Hannah Arendt: Thinking Without a Banister: ESSAYS IN UNDERSTANDING, 1953-1975
“AS IF SPEAKING TO A BRICK WALL”
A Conversation with Joachim Fest
FEST: Frau Arendt, do you think there is any connection between the Eichmann trial and the so-called successor trials in Germany? And in particular, are the reactions in Germany and Israel in any way comparable? People have occasionally suggested that Germans and Jews have in common what is called—in a somewhat inadequate expression—an “unmastered past.”
ARENDT: Well, those are actually two questions. Perhaps I might answer the first one first: in my view, the Eichmann trial has really acted as a catalyst for the trials in Germany. Some of these took place earlier, and some arrests were made earlier. But when you look at this from the statistical point of view and bear in mind the date of Eichmann’s abduction, not the date of his trial, of course, you’ll be overwhelmed, purely in terms of percentages. And I don’t want to say here why I think it was like this—it’s just a fact.
Now you are quite right to say that the question of the unmastered past is something the Jews and Germans have in common. I’d like to qualify that a bit. To begin with, of course, the actual kinds of unmastered past that they have in common are very different in the case of victims and perpetrators; for even the Judenräte were, of course, victims. This doesn’t mean they are a hundred percent exonerated, but they obviously stand on the other side—that much is clear.
Now the unmastered past is also something that—I know this from America—Jews and Germans in fact share with almost all countries or all peoples on earth, at least in Europe and America. The very horror that the whole business arouses affects everyone, not just Jews and Germans. What Jews and Germans have in common is the fact that they were the direct participants.
And now you ask, “Is this reaction the same in Germany and Israel?” Look here, a quarter of the population of Israel, twenty-five percent, consists of people who were immediately affected. That’s a huge percentage in a population. That they, as victims, obviously react differently from the average German of any generation, who has only one wish—never to hear anything more about it—is clear. But they don’t want to hear about it either, but for completely different reasons.
Now there’s one thing that I’ve noticed, and that’s the attitude of the younger generation in Israel and of course of those born there. There’s a lack of interest that’s similar in some ways to the lack of interest in Germany. In Israel they also feel, “It’s our parents’ problem”…Only there, of course, it’s different: “If our parents want this or that to happen…well, of course! They’re welcome! But they should please leave us out of it….We’re not really interested in that.” This was a truly general feeling. So it’s a generational problem, in Israel as it is in Germany.
FEST: These trials—like the Nuremberg Trials, to some extent, and the successor trials held mainly in Nuremberg—have brought to light a new type of criminal.
ARENDT: It is indeed a new type of criminal, I agree with you on that, though I’d like to qualify it. When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn’t actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by “criminal motives.” He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say “we,” and his going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren’t the ones who are typical in this kind of situation—they’d lack power without the support of these others.
So what’s actually going on here? I’d like to concentrate just on Eichmann, since I know his case well. See here, the first thing I’d like to say is that going along with the rest—the kind of going along that involves lots of people acting together—produces power. So long as you’re alone, you’re always without power regardless of how strong you are. This feeling of power that arises from acting together is absolutely not bad in itself but altogether human. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s simply neutral. It’s something that’s simply a phenomenon, a general human phenomenon that needs to be described as such. In this way of acting there’s an extreme feeling of pleasure. I won’t start quoting reams of material here—you could go on quoting examples from the American Revolution for hours at a time. Now I’d say that the real perversion of this form of acting is functioning, and in functioning the feeling of pleasure is also always there. Yet everything else in acting together with others, namely, discussing things together, reaching certain decisions, accepting responsibility, thinking about what we are doing, is all eliminated in functioning. What you have there is empty busyness. And the pleasure in this empty functioning was quite evident in Eichmann. Did he seek pleasure in power? I don’t think so. He was a typical functionary. And a functionary, who is nothing but a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman. Ideology, I believe, in my view, played no great role here. This seems to me decisive.
FEST: When I mentioned a new type of criminal, I meant the following: there was a tendency after the war, both in Germany and in the Allied countries, to demonize the leaders in the Third Reich. The Germans always saw these figures, from Hitler right down to Eichmann, as beasts from the depths and they possibly understood this as a way of creating an alibi for themselves. If you succumb to the power of a beast, you’re naturally much less guilty than if you succumb to a completely average man such as Eichmann.
