Hannah Arendt and the Evil of Anti-Semitism

Preface: Incredible as it may seem, it is now no longer possible to ignore the growing parallels between the present onslaught of anti-Semitism in Australia and elsewhere in the West, and the situation of the Jewish people in Germany and Europe during the inter-war years, culminating in the Holocaust and the attempted extermination of the Jewish race. Above all, there should be no doubt that the well-organised coalition of Progressivist and Islamist forces wishes the greatest possible harm upon not only Israel but the Jewish diaspora as a whole.

This danger is especially acute in a multicultural society like Australia which has imported entrenched anti-Semitism, and where key sections of the political elite and civil society, including academia, the education system, the media and the arts have been captured by these forces, while federal and state governments are seeking to withdraw or render incapable all relevant levels of protection for Australian Jews. This deliberate anti-Semitic policy has already been implemented by the New South Wales and Victorian police forces in their refusal (presumably under political instruction) to apply the laws relating to hate-speech and anti-Semitic demonstrations, while the Australian Human Rights Commission has similarly remained deliberately inactive in the face of clear violations of human rights suffered by our Jewish citizens.

It is possible to illustrate the great dangers, especially of complacency and disbelief, that exist by focusing on the experience of Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, as she was brought from her comfortable and beloved “life of the mind” to confront the dark malignancy that came to convulse Europe during her lifetime, and that led her to write two of the most important books of the century, exploring these issues. The principal message here is that nothing can be taken for granted, there is no room for complacency, the horrific times could well return, and the most vigorous resistance to the age-old evil of anti-Semitism must be mounted.

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On May 22, 1960, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, rose to his feet in the Israeli parliament to announce that ex-SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial facing fifteen charges including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people for his part in the murder of six million Jews. Eichmann had escaped the Allied authorities after the Second World War and had joined many other Nazi fugitives in South America. Eventually, he was tracked down to a suburb of Buenos Aires by Mossad agents after he became careless and began to boast. (“I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”) He was kidnapped, sedated, disguised, taken to the airport, placed on an airliner and spirited away to Israel. His trial ran from April 11 to August 15, 1961.

Eichmann had been the head of the Gestapo’s Office of Jewish Affairs and was a central participant in the crucial January 1942 Wannsee Conference in Berlin, at which the implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was agreed to by the relevant Nazi government departments and agencies. Eichmann was tasked with planning and managing the logistics involved in the transportation and extermination of all the millions of Jews in Europe under German control, stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Adriatic. This gargantuan campaign of mass murder, carried out by a nation-state against a single ethnic group, had progressed initially through mass shootings and gassings, but this had proven too slow and henceforth it would involve the systematic use of poison gas and ovens in purpose-built death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and elsewhere in occupied Europe.

The determination of Eichmann’s central role in the Holocaust was to be the “trial of the century”. As Ben-Gurion declared, it would record for posterity the hideous experiences that the Jewish people had suffered but that the victorious Allies had ignored at the famous Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals. It would also make the case for the necessity of a Jewish homeland and announce to the world that “the Jews are not sheep to be slaughtered but a people who can hit back”.

A decade before, Hannah Arendt had published one of the most important books of the twentieth century: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Since then she had produced a major philosophical work, The Human Condition (1958), and had worked feverishly, possessed by her vision of the abyss into which the world had fallen. She had won prizes and fellowships and had achieved a high profile as an insightful and knowledgeable public intellectual. These qualities led the New Yorker magazine to eagerly accept her proposal that they accredit her as a journalist and send her to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the Eichmann trial and prepare a series of in-depth articles on “the trial of the century”.

How had this task fallen to Arendt? Exactly a century ago, Hannah could never have imagined the role history would allocate to her. She was the only child of a prosperous middle-class Jewish family that had a long history in Königsberg, Immanuel Kant’s hometown, in the German enclave on the Baltic. Her father, Paul, was an engineer, her mother, Martha, a trained musician, and their friends and peers were lawyers, doctors, scientists, psychologists and other professionals. They formed a large, sophisticated, secularised Jewish community that was heir of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought and the highest ideals of civilisation.

