It was at the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio on Lake Como in Italy that I first saw the film “The Reader” based on Bernard Schlink's novel (1995) that speaks of one's inability to respond to the tragedy of the Holocaust by succeeding generations of Germans. This inspired some of us at the Bellagio Center to enter into a discussion on Arendt's report on Eichmann's trial which she had personally covered and which derives its significance from the complex notions of justice and responsibility, ethics and duty. The discussion became all the more intense with the thought that Arendt had been there at Bellagio as a visiting scholar many years ago and presently was recognised world-wide as one of the most important philosophers studied in the social sciences for her views on ethics, on violence, on public and private freedom and on political action.
Born in 1906, Arendt grew up in a Jewish family in Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia. Not for once was the word Jewish used within her family, particularly under the influence of the hardcore socialist leanings of her mother. In 1924, at the age of 18, Arendt joined the University of Marburg where she fell in love with her teacher Martin Heidegger and came in contact with her classmate Herbert Marcuse.
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The clandestine love affair with a man twice her age carried on for almost a decade until Heidegger became a committed member of the Nazi Party. Not ready to face a scandal, Heidegger decided to send Arendt to Heidelberg to study under the guidance of Karl Jaspers and finally complete her dissertation on Saint Augustine at the age of 23.
The rise of Nazism catapulted Arendt into the lap of Zionism; she was arrested in Berlin for trying to steal records from the national archives that would supply information about what the Nazis intended in the future for the German Jews. Released after eight days, she escaped from Germany and after a stint in Paris, reached the US where it did not take her long to get assimilated into the intellectual circles.
As time passed she began to see through the xenophobia of the Zionist movement. She remained a staunch enemy of Zionism, especially after the war, taking the Israeli state to be an anachronism. Her jeremiads against the fascism of the Israeli leadership in its exploitation of the Holocaust tragedy for larger nationalist purposes no doubt provoked harsh criticism, but nevertheless, won her admirers on the left.
Arendt arrived in Jerusalem in April 1961 to cover the trial of Eichmann for The New Yorker . Her five articles, which were then expanded into the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , provoked enormously heated debates in the western world. According to Arendt, Eichmann's sense of duty, like Hannah Schmitz in “The Reader” prevailed over any pity or sense of ethics and humanitarian rationale.
It is commonly held that the commitment of an evil deed must essentially involve an evil heart or a criminal temperament. But within Hannah Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil” this is not the case. You can very well commit a culpable deed without having a streak of wickedness. Eichmann, a “faceless, unthinking bureaucrat, a cog in the machinery of the Final Solution (to exterminate the Jews) rather than one of its masterminds” has no pleasure in cruelty, but has acquired the faculty for shutting his mind to it. This is regimentation under a strict bureaucracy. He lacks a criminal mind; his involvement in the deportation of hundreds of Jews to the gas chambers does not give him any pangs of conscience, but is the result of a deep-seated sense of duty. Personal feelings or the sense of morality are not permitted to interfere with the sense of duty. To Arendt, it was more a case of thoughtlessness, than a “monstrosity”, an incapacity to “think from the point of view of others.”
Such a report on the most despised of Hitler's generals runs counter to the Zionist ideology that put Arendt in the docks. She is solely responsible for giving a philosophical reasoning to the trials of Eichmann which have over the years resulted in an uproar against her anti-Semitic stance. Sol Stern, in his article, “Hannah Arendt and the Origins of Israelophobia”, writes: “Her writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancour, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel's ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”
Along with her controversial but courageous stand against the Israeli nation, she will be remembered for her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition . In the former book, Arendt has examined Nazism and Stalinism, the two major movements in the 20th century and takes for her basis the notion of “biological racism” as being the major impetus behind imperialist ideology, especially of the Pan Germanic and Pan Slavic variety.
Out of such European movements sprang the totalitarian ideology of Nazism and Stalinism that sought an end to all opposition, a complete submission of the individual self to the state. Such is the condition of the individual's sense of isolation and lack of all social relationship which becomes essential for any dominance. Totalitarianism always endeavours to achieve this condition in an inherently unparliamentary process, seeking to advance itself through anti-Semitism or other kinds of racism. Those who stand behind it have the capacity to become demons striking out at the very dignity of being human, breaking down the structures of morality resulting in the very contradiction of the idea of freedom and justice.
In her other significant work, The Human Condition , she focuses on her deep-seated interest in political humanism and a free space in the world inhabited by people who are inspired by public principles and an ethics that inherently remains essential to their world view. And not to miss Men in the Dark , an important book on the lives of some of the most inspiring thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers and Rosa Luxemburg who contributed significantly to the rise of a more workable political and public humanism. Probably, as Hannah Arendt saw it, only the “free spectators of action” determine the meaning of action and it is such public meanings that save humans from the abyss of meaningless existence. It was in the open and free environs of Bellagio that I first began to understand Arendt's desire to urge politics towards humanism in the context of 20th Century totalitarian movements.
Published - February 25, 2012 05:08 pm IST