ARENDT: It is also more interesting!
FEST: Really? I guess so. The situation with the Allies was altogether similar. In their case, they found a partial excuse for their lack of resolve, the appeasement policy up until 1939. And on the other hand, victory over this beast from the depths appears as much more glorious, for you’re dealing with the Devil incarnate.
ARENDT: The demonization of Hitler, in my view, was much more common among the Germans, including the German émigrés, than among the Allies themselves. In fact, the Allies were appalled, immeasurably and unprecedentedly appalled, when the truth came to light. This is underrated in Germany, catastrophically. For they were shaken profoundly, to the core of their being when they learned of it, when an ordinary soldier saw Bergen-Belsen and so on….I’ve experienced this in countless conversations. I’ve lived abroad—so I can say this to you….
Now, demonization itself can help, as you’ve rightly said, to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you yourself are not guilty. But above all….Look here, our whole mythology, our whole tradition sees the Devil as a fallen angel. And the fallen angel is of course much more interesting than the angel who always remained an angel, since the latter doesn’t even provide you with a good story. In other words, evil, especially in the twenties and thirties, played the role of ensuring that it alone had authentic depth, don’t you agree? And you have the same situation in philosophy—the negative as the only thing that gives impetus to history, and so on. You can pursue this idea a very long way. And as a result, if you demonize someone, not only do you make him look interesting, you also secretly ascribe to him a depth that other people don’t have. The others are too superficial to have killed anyone in the gas chambers. Now I’ve put it like that deliberately, of course, but that’s what it comes down to. Anyway, if there was ever anyone who deprived himself of any demonic aura, it was Herr Eichmann.
FEST: Eichmann was actually such a small figure that one observer asked whether they hadn’t caught and put on trial the wrong man. And actually he wasn’t a cruel man—this emerges quite unambiguously from all the documents. Quite the opposite: he always found it difficult to do what he was instructed to do, and because he always found it difficult, he derived a feeling of worth.
ARENDT: Yes. That’s true, and unfortunately it’s very common. You think that you can judge what’s good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don’t mind me saying so. Brecht is always showing the temptation toward good as something that you have to withstand. If you go back into political theory, you can read the same thing in Machiavelli, and even in a certain sense in Kant. So Eichmann and many other people were very often tempted to do what we call good. They withstood it precisely because it was a temptation.
FEST: Yes, you’ve already indicated that the way we imagine evil, or the way evil is imagined and has been formulated in our culture, in religious, philosophical, and literary terms, has no place for the type of man like Eichmann. One of the main ideas in your book—it already emerges in your subtitle—is the “banality of evil.” This has led to many misunderstandings.
ARENDT: Yes, look here, these misunderstandings actually run through the whole polemic, they belong to the small part of it that is genuine. In other words, it’s my view that these misunderstandings would have arisen in any case. Somehow, it shocked people enormously, and I can understand that perfectly well; I myself was very shocked by it, too. For me, too, it was something for which I was quite unprepared.
Now, one misunderstanding is this: people thought that what is banal is also commonplace. But I thought…That wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t in the least mean that there’s an Eichmann in all of us, that each of us has an Eichmann inside him and the Devil knows what else. Far from it! I can perfectly well imagine talking to somebody, who says to me something that I’ve never heard before, so it’s not in the least commonplace. And I say, “That’s really banal.” Or I say, “That’s just rubbish.” That’s the sense in which I meant it.
This banality was a phenomenon that really couldn’t be overlooked. The phenomenon expressed itself in those unimaginable clichés and turns of phrase that we heard over and over again. I can tell you what I mean by banality since in Jerusalem I remembered a story that Ernst Jünger once told, and that I’d since forgotten…
During the war, Ernst Jünger came across some peasants in Pomerania or Mecklenburg—no, I think it was Pomerania (the story is told in Strahlungen, “Radiations,” the title of Ernst Jünger’s collected diaries from the Second World War, first published in 1949). A peasant had taken in Russian prisoners of war straight from the camps, and naturally they were starving—you know how Russian prisoners of war were treated here. And he says to Jünger, “Well, they’re subhuman—and…like cattle! It’s easy to see: they eat the pigs’ food.” Jünger comments on this story, “It’s sometimes as if the German people were being ridden by the Devil.” And he didn’t mean anything “demonic” by that. Look here, there’s something outrageously stupid about this story. I mean the story itself is stupid. The man doesn’t see that this is what starving people do. That anyone would behave like that. Still, there’s something outrageous about this stupidity. […] Eichmann was rather intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing, isn’t that true?