Communities such as theirs had been encouraged for decades to believe they were assimilated into the German nation, but their position always remained precarious. Just to the east, in the years leading up to the Great War, there were thousands of pogroms in the Russian empire and Eastern Europe, taking the lives of 200,000 Jews, leaving 500,000 homeless and prompting 2.5 million to emigrate. Nevertheless, the Königsberg Jews felt they should be safe, that civilisation had advanced beyond the point of mindless anti-Semitic violence, and many served proudly in the German Army during the war. Nevertheless, all who stayed were later exterminated by the Nazis.

But those dreadful days lay in the unimaginable future. Hannah grew up like many other Jews, thinking of herself simply as German, and she wasn’t even told she was Jewish until she was old enough to venture into the outside world, and even then it meant little to her. Instead, she revelled in the life of the mind, immersed in the unsurpassable heritage of German literature and philosophy. Intellectually precocious, Hannah read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when she was only sixteen, while also mastering the canon of German literature. Recognising her potential, her family provided her with a private tutor, and she was sent to audit classes at the University of Berlin to prepare for her university entrance exams.

And so, in 1924 the eighteen-year-old Hannah was admitted to the University of Marburg, eager to engage fully in the life of the mind to which her future seemed consecrated. And there she sat before the brilliant Martin Heidegger, the new professor of philosophy who was drawing unprecedented crowds to his classes. Esteemed as a visionary who saw deep things, had deep thoughts, and led others to have them too, he was the prized protégé of Edmund Husserl, the inventor of phenomenology, a radical departure in philosophy that was taking the European intellectual world by storm. Heidegger was renowned as the legendary “hidden king of the empire of thought”, as Hannah later recalled, and notes of his lectures were passed around like a sort of occult wisdom.

Heidegger soon noticed her. Attractive, dark-haired, wide-eyed, with an intense gaze, she was one of the few students able to follow his philosophical speculations. These were deeply challenging, as he erected vast intellectual hypotheses only to systematically tear them down again in a deconstructive fashion that frequently left pupils with a vertiginous sense of an intellectual void. It was a demanding form of inquiry that became famous amongst eager and aspiring students and, notoriously, even drove one to suicide.

Such difficulties arose because Heidegger was pursuing one of the greatest mysteries in philosophy: What was it that held the universe and all of reality together? In philosophical terms, what were the meaning, nature and inter-relationship of “Being” and “beings”? To manage this pursuit—which resulted in Being and Time (1927), one of the most influential books of the Modern Era and a foundational text of Postmodernism—Heidegger invented a range of arcane neologisms and indulged in complex and obscure word-play as he tried to tease out the critical distinction between Being and beings, and pose the crucial question: “What is the being of Being?”

Because young Hannah was entranced by the life of the mind, she was captivated by such intellectual quests. As she later recalled: “The rumour about Heidegger put it quite simply: thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak [again!]” Above all, Heidegger taught “thinking as pure activity”, not as a mere part (however essential) of any quest for knowledge or to render any judgment, but as “a passion” in itself. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 2004)

Hannah felt this passion for thought very deeply, but there were other passions also. Heidegger was eighteen years Hannah’s senior and married with two sons, but he was also a riveting father-figure with whom she quickly fell in love. “He was a figure out of a romance—gifted to the point of genius, poetic, aloof from both professional thinkers and adulatory students [and] severely handsome.” Above all, he was the apostle of “passionate thinking”, an activity that appealed to a brilliant young person like Hannah, revelling in the realm of deep thought and speculation.

Heidegger recognised the forces that were being unleashed, and soon he was professing a “love rich beyond all possible human experiences”. She rushed to his embrace; the potential of “passionate thinking” was realised; they were overpowered by the “demonic”; and an intimate and secret relationship began (and was not discovered until years after both their deaths), one that would last, even after the physical passion had subsided, until the end of their lives, despite triumphs, challenges and betrayals on a scale that neither could ever have imagined in those volcanic years of the Weimar Republic.

And yet it was in Weimar that the seeds for those triumphs and betrayals were sown. The German people had emerged from the war defeated and resentful. Their world had dissolved into a cauldron of rage and disbelief at the stupefying outcome, mixed with violently conflicting political, psychological and cultural forces, all held precariously together under the new constitution of what became known as the Weimar Republic (1918 to 1933; so named because it governed from Weimar, as Berlin was too dangerous).

