The Conflicted Legacy of Hannah Arendt

‘Hannah Arendt – A Life of the Mind’By Thomas MeyerPenguin Press, 539 pages Hannah Arendt first attracted notice as the star pupil of the great, but highly controversial, German philosopher Martin Heidegger who also became her lover. Heidegger said of Arendt, “There are few people today who enter this field with this adequate a philosophical preparation.” Praise indeed. Arendt’s philosophical abilities were amply demonstrated in her doctoral thesis, ”Love and Saint Augustine.” Arendt, who had a lifelong facility in ancient Greek and Latin, believed that philosophy had failed by detaching itself from its Platonic-Aristotelian roots, thereby excluding itself from the political domain. “The only thing of importance,” wrote Arendt, “is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one’s own little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is.” Heidegger, who would notoriously become an enthusiastic Nazi, may well have been in her mind when Arendt wrote this, though she maintained her friendship with him until the end.It was the rise of Nazism and its fatal threat to Jewry that drew Arendt into the political sphere as a woman of action. Arendt, who came from a middle-class, German-Jewish family in Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher of all, Immanuel Kant, was briefly interred in Gurs before making her way to France. Here she led the educational department of Agriculture et Artisanat whose aim was to furnish refugee Jewish children with the skills that would help them prosper on emigration to Palestine. It is here that Thomas Meyer’s biography comes into its own. Newly unearthed archival material demonstrates the extent to which Arendt devoted herself to rescuing Jewish children, and her particular concern for the fate of Eastern European children, displaying a humanity that has long been cast in doubt following the publication of her controversial book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In that book Arendt attempted to exonerate Eichmann, casting him as an apparatchik who bore no particular enmity to the Jews, and sympathized with his bizarre claim that there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience. Arendt also cast aspersions on the Judenräte and even Rabbi Leo Baeck, who had been deported to Theresienstadt, bizarrely casting him as a “Jewish Führer.” Arendt, who also spoke disparagingly of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews, tellingly quoted Georges Clemenceau in a letter: “What lames those who struggle for a just cause is that, along with the hatred of the oppressors, they must also do battle with the ignorance, weakness, and all too frequent cowardly hearts of the oppressed.” When Arendt weighed into the civil rights movement debate, strangely questioning whether President Eisenhower should have issued an executive order sending in soldiers to protect the Black Little Rock students as they entered the school building while being harassed by a mob of segregationists in 1957, she incurred the ire of the black writer Ralph Ellison who compared her stance to the one she had displayed towards Mizrahi and Eastern European Jews in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”Hannah Arendt emerges as a controversial and provocative figure. Once she had freed herself of the shackles of philosophy, she was, to quote Meyer, “full of discontinuities and disorder, zooming in, then pulling back for a bird’s-eye view, then superimposing literature, perpetrators’ thoughts, the language of theology, always a bit off-kilter, unreliable in its quotations and attributions.” Meyer, compiler of the 13-volume edition of her works and a cheerleader for his subject almost throughout, states, “She always ran crosswise to the tracks laid by tradition, and in this respect was closer to literature in its various manifestations than to philosophy in its clearly defined forms.” Perhaps Arendt’s contradictions arose from her growing up as a Jew in an alien society whose non-Jewish mores were nonetheless the ones to which she felt most connected, as was the case with Rahel Varnhagen, subject of her second book. Anne Birstein, in her 1977 roman à clef “When the Wind Blew,” supplies an unkind portrait that seems to have a ring of truth. In Meyer’s words, “Her tough stance that spared no one, her need to be the center of attention… The impression created here of a spirit wrestling for control over others—and herself—while struggling for recognition of her intelligence, her attractiveness, and her incomparable wealth of experience.”Meyer is a professional philosopher whose dense, indigestible prose chronicles more than it analyses. One suspects infelicities such as “Whenever Arendt did or wrote about something, on her own or for the institutions she worked with, she virtually always came into the public view on the spot” might be more the responsibility of the author than his hard-working translator, Shelley Frisch. But his biography should do something to restore the reputation of a brilliant and remarkable woman, remembered today primarily for coining that controversial phrase “banality of evil.”

The Conflicted Legacy of Hannah Arendt

The Conflicted Legacy of Hannah Arendt

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