FEST: Would you say that Eichmann, and Höss,*1 too, are specifically German figures? You mentioned Kant just now, and Eichmann himself occasionally referred to Kant during his trial. He’s supposed to have said that he had followed Kant’s moral precepts all his life long, and made Kant’s concept of duty his guiding principle.
ARENDT: Yes. Quite an impertinent remark, of course, isn’t it? On Herr Eichmann’s part. After all, Kant’s whole ethics amounts to the idea that every person, in every action, must reflect on whether the maxim of his action can become a general law. In other words…It really is the complete opposite, so to speak, of obedience! Every person is a lawgiver. In Kant, nobody has the right to obey. The only thing that Eichmann did take from Kant is that fatal business of inclination. And this is, unfortunately, very widespread in Germany. This curious conception of duty in Germany…I’ll say this to you: Look here, Hitler or sadists such as Boger in the Auschwitz trial—Hitler was probably a plain murderer, a man of murderous instincts. In my opinion, these people aren’t typical Germans.
In my view, the Germans as a people aren’t especially brutal. In fact, I do not believe in that kind of national characteristics…Still, the story I told just now, Jünger’s story, is specifically German. I mean this inability, as Kant says, if I can now really quote his own words, “to think in the place of every other person”—yes, this inability…this kind of thoughtlessness is like talking to a brick wall. You never can get a reaction, because these people never pay you any attention. That is German. The second thing that strikes me as specifically German is this frankly maniacal way that obedience is idealized. We obey in this sense when we’re children, when it is necessary. Obedience is a very important matter then. But this should come to an end at the age of fourteen, or at the latest fifteen.
FEST: Don’t you think that behind the references to “oaths,” “orders,” “obedience” there’s more than a mere excuse? Eichmann was forever referring to these words. He explained that he’d been brought up to be obedient from an early age; he asked, “What advantage would I have derived from disobedience? In what respect would it have been of any use to me?” And then he stated that when, in May 1945, no more orders were reaching him, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that the world was coming to an end.
ARENDT: A life without a führer!
FEST: The problem of obedience runs like a leitmotif through his whole life—you can read it in the trial records, for instance, it’s forever cropping up. It’s the leitmotif of a completely sham existence.
ARENDT: Yes, this sham existence can of course be seen everywhere. But, you know, he wasn’t the only person to refer to all that, was he? To “orders,” “oaths,” “God,” “the duty to obey,” and “the virtue of obedience.” Also, Eichmann talked about “slavish obedience.” In Jerusalem he got into a terrible muddle and suddenly said it was a question of obeying slavishly, there was nothing good about it at all, and so on. Right? So it’s forever whirling round and round in people’s minds. No, the reference to “oaths,” and the idea that responsibility has been taken from you, and so on—you don’t find this just with Eichmann, I’ve also found it in the records of the Nuremberg Trials—there’s something outrageously thoughtless about this, too. You see, Eichmann produced these attacks of rage—as did the others—and said, “But they promised us that we wouldn’t be held responsible. And now we’re left holding the bag, aren’t we? And what about the big fish? They’ve evaded responsibility, of course—as usual.” But you know how they evaded responsibility: either they took their own lives, or they were hanged. To forget that when you talk about responsibility is grotesque, and makes the whole question comical! Yes, the fact is they’re no longer among the living! When you’re unable to imagine that all this is only relevant as long as people are still alive—well, in that case there’s no helping you.
FEST: But to what extent is there a deeper problem lurking here? To what extent can people living in totalitarian circumstances still be held responsible? This doesn’t apply just to the Eichmann type, it applies in the same way to the Judenräte on the other side.
ARENDT: Just a moment before I answer that question. Look, it’s a really amazing phenomenon: none of these people expressed any remorse. Yes, Frank2 did, obviously; perhaps Heydrich3 on his deathbed—so they say; Ley*4…
FEST: Yes, in Frank’s case I’d say it was a purely emotional remorse. He retracted it straightaway in his concluding speech to the court.
ARENDT: Yes!
FEST: His was a most ambivalent feeling.