This was a liberal regime imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies but hated by both the Left and Right: by the Communists because it deflected the masses from revolution; and by the Nationalists precisely because it was liberal and democratic and did away with the German empire and the emperor. Caught in the middle was the Weimar administration. Formed by moderate Social Democrats, it bore the odium of agreeing to the punitive Treaty of Versailles, and to the payment of financially crippling reparations. The government was labelled the “November Criminals” and was linked with the myth of the Jewish-Socialist “stab in the back” that had allegedly caused the otherwise incomprehen­sible German defeat.

Weimar plunged into an extended period of crisis as the government struggled to deal with many challenges: economic dislocation verging on collapse; hyperinflation on an unprecedented scale; widespread food shortages; and the return of millions of soldiers, many with serious physical and psychological injuries. And all the time there was political chaos and violence. But even as this volatility became ever more extreme and ominous, Hannah and Martin’s affair blossomed, as they used a system of codes, signals and little anonymous notes (“Do you want me?” she might ask; “I am consumed by the demonic!” he might declare) that allowed them to meet secretly for intimate liaisons in various places such as his office and her attic room. For several years they shared a secret, intense and passionate life of the mind.

Slowly, however, political realities intruded. Hannah found herself gravitating, first, to the far Left and socialism, but then towards Zionism and the hope of a Jewish homeland. Heidegger took the path to the far Right, embracing rabid German nationalism and succumbing to the increasingly pervasive anti-Semitism, for which, absurdly, he tried to provide a metaphysical justification. It became obvious that Heidegger couldn’t serve as Hannah’s supervisor as she went on to complete her PhD. This task was assigned to Heidegger’s friend, Karl Jaspers, another great existential philosopher and psychologist, and Hannah moved to join him at the University of Heidelberg.

The subject of Hannah’s dissertation was the concept of love in the philosophy of Saint Augustine. This she saw as the “craving desire” that mediates between the lover and the beloved to bind the two together into one. In opposition to the ancient Stoic view that love should be resisted along with all other emotions that disturb one’s equilibrium, Hannah insisted it should be embraced, as one’s very identity—who one really is—can only be resolved by total engagement with the beloved. At any rate, Hannah returned to the topic over the next few years, arguing in an article about the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke that love is the greatest path to transcendence in a profane world. Hannah, still only in her mid-twenties, was seeking philosophically to understand deep emotional experiences that she later described as the most profound of her life.

But she moved on. At Heidelberg she began another affair with an academic twenty years her senior, an expert on Expressionism and correspondingly unstable. Then she turned to a younger scholar who was an expert on the “wild years” of the German Romantics, but who decided after two years that he needed someone a little more “domesticated” than Hannah would ever be. Eventually, in 1929, she became re-acquainted with Gunther Stern, a dashing figure who had also been one of Heidegger’s students, and after a whirlwind romance they married. They were an ideal couple on several levels: they were both middle-class Jews, both socialists, both had studied under leading philosophers, both held doctorates, and both were committed to completing their Habilitations, the highest university degree in Germany (and the world) and the qualification required to begin an academic career.

At this point Hannah completed her shift away from the life of the mind and towards an ever more intense engagement with the infernal historical and cultural forces that would shortly tear the world apart. Her Habilitation was initially on German Romanticism, but she came to focus on Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), the beautiful and passionate hostess of one of Europe’s leading intellectual salons, and an important correspondent, whose 10,000 letters documented much of the cultural history of the age. A proud German, Rahel came to revile her Jewishness as she felt “pushed out” of the gentile world and forced to work twice as hard as anybody else to survive: “How wretched it is always to have to legitimise myself!” Nevertheless, she did come to embrace the heritage of her race, declaring proudly on her deathbed: “What a history! A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine … With real rapture I think of those origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand side by side with the latest developments!” Above all she embraced her Jewish identity: “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—being born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.” (Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933, 2002)

But now the moment of truth was approaching. Rahel’s affirmation of her identity as a Jew spoke to Hannah as she confronted the anti-Semitism that was consuming German society. As Hitler and the Nazis rode a popular road to power it was becoming obvious that Jews would be denied academic positions, and that her and Gunther’s career prospects were dismal. And soon she was aghast to learn that after the Nazis had made Heidegger the Rector of the University of Freiberg, he had instituted the Führerprinzip of absolute, unfettered power, and used this to expel Jewish staff and students from his university, including even his own mentor and loyal supporter, Edmund Husserl, who soon died, Hannah believed, from a broken heart.

