Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

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The Yale University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order, if, in its judgement fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. 137 C.F.R. §201.14 2018 Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem EDITED BY Steven E. Aschheim UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint previously published material: Albrecht Wellmer, "Hannah Arendt on Revolution," from Revue International de Philosophie z (1999)• Michael Halberstam, "Hannah Arendt on the To- talitarian Sublime and Its Promise of Freedom," from Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, © 1999 Yale Uni- versity Press. Dana R. Villa, "Totalitarianism, Mo- dernity, and the Tradition," and "Apologist or Critic? On Arendt's Relation to Heidegger," revised from Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, © 1999 Princeton University Press. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © zoo, by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem / Steven E. Aschheim, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-5zo-zzo56-o (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN o-5zo-zzo57-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Arendt, Hannah. I. Aschheim, Steven E., 194z— B945•A694 H36 zoo, 32.0.5'o92—dczl 0o-053z43 Manufactured in the United States of America to 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 oz 01 to 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 z 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/Ntso Z39.48-199z (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). mQ Contents Preface Steven Aschheim ix Introduction: Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem Steven Aschheim 1 HANNAH ARENDT: POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY Hannah Arendt on Tradition and New Beginnings Agnes Heller 19 Hannah Arendt on Revolution Albrecht Wellmer 33 The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator Walter Laqueur 47 Theodicy in Jerusalem Susan Neiman 65 THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM RECONSIDERED Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism: An Anglocentric View Bernard Crick 93 Hannah Arendt on the Totalitarian Sublime and Its Promise of Freedom Michael Halberstam 105 Totalitarianism, Modernity, and the Tradition Dana R. Villa 124 HANNAH ARENDT AND JEWISHNESS: IDENTITY, HISTORY, AND ZIONISM In Search of the Mother Tongue: Hannah Arendt's German-Jewish Literature Liliane Weissberg ~ 149 j Binationalism and Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Palestine Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin 16 5 Hannah Arendt, the Early "Post-Zionist" Moshe Zimmermann 181 Hannah Arendt's Zionism? Richard J. Bernstein 194 EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM Eichmann in Jerusalem: Justice and History Michael R. Marrus 2.05 Malicious Clerks: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil Yaacov Lozowick 214 Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence: The Intellectual Background Hans Mommsen 2.24 Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial Leora Bilsky 232 A Generation's Response to Eichmann in Jerusalem Richard I. Cohen 253 ARENDT AND GERMAN CULTURE Love and Bildung for Hannah Arendt Gabriel Motzkin 2.81 German as Pariah, Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Anson Rabinbach 292 The Grammar of Prudence: Arendt, Jaspers, and the Appraisal of Max Weber Peter Baehr 306 Apologist or Critic? On Arendt's Relation to Heidegger Dana R. Villa 325 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History and Metahistory Annette Vowinckel 338 Notes 347 List of Contributors 42.1 Index 425 Theodicy in Jerusalem Susan Neiman I must admit that I shall be in fullest sympathy with a Zeitgeist that would bring the intellectuals to the point of no longer considering the tremendous body of past philosophy as the "errors of the past.- -Arendt, "Religion and the Intellectuals" Whose trial was it? The question haunts the pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem and much of the controversy surrounding it. Arendt charged that in soliciting victims' testimony, the state of Israel was trying the history of anti-Semitism, rather than the particular deeds of a particular criminal, as simple justice demands. Arendt's critics found her discussion of the role of the Ju- denräte even more gratuitous. Her insistence on confronting the question of Jewish complicity in this context suggested that not Eichmann, but the Judenräte were on trial and led many to conclude that Arendt had taken it on herself to indict the victims. That Eichmann in Jerusa- lem provoked enormous controversy at its publication when the issues it broached had been little discussed in the Jewish or German commu- nities is no surprise. More puzzling is the violent passion the book con- tinues to inspire some thirty-five years later, when we can hardly be said to suffer from a dearth of discussion of the Holocaust. The ferocity of discussion cannot be explained by the book's apparent content. Thus, it remains unstilled by further examination of historical data or by the suggestion that Arendt was simply careless in her choice of expression.' In what follows, I shall offer a reading of the book in terms that are unavailable on its surface. Discussion of her notion of the banality of evil has emphasized her attempt to capture the specifically modern charac- ter of evil. I do not intend to evaluate her view, shared by many, that the 65 66 TheodicY in Jerusalem Holocaust involves a radically unique form of evil, or the success of her attempts to characterize its nature. Without deciding the question of whether the twentieth century presents something fundamentally new in the quality of evil, I wish to situate the question in an older one. Much about the book and the debate it engenders becomes clearer when we - cease to view it as a faulty piece of historical writing, or even an incom plete sketch in moral theory. What was on trial was not (only) German war crimes, or Jewish complicity in them, but Creation itself. Among other things, this explains why Arendt's critics were right to sense she was engaged in more than the simple reporting she claimed. There is no doubt that Arendt undertook to defend something whose justification should make us more than a little uneasy. It was not, however, Adolf Eichmann, but a world that contained him. My argument proceeds as follows. I begin with a summary of the modern problem of evil in order to place the issues raised by Arendt in tradi- tional context. I then discuss Arendt's use of theological discourse and her remarks about philosophy in order to outline the constraints her project must face: If Arendt's work provides a (substitute for) theodicy, it does so in radically modern form. Her decided antipathy to Hegelian attempts to justify Creation through history is as much rooted in Kantian metaphys- ics as in the experience of the Shoah and must entail rejecting any hint of suggestion that this world is the best of all possible ones. I proceed to ex- amine her discussion of evil as a piece of moral psychology and philosophy whose goal is to preserve individual moral responsibility without re- lying on a notion of intention. Finally, I discuss the ways in which that discussion serves practical and theoretical ends. It responds to concrete political dangers Arendt correctly anticipated while providing a meta- physical framework that allows us to preserve the stance she ascribed to Lessing: not entirely at home in the world, but committed to it (MDT, 5 ). The problem of evil can be divided into three separate questions: (1) Defining the nature of evil. (z) Explaining how people (knowingly) commit evil actions. (3) Understanding how (a benevolent and powerful) God could cre- ate a world containing innocent suffering. For most modern readers, these are thoroughly different projects, so that the eighteenth-century designation of all of them as somehow be- longing together can seem simply confused. That human cruelty and natural disaster were both called evils may appear but a historical mis- Susan Neiman 67 take—perhaps a natural mistake in a group of theists, for whom every- thing is ultimately in God's hands, but one we've been forced to correct. Even optimists among us no longer expect benevolence and intelligibil- ity from the natural world but confine our hopes to encountering them occasionally among human beings.

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