ARENDT: So I can say, “No one expressed remorse.”
FEST: Basically, at any rate, it can’t be definitely proved in a single case.
ARENDT: And, as is well known, Eichmann said, “Remorse is for little children.” No one expressed remorse. On the other hand, we should imagine that when nobody expresses remorse, there ought to be at least one person who stands up for his actions and says, “Yes, actually, we did do it, for this and that reason, and I still think the same way today. We lost. Whether we won or lost doesn’t affect the cause itself.” In actual fact, the cause collapsed like a wet dishrag. Nobody stood up. Nobody put forward any defense. And this seems quite crucial for the phenomenon you touched on just now—obedience. Don’t you think? In other words: they just wanted to go along. They’re ready to go along with everything. When someone says to them, “You’re only one of us if you commit murder”—fine. When they’re told, “You’re only one of us if you never commit murder”—that’s fine, too. Right? That’s the way I see it.
FEST: That is so true—indeed, Eichmann stated, when he was imprisoned by the Americans, that he’d been glad to submit to somebody else’s leadership again. And the peculiar way he was ready to tell the court or rather the interrogation, the preliminary interrogation, everything he knew, is probably to be interpreted in the same way as his readiness to give absolute obedience to any current authority, right to the limit of what was possible—his readiness to submit to any authority.
ARENDT: Wonderful. He was euphoric in Jerusalem. There’s no question about it, is there? The superior was Landau,5 everyone could see that, and then came various other ranks down to Herr Captain Less,6 whom he used—as Herr Mulisch rightly said*7—as a father confessor. He said, “Captain, I’ll willingly say everything.” Of course, he wanted to cut a fine figure, too. At any rate, tell his life story. Anyway, the question of responsibility—shall we get back to that?
FEST: Yes, please.
ARENDT: Look here, when we put people on trial, we ascribe responsibility to them. And we have a right to do so, from a legal standpoint…We have the right, since the alternative was not martyrdom. There was an alternative on both sides: you didn’t have to go along, you could make up your own mind. “Thanks anyway, but…I’m not going to do that. I’m not risking my life, I’m trying to get away, I’m trying to see if I can slip off.” Isn’t that right? “I’m not going along with anyone, and if I should be forced to go along, then I’ll take my own life.” This possibility existed. It meant not saying “we,” but “I”—judging for oneself. And judging for oneself is what people did do, everywhere, at every level of the populace: religious people and nonreligious people, old and young, educated and uneducated, nobles and bourgeois and a great many workers, an amazing number of workers, especially in Berlin, where I was able to watch it happening.
Those who did go along always justified themselves the same way, as we can see. They always said, “We only stayed on so that things wouldn’t get any worse.” Right? But, well—this justification should be rejected once and for all—it couldn’t have got any worse.
FEST: And the American prosecutor Jackson8 at the Nuremberg Trials spoke his mind on this in a very apt and characteristic way. Referring to Schacht and Papen,9 he said, “If we ask these people why they went along with it for such a long time, then they say it was because they wanted to prevent anything worse. And if we ask them why everything turned out so badly, they say they had no power.” At this point, everything really falls apart and their apologia becomes a mere excuse.
ARENDT: Yes. They were all bureaucrats, too.
FEST: Absolutely.
ARENDT: With scruples—they were functionaries with scruples. But their scruples didn’t go far enough to show them clearly that there is a boundary at which human beings cease being just functionaries. And if they’d gone away and said, “For God’s sake, let someone else do the dirty work!”—wouldn’t they suddenly have become human beings again, instead of functionaries?
FEST: Yes. But I’d still like to ask once again what possibilities there were to remain guiltless in a totalitarian regime or within a totalitarian society. Many people are not heroes, and you can’t expect them to be….But they are not criminals, either. Sometimes they’re just accessories in the sense they knew what was going on.
ARENDT: Yes, you know, it’s terrible to be an accessory in that sense. The critical question here is the guilt of people who just looked on, who didn’t go along or who at first, and there were many, felt an impulse to go along in solidarity with those who were killed….Jaspers, I believe, has spoken the decisive words about where this being an “accessory” leads. He said, “My guilt is that I’m still alive.”*10 Right? “For we could survive only by keeping our mouths shut.” But you see, between this knowledge and the deed there’s an abyss. Between the man who sees it and goes away, and the man who stays and does it….So when the person who hasn’t done anything, who has only seen and gone away, says, “We’re all guilty,” he thereby is covering up for the man who actually carried it out—this is what happened in Germany. And so we must not generalize this guilt, since that is only covering up for the guilty. Anyway, I’d like to say a bit more about this, if I may.