As the walls closed in, Hannah found in Rahel Varnhagen qualities and challenges she felt reflected her own and, like Rahel, she now embraced her identity as a Jew in the face of the tremendous hatred that was being directed at her people. “Hannah, whose interest until this point had been German philosophy [had] through an emotional identification with Varnhagen discovered [her own] Judaism. Hannah’s identity as a Jew now became the centre point of everything in her life.” Hannah came to cherish Rahel as her “closest friend, though she’s been dead for some hundred years”, and her Habilitation was later published as the definitive biography of her friend. (Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt, 2015)

By embracing her destiny as a Jew, Hannah saw herself becoming a “conscious pariah” in a society whose hatred was becoming truly intense and ever more threatening. Indeed, she came to distinguish between those Jews who accepted their Jewish identity as “pariahs” and their status as outsiders; and those “parvenus” who downplayed their Jewishness and tried to blend in and assimilate into the host society. Hannah believed this was the wrong path that led only to a trap, but many millions of European Jews took it, believing that European civilisation had advanced beyond the murderous anti-Semitism that had blighted the previous millennium, and they paid for this belief with their lives.

Such choices became acutely real in 1933. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30 and the Reichstag burnt down on February 27, providing a pretext for suppressing all political opposition. On March 23, the Enabling Act gave Hitler the power to enact laws without parliamentary consent. With these dictatorial powers, the Nazis abolished labour unions and all other political parties and began imprisoning their political opponents in concentration camps. Later in 1934 there was the “Night of the Long Knives” when Hitler had the entire leadership of the Nazis’ own paramilitary wing, the SA, murdered to appease the army, thus consolidating the power of the SS under Heinrich Himmler and opening the door to the state-directed internal terrorism that Hannah would later identify as a vital component of totalitarianism.

Almost immediately, the new regime also set about enacting its anti-Semitic policies, dismissing all Jews from the public service (including academia) and developing its Generalplan Ost (“Master Plan for the East”). This plan was to acquire extra “living space” (Lebensraum) for the Volk, the German/Aryan people. The goal was to invade Poland, Eastern Europe and Ukraine, deport, exterminate or subjugate the non-Aryan occupants, and then resettle the region with the new Master Race living a neo-feudal lifestyle, based on the exploitation of slave labour. It was estimated that it would be necessary to kill some 40 to 50 million non-Aryans to achieve this plan.

Culturally, the Third Reich announced its arrival on April 8, 1933, with a nationwide campaign of massive book burnings of tens of thousands of volumes and even entire libraries and bookshops, led by the Nazi-controlled German Student Union. Throughout this campaign the Jews were identified as the principal enemy. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, deliver an address that was also broadcast on radio. “No to decadence and moral corruption”, he declared. Referring to “intellectual filth” and the “gutter Jewish literati”, he announced that “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.” This onslaught was accompanied by a campaign against Modernist art, again identified with the Jews, and culminating in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 and the confiscation and destruction of thousands of paintings that would now be worth billions. Expressionist works particularly hated by the Nazis were hung with signs declaring: “Revelations of the Jewish Soul!!”

The Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, effectively defining Jews (and Roma, Slavs and others), as sub-human Untermenschen, while state-sponsored anti-Semitism exploded with a vengeance in November 1938 with Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). This was a nationwide pogrom carried out by the paramilitary SS and SA, along with masses of citizen vigilantes. Innumerable Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were attacked, ransacked and demolished, along with some 7000 Jewish businesses and 267 synagogues. The opportunity was also taken to arrest some 30,000 Jews and consign them to concentration camps. The lack of opposition to this campaign amongst the German people encouraged the Nazis to move on to the next phase of the “Final Solution”, their plan to exterminate all the Jews, once and for all.

