About Hannah

excerpt from a novel

Hannah Arendt recently came up in my post, Victims, and is the subject of today’s post, an excerpt from an unpublished novel I wrote, set in a fictional Midwest college town in 1989, in which two characters talk about her. She made her way into the novel because the two books of hers that I read, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil made a strong impression on me. In preparing this post, I viewed some very good youtube videos about Arendt and her ideas, a number of them by Lyndsey Stonebridge, one of which is embedded below. Stonebridge (whose book We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience I just got hold of) was also a contributor to a just released PBS documentary worth watching, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny which, for the time being, can be viewed without subscription.

Excerpt from Looking Through You

Before Casey had a chance to sit down, Asher started in on her, asking why she’d gone to Israel.

“I tagged along with a study group looking into peace initiatives in the Middle East.” She removed her coat and settled into her chair. “But there were other reasons I wanted to go.”

Pleased as she was to be part of a peace effort, she had ulterior motives for joining the group. She traveled to Israel in the wake of the trial of John Demjanjuk, misidentified as Ivan the Terrible, a notorious concentration camp guard. Two decades earlier, Hannah Arendt, a central figure in Casey’s honors thesis on totalitarianism, had famously written about another trial that took place in Jerusalem, that of Adolf Eichmann.

“What sorts of reasons?” Eyebrows furrowed, Asher was interrogating her like a prosecutor.

“I wanted to talk to people in Israel about the Demjanjuk trial. I thought it might give me some insights into the Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt’s take on it, which is what I’m really interested in.”

“Hannah Arendt?”

“Um-hmm,” Casey said, sipping her tea. “Have you read anything by her?”

“No, not yet. What do you think of her?

“I idolize her. The thesis I’m working is based on her ideas—although it’s not really supposed to be. My mentor keeps trying to get me to shift my focus away from her, but she’s so central to what I’m trying to say.”

“What is it about her you like?”

“Many things—her ideas, her brilliance, how she lived her life. She was a fearless thinker who eschewed simple answers and conventional wisdom. There were plenty of political and economic explanations for the rise of fascism and the atrocities of the Nazi regime, but she looked inward, at the human psyche. Her search for larger, deeper truths, the very thing I find so appealing about her, rubbed lots of people the wrong way.”

“Why is that?”

“Her report on the Eichmann trial infuriated them. You see, people, not just the prosecutors, not just Israelis, Jews, and Holocaust survivors, but people generally wanted to see Eichmann as evil incarnate, but Arendt, with that famous phrase, the banality of evil, contradicted that notion and asserted that he was an ordinary human being, far from the personification of evil.”

“She was Jewish, wasn’t she? Didn’t she think that what the Nazis did was evil?”

“Yes, she was Jewish. She’d been arrested by the Gestapo and spent time in a detention camp in France. She knew first hand the horrors and evils of the Holocaust. She didn’t deny the existence of evil or assert that what Eichmann did wasn’t evil. Her point was that ordinary people can do awful things and hardly be aware that they’re doing anything wrong. Of course, there are sadists and psychopaths who take pleasure in the harm they inflict on others, but large-scale horrors like genocides are possible only when lots of ordinary people enable them by going along, doing their part, following orders.”

“And people were upset by that idea?”

“Very much so. It was hard to understand how so many people in Germany and across Europe could participate in such atrocities, and the most palatable explanation was that they were duped by a small group of inhuman monsters. At the trial, Eichmann was depicted as a monster, but when she saw him and heard his vapid talk, she thought him just a rather stupid, morally obtuse human being, a very ordinary person who still didn’t comprehend what he’d done.”

“Why was it so important for people to see Eichmann as a monster?”

“To separate themselves from the despicable evil Eichmann represented. Arendt was saying that ordinary people had the capacity to do terrible things and that was hard to accept. Only a depraved individual, a monster, could do the things Eichmann had done. He was evil, and evil had to be eradicated. It was clear and simple. The idea that she was putting forward, that the propensity for evil is within all of us, was anathema to many people, and especially to Holocaust victims who wanted to have someone to blame for their misfortunes and to take revenge on.

“So Eichmann was a scapegoat to pile all the blame on?”

“Not exactly. A scapegoat is often an innocent person who gets blamed, and Eichmann was anything but innocent. But, yes, the more blame that could loaded on him, the less there was for everyone else, including the Judenräte, members of the Jewish councils, who, facilitated Hitler’s plans in their role as liaisons between the Nazis and the Jewish communities. Fixing the guilt on a few individuals helped absolve a larger population for their own actions, so in that sense, I think you’re right in calling him a scapegoat.”

“I’m beginning to understand why she wasn’t so popular among some in the Jewish community.”

“Arendt pretty much upset the apple cart by portraying the trial as a farce, political theater that distracted from the important questions about the nature of evil and how to combat it, intent, instead, on the prosecution of one man as if he was the embodiment of all evil. She must have realized that branding certain people as evil, dehumanizing them, and calling them monsters is just what the Nazis did with the Jews, and almost succeeded in exterminating them in an unprecedented Holocaust. Evil can’t be excised like a tumor, and it can’t be killed off with guns and bombs, because it’s within us, part of us, and we have to learn to curb it or face even greater catastrophes.”

Asher, dumbstruck by her passion and eloquence, couldn’t believe that when they’d met fifteen minutes earlier he took her for a dumb blonde.