FEST: Please do.
ARENDT: We need to realize that in totalitarian circumstances the phenomenon of powerlessness exists, and we need to realize that even in circumstances of absolute powerlessness there are still different ways of behaving. In other words, it doesn’t imply that you absolutely have to become a criminal. The phenomenon of powerlessness tips the scales, and this was the situation of all these people. They had become absolutely powerless. There was no possibility of resisting, since they were all isolated, since they didn’t belong together anywhere, since not even a dozen people could get together, as it were, and trust one another.
FEST: Would you say, Frau Arendt, that as regards this situation we can get by with the old, simple proposition that it’s better to suffer injustice than to commit it?
ARENDT: Look here, this proposition comes from Socrates. In other words, it was formulated before the religious commandments for Christian and Western mankind, taken from the Jews, became authoritative. What Socrates always added, or rather Plato did, is that we can’t prove this proposition. For some people, it’s self-evident, but you can’t prove to other people that it’s how they should behave. So what is the reason for the belief of those who view it as self-evident?
Now there’s another proposition of Socrates’, which in my view does provide us with the reason. It’s this: “It is better to be out of harmony with the whole world than with oneself, since I am one.” For if I am not in harmony with myself, a conflict arises that is unbearable. In other words, it’s the idea of contradiction in the moral realm, which is still authoritative for Kant’s categorical imperative. This idea presupposes that, in actual fact, I live with myself, and am, so to speak, two-in-one, so that I then can say, “I will not do this or that.” For then the only way out, if I do this or that, is suicide, or later, when thought in Christian categories, to change my mind and repent.
Now living with yourself means, of course, talking to yourself. And this talking-to-yourself is basically thinking—a kind of thinking that isn’t technical, and of which anybody is capable. So the presupposition behind the idea is: I can converse with myself. And so, there may be situations in which I fall out of harmony with the world to such an extent that I can only have recourse to myself—and perhaps with a friend, too, with another self, as Aristotle so beautifully put it: allos autos. This, in my view, is what powerlessness actually is. And some people who walked away without doing anything admitted to themselves that they were powerless and clung to this proposition, the proposition that someone who is powerless can still think.
FEST: Let’s get back to Eichmann and the role that bureaucracy played in mass murder. What does it mean for an individual to be embedded in a bureaucratic apparatus? And how far can the awareness of injustice evaporate? Is it maybe that the merely partial responsibility given to a person hides the possibilities for any moral insight? Eichmann said, “I sat at my desk and did my work.” And the former gauleiter of Danzig stated that his official soul had always identified with what he did, but his private soul had always opposed it.*11
ARENDT: Yes, this is the so-called internal emigration among the murderers—which means the extinction of the whole concept of inner emigration or inner resistance. I mean there’s no such thing. There’s only external resistance, inside there’s at best a reservatio mentalis, right? Those are the lies of a sham existence, transparent and rather nauseating. The bureaucracy, in other words, administered mass murder, which naturally created a sense of anonymity, as in any bureaucracy. The individual person is extinguished. As soon as the person concerned appears in front of the judge, he becomes a human being again. And this is actually what is so splendid about the legal system, isn’t it? A real transformation takes place. For if the person then says, “But I was just a bureaucrat,” the judge can say, “You listen now, that’s not why you’re here. You’re standing here because you’re a human being and because you did certain things.” And there’s something splendid about this transformation.
Apart from the fact that bureaucracy is essentially anonymous, any relentless activity allows responsibility to evaporate. There’s an English idiom, “Stop and think.” Nobody can think unless he stops. If you force someone into remorseless activity, or if he allows himself to be forced, then you will always hear the same story. You’ll always find that an awareness of responsibility can’t develop. It can only happen in the moment when a person reflects—not on himself, but on what he’s doing.
FEST: Let’s turn for a moment to some of the legal consequences that arise from this whole complex, especially the question that’s linked with what we’ve just been talking about: Does the Eichmann type still belong to the traditional concept of the murderer? Isn’t he much more of a functionary in a murderous apparatus than a murderer? And does the partial responsibility he held justify the sense of total guilt?