By then Hannah had not only fled Germany but also the beloved life of the mind that had always been her fondest realm. She had been documenting the scale of anti-Semitic persecution for underground Zionist groups, but had come under surveillance by the Gestapo, and was arrested and interrogated for a week. She apparently sweet-talked a young Gestapo officer and was released, after which she and Martha took flight via a convenient “safe house” whose front door opened onto Germany while its back door opened onto Czechoslovakia.

Hannah then worked for various Jewish organisations in Paris, where she reunited with Gunther, but the pressure of events was driving them apart, and the marriage was later dissolved amicably, with Hannah finding a new “love of her life”. This was Heinrich Blücher, a talented poet and a self-educated Marxist philosopher who had been a Spartacist and founding member of the German Communist Party, and they remained together for the rest of their lives.

Fascism’s grip on Europe tightened during the 1930s, not only in Germany and Italy, but also in Austria, Portugal, Greece, Rumania and especially Spain. It was also prominent in France, where the steady influx of Jews and other refugees caused the government to build internment camps to contain this “alien” population. Consequently, when the Second World War broke out, Hannah and her new husband were interned, in appalling conditions, in separate camps.

Hannah’s camp at Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, was built to house 20,000 women. A steady stream of prisoners moved through it, mostly to their deaths as part of the Holocaust, and by November 1943 when the camp closed, only 1100 inmates remained alive, and they were taken away to their fate. Very fortunately for Hannah, after the French surrender, there was a brief transition period as the French guards handed over control of the camp to the newly-arrived Germans and, in the resulting bureaucratic uncertainty, she seized her chance to escape. One internee was a forger skilled in producing convincing exit documents; Hannah took one, walked to the gate, showed it to an uninterested guard, and hurried off, walking the seventy kilometres to Lourdes, where she merged into the crowd. She then joined up with Heinrich and Martha, travelled to Marseilles to obtain exit papers and, with the police hot on their heels, managed to escape by train to Lisbon, en route to America.

The little family arrived in New York in May 1941. For a long time, life was very hard but with some small financial aid from a Zionist organisation they managed to rent two rooms in a boarding house, one for Hannah and Heinrich, the other for Martha, and they shared a communal kitchen. They lived there for ten years, and it was there, under those conditions, that Hannah drew on her vast knowledge and experience to write one of the most important books of the twentieth century: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

It may be that some people are put on earth to accomplish one great task, but in Hannah’s case it was two great tasks, tasks that demanded she leave behind the entrancing realm of speculation and confront the horrors of history. First, there was the need to comprehend totalitarianism. This task was long and arduous, beginning with the need to learn English. To help with this, Hannah took a job as a live-in servant with a sympathetic family, while also writing for German-language periodicals and academic journals, pioneering the study of totalitarianism while also producing a major article on “Existenz-Philosophie”, the form of Existentialism associated with Heidegger and Jaspers that would become a central part of the intellectual sensation of the post-war period. Desperate, Heinrich got a job shovelling chemicals in a factory, while Martha took on sewing and embroidery piecework. Hannah was able to establish herself with the influential Jewish intelligentsia in New York whom she came to dazzle and intimidate with her erudition and combativeness.

In late 1944 Hannah began work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, submitting a detailed book proposal to her publishers. Made up of three parts, “Anti-Semitism”, “Imperialism” and “Totalitarianism”, the book broke new ground in identifying Nazism and Stalinism as the first great totalitarian systems, identifying a sinister new form of twentieth-century politics. Amongst the defining characteristics of totalitarianism is the comprehensive use of state terror, predominantly directed inwardly, to subjugate the entire population, rather than just against political adversaries or external foes. Another is the presumption that its power is absolute; totalitarian states recognise no limits on the exercise of their power over every aspect of public or private life, or over any neighbour too weak to resist.

Totalitarian regimes will also be one-party states led by a single dictator, exercising virtually total control over the economy, and enjoying an absolute monopoly on the use of weapons and force, buttressed by a dominant ideology, promulgated via all systems of education, media, propaganda and communication. Such regimes seek also to mobilise the entire society in life-and-death struggles against some mortal enemy (the Jews, the Communists, the Capitalist West, the Great Satan), while tending to cultivate a docile society of atomised individuals whose primary relationship is to the state and the Führer figure, and not to their family or community.

