postmodern. Postmodernity, one may say, is modernity without illusions” (Z. Bauman, 1993: p.32).