ARENDT: We’ve already mentioned the murderer without a motive, I mean without the criminal motives we’re familiar with: passion, self-interest, and so forth….Or the perpetrator who commits a crime out of conviction—an intermediate figure. All well and good! So, no, the concepts we’ve inherited give us no handle on this way of killing from one’s desk or in masses….That is, of course, an incomparably more fearsome type of person than any ordinary murderer, since he no longer has any relationship with his victim at all. He really does kill people as if they were flies.
Partial responsibility was, of course, never a ground for partial guilt. Eichmann wasn’t commissioned to actually kill, since he wasn’t suited for it. But he was part of the killing process! It’s not important who actually does this or that. What I mean is…when I say “But he’s not a typical murderer,” I don’t mean that he’s any better. What I mean is that he is infinitely worse, even though he has no actual “criminal instincts,” as we call them. He was pulled into it. But I can imagine murderers whom I might find, if I may say so, much more likable than Herr Eichmann.
FEST: The court in Jerusalem also gave a conclusive answer to this question when it stated that this case wasn’t just a mass crime with regard to the victims that was at stake, but also one with regard to the perpetrators. Perhaps at this point I can quote: “Being near to or far away from…the man who actually kills the victim [can] have no influence on the extent of the responsibility…Rather, the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.”*12
ARENDT: Yes, quite true. I’ve quoted the same words myself. They come from the closing judgment. I entirely agree.
FEST: But the question is whether the legal norms in place can still grasp the nature of responsibility in this case. Would you say so?
ARENDT: Legal textbooks don’t prepare us for administrative mass murder, and nothing prepares us for this type of perpetrator. So can we still exercise justice? Not in accordance with the legal textbooks, as it were, but de facto? In fact, the judges—though they struggle with might and main to deny it—always passed judgment without any hindrance.
Justice leads to two things. First, it should restore the order that has been disturbed. This is a process of healing that can only succeed if the ones who have disturbed the order, the people we’re talking about, are condemned. And second, in my view, is what affects us Jews…There’s a quotation from Grotius that one of the judges used, but which they didn’t pay much attention to, alas; he said that it is part of the honor and dignity of the person harmed or wounded that the perpetrator be punished. This has nothing to do with the suffering endured, it has nothing to do with putting something right. It’s really a question of honor and dignity. Look, for us Jews it’s a crucial question when we’re in Germany. If the German people think they can carry on living quite undisturbed with the murderers in their midst, this goes against the honor and dignity of a Jewish person.
FEST: Let’s return to your book, Frau Arendt. In it, you referred to the way that the Eichmann trial laid bare the total nature of the moral collapse at the heart of Europe, among the persecutors and the persecuted alike, and in every country. Does the reaction to your book—a reaction that consisted on the one hand of denying this collapse, and on the other of making a confession of total guilt—indicate precisely what you were trying to prove?
ARENDT: Well, yes, this reaction to my book was for me…it was, of course, a test case—but after the event, not in the sense that I had expected it. Let me give you an example, one that I experienced several times…This book was read in manuscript by a very great number of people (which is unusual for me), and of those people who read the book in manuscript, at least fifty percent, probably many more, were Jews. Not a single one of them voiced the reaction that came subsequently—they didn’t even hint at it! In fact, these include, of course, people who are friends of mine and whom I know well. And one of them, for example, with this book…not just one, but several Jews read the book in manuscript and were really enthusiastic, right? Then the campaign started up, and they completely forgot that they’d already read the book in manuscript. If you want to understand this phenomenon better—you know, this is yet another phenomenon—then you really must read The Golden Fruits by Nathalie Sarraute;*13 she depicted it as a comedy. And it is indeed a comedy, it’s the comedy of intellectual society, isn’t it? The way these opinions swing this way and that, of course under influences….And many more people are subject to these influences than is generally realized. Aren’t they? And this has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. A person can be very intelligent and nevertheless behave like that.
FEST: You mentioned the campaign. There are many reasons behind the resistance to the connections you drew in your book, of course, and some of them—it has to be said—deserve to be treated with respect. This raises the question: Should we tell the truth, even when we come into conflict with certain legitimate interests on the one hand, and people’s feelings on the other?