This absolutism is justified by the totalitarian insistence that the regime is acting entirely in keeping with what are claimed to be unavoidable imperatives—such as those supposedly imposed by “History” and the need to be “on the right side of history” by adhering to its dialectical unfolding as scientifically ascertained by Marxism-Leninism, as in the Soviet Union; or those supposedly imposed by “Nature”, the need to safeguard the purity of the Aryan race from contamination, as in Nazism. This leads to the most sinister characteristic of totalitarianism—the concept of “superfluous people”. This is invoked and combined with racism and anti-Semitism to justify various forms of systematic genocide, as practised, of course, by the Nazis but emulated by the Soviet Union and other nation-states. It is this conception that gives rise to the proliferation of concentration camps (where superfluous people are stored) and death camps (where they are disposed of).

How does humanity come to grips with such phenomena? Hannah concluded that such abominations are examples of “Radical Evil”. This is a concept she adapted from Immanuel Kant, who saw it as a form of evil that totally possesses people and drives them to actions that violate what Kant and Arendt both believed was the universal moral law (including the Golden Rule: “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you” and so on). This is the sense of morality that is inherent in all human beings and transcends them and the society in which they live—it is an objective part of reality. Morality is therefore not a question of merely following the rules and conventions of society; rather, it involves living according to a deeply ingrained sense of right and wrong. Therefore, to be radically evil is to transgress the very essence of human nature itself.

The Final Solution was, by any estimation, an exemplar of Radical Evil, and the Eichmann trial attracted some 700 journalists, as well as international politicians, jurists, historians, death camp survivors and ordinary citizens. So great was the crowd that a new theatre was taken over as a temporary courthouse, while the trial was also televised live. This massive audience was there to witness this Satanic figure, the “moral monster” and the “Most Evil Man on Earth”, as Eichmann was described. Here was a chance to see the architect of the Holocaust, a living embodiment of Radical Evil.

But that was not what Arendt and others saw before them. The “moral monster” encased in a bulletproof glass booth was a skinny, balding, bespectacled little man with a runny nose and a compulsive twist to his bitter, thin mouth; he looked like “a ghost with a cold”, as Arendt later wrote. There appeared to be nothing monstrous about him, nothing remotely Satanic; he was, it dawned on Arendt, merely a pathetic, nondescript bureaucrat, a functionary perfectly happy to take comfort in the claim that he couldn’t be found guilty because he was merely “following orders”.

Besides, Eichmann insisted in his testimony, there had been no opposition to the Final Solution when it was put before the assorted key Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference. Eichmann and his superior, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, had expected some objections and protests at the murderous nature of what was intended. Instead, their proposals met with unanimous enthusiasm—as they’d learned from Kristallnacht, the German people didn’t really care what happened to the Jews. As Eichmann explained, if these senior people and Eichmann’s military and social superiors saw nothing wrong with the plan then his conscience was clear. He had a “Pontius Pilate moment … the Popes of the Third Reich had spoken … At that moment … I felt free of guilt!”

And then it struck Hannah, and the pieces suddenly fell into place: this was the face of evil in the twentieth century! Eichmann was what he said he was, an administrative cog in a vast machine. And humanity’s greatest threat in the present Age of the Masses, Arendt now realised, is the anonymous, unreflective, thoughtless functionary, driven not by ideology or even emotion, but by rules and regulations, and by the hope of career advancement inside some huge unaccountable organisation.

Eichmann was like the rest of the operatives in the Nazis’ vast apparatus of extermination; he was a “desk murderer” (Schreibtischtäter), who spent his time organising railway schedules, planning transit points, estimating train capacities and loading times, and reconciling it all with the “production capacity” of the death camps. There was nothing at all impressive and certainly nothing demonic or even out of the ordinary about such a creature. Our era, Arendt realised, is not some grand dramatic age of Satanic figures and Radical Evil; ours is the age of the Eichmanns and the “Banality of Evil”!

But how could such evil be banal?! The wrath of much of the world fell upon Arendt when her articles appeared in the New Yorker and when Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published in 1963. She was suddenly persona non grata, reviews were negative, vindictive and unfair, she’d deeply offended the Israeli government and the Jewish people, while friends and colleagues deserted and denounced her and speaking invitations evaporated. Her book was a best-seller, but it fuelled one of the biggest intellectual and political scandals of the mid-twentieth century. What had Hannah done?