ARENDT: Look here, now you’re touching on the only question in the whole controversy that is actually of interest to me.
I don’t think that I damaged anyone’s legitimate—let me emphasize legitimate!—interests. But let’s assume that this is a controversial issue and that I did actually damage them. Should I have done so? Well, I think that such is the historian’s task, as well as the task of people who live at the time and are independent—there are such people, and they need to be guardians of factual truths. What happens when these guardians are driven out by society, or driven into a corner or put up against a wall by the state—we’ve seen this happen in the writing of history, for example in Russia, where a new history of Russia comes out every five years. Does the state or society, with their legitimate interests that may come into conflict with the truth, nevertheless have an interest—in principle—with these guardians of factual truth? In this case I’d say yes. What then happens is of course that a whole series of apologias or defenses are brought out and put onto the market just to cover up the two or three truths that are actually quite marginal in this book. It won’t succeed—nothing of this kind ever does.
But there’s another thing: there are also legitimate feelings. And there’s no question about it: I have wounded some people. And you know, it’s more unpleasant for me when I hurt people than when I get in the way of organizations and their interests, right? I take this seriously, I must say, while the other thing is only a matter of principle. Well, I have hurt these legitimate feelings—essentially through my style, and I can’t say much about that. Look here, it’s my view that the legitimate feeling here is sorrow. The only one! Not self-congratulation! And very few people understand this. There’s nothing I can do about it. In fact, in my opinion people shouldn’t adopt a pathetic tone to talk about these things, since that only belittles them. But all of that…I also think that you must be able to laugh, since that’s a form of legitimate sovereignty. And I feel that all these criticisms of my irony are very unpleasant, indeed, from the point of view of taste. But these are all personal matters. I’m obviously rather unpleasant in the eyes of a great many people. I can’t do anything about that. What am I supposed to do? They just don’t like me. The style in which people express themselves—well, that’s something they themselves aren’t aware of.
FEST: One last question, Frau Arendt. There were a great number of people who advised against publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem in Germany. They used phrases like “a negative impact on public awareness.” How exactly could such a negative impact come about?
ARENDT: Well, the Jewish organizations quite obviously have an odd anxiety: they think that people might misuse my arguments. “That’s it,” they think, the antisemites are going to say “the Jews themselves were to blame.” They say that anyway. But if you read my book, there’s nothing useful for antisemites in it. And many people think the German people aren’t mature yet. Well, if the German people aren’t mature yet, then we’ll probably have to wait until the Last Judgment.
*1 Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from mid-May 1940 through November 1943.
*2 Hans Frank, the chief jurist of Nazi Germany and governor-general of the “General Government” territory, which encompassed much of central and southern Poland as well as western Ukraine, during the war. He was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity, found guilty, and executed in 1946.
*3 Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official and one of the principal architects of the Final Solution. He was attacked in Prague on May 27, 1942, by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers, sent by the Czechoslovak government in exile, and died from his injuries a week later.
*4 Robert Ley, Nazi politician and head of the German Labor Front from 1933 to 1945. He committed suicide in 1945, while awaiting trial for war crimes in Nuremberg.
*5 Moshe Landau, the presiding judge in the Eichmann trial, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany.
*6 Captain Avner W. Less, a young Israeli police official who interrogated Eichmann for 275 hours in the pretrial interrogations in 1961.
*7 Arendt is referring to Dutch journalist Harry Mulisch’s book on the Eichmann trial, Strafsache 40/61 (Criminal Case 40/61), which she greatly admired.
*8 Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
*9 Hjalmar Schacht, an economist, banker, and politician who served in Hitler’s government as president of the Reichsbank and minister of economics; and Franz von Papen, a politician who served as vice-chancellor of Germany under Hitler in 1933 and 1934.
*10 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 66. Jaspers calls this guilt “metaphysical,” which he differentiates from moral and political guilt. —Ed.
*11 Fest is referring here to Albert Forster, the gauleiter (party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP) of Danzig–West Prussia from 1935 to 1945. Forster was directly responsible for the mass murder, resettlement, and forced assimilation of tens of thousands of Jews and nonethnic Germans over the course of his administration.
*12 See Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Penguin, 1963), 247.
*13 See Arendt’s review, “Nathalie Sarraute,” —Ed.
wonkmonk's notes 