Amongst other things, she had concluded that the leaders of the various Jewish communities in Europe during the war had failed their people by co-operating with Eichmann and other desk murderers. While some accepted the lie that the Jews were being moved to “resettlement areas” in the East, others knew they were really being transported to the death camps. Instead of co-operating, the leaders should have incited revolt: even if it proved suicidal, it was better to die fighting and tie up valuable Nazi military resources than to succumb as docile victims, a capitulation that sickened Hannah to the core of her being. Hannah’s critics responded that all this was easy with hindsight, that the victims couldn’t possibly have anticipated or comprehend the level of evil they were facing (who could?), and that all people will always hope against hope, right to the bitter, unimaginable end. And, anyway, wasn’t she blaming the victims?

But above all, Hannah had affronted them most with the proposition that the systematic murder of six million Jews was not an act of Radical Evil committed by Satanic monsters but was an act of banality carried out by bureaucrats, “desk murderers” who were simply “following orders”. How could the Holocaust, a previously unimaginable event without parallel in human history, be banal? It was as if T.S. Eliot’s taunting nursery-rhyme ending to The Hollow Men (1925) had come to life: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Was this not the ultimate insult to direct to her own people? That they had gone to their deaths and nearly allowed their race to be wiped off the face of the earth … without a whimper? How could she say that?!

Perhaps Hannah was wrong, perhaps not. Perhaps she should have attended more to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s emphatic words as he set the Eichmann trial in motion: “the Jews are not sheep to be slaughtered but a people who can hit back”. The Jewish people had been taught a dreadful, unimaginable, nearly fatal lesson: the world was not civilised, and henceforth nobody should entertain the slightest doubt that the Jews will resist annihilation and hit back at their enemies with all the force they can muster. Perhaps the lessons learnt in those dreadful years inform the shocking events in the Middle East today. And perhaps a parallel can also be drawn between the Nazi bureaucrats who were following orders and regulations, and those functionaries in the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australia Council, and police forces who feel they can be absolved of responsibility for the nurturing of the toxic brand of anti-Semitism that they are allowing to infect our country. Perhaps they are not “desk murderers” yet, but in the 1930s the Final Solution was just a matter of time and not inclination.

Eventually the outrage subsided, and Arendt began to publish again. On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968) and Crises of the Republic (1972) were all major works that together gave expression to her deep understanding of the nature of power and evil in the contemporary era, and of the need for power and evil to be constrained by liberal, republican and democratic principles and institutions. But Hannah had aged. A life-long smoker, she was also badly injured in a traffic accident, and her beloved husband died. Things were unravelling, but she did venture to Germany to share memories with the elderly Heidegger. These may well have included memories of an all-consuming passion enjoyed in a previous time that history had since made unimaginable.

When she died in 1976 she was working on the second volume of her Gifford Lectures, The Life of the Mind. And so, in this way, Hannah returned at the end of her life to the realm of thought that had been her first love, but from which she’d been driven to confront—emotionally, physically and intellectually—the maelstrom of the twentieth century and the darkest of dark times. 

Appendix: The Heidegger scandal

Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism is the greatest intellectual scandal of the past century. Almost all evidence of it was systematically falsified and suppressed by Heidegger’s family and his multitude of intellectual and academic devotees. It only became impossible to ignore after the detective work of Victor Farias, reported in his exposé, Heidegger & Nazism (1989), explored further in books like Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2009), and revealed in all its appalling hatefulness when Heidegger’s notorious Black Notebooks were published for the first time in 2015 and the full extent of his anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi and ultra-fascist beliefs became clear (see Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins, 2022).

Hannah Arendt had accepted Heidegger’s assurances that he was being misrepresented and slandered by jealous critics. Her devotion was crucial for him, not only because he wanted to maintain their relationship, but also because her support was essential if he was to survive the post-war “denazification” process and be rehabilitated into German academia. She died a few months before him, never knowing the truth about her “Hidden King”.

Mervyn Bendle wrote “The Endless War on Anzac” in the April issue. His series on twentieth-century philosophers and the meaning of life will continue in Quadrant shortly