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Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original Context Alfons Söllner European Journal of Political Theory 2004 3: 219 DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041048

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article

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of EJPT

Totalitarianism in its Original European Journal of Political Theory Context © SAGE Publications Ltd, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi issn 1474-8851, 3(2) 219–238 Alfons Söllner Technical University of Chemnitz [DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041048]

abstract: The objective of this article is to contribute to an understanding of Hannah Arendt’s special place in present-day political theory by means of a contrast between her Origins of Totalitarianism and four important political science studies of National Socialism and totalitarianism, three written by authors who shared the status of involuntary emigrant with Arendt, that are offered as constituting the original context of her work. A critical appreciation of the seminal works by Ernst Fraenkel, Franz L. Neumann, Sigmund Neumann, and Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brezinski, with special emphasis on questions of method, opens the way to a reconsideration of the distinctly philosophical character of Arendt’s work, and its shocking challenges to the scientific orientations of political science.

key words: Carl J. Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz Neumann, Hannah Arendt, Nazi Germany, Sigmund Neumann

Little proof is needed that The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential intellectual writings of the early 21st century. How many other academic works are able to call forth a whole series of conferences on the occasion of their 50th birthday?1 Furthermore, it is not to be expected that the wave of studies, celebrations and debates on Hannah Arendt, which has swept over the western democracies since the disintegration of the Communist empire, will soon come to an end. There has been no solution of the problems of transition confronting the post-Communist states, after all, nor will those problems disappear simply because these states will soon become members of the European Union. And it is the configuration of these problems that consti- tute, in the language of Arendt’s teacher and friend, Karl Jaspers, the kairos – the transhistorical moment – of the intense interest in Hannah Arendt. If a book that is by no means easy to read has retained such a leading position, notwithstanding the boulder-strewn rapids of political as well as scholarly criti-

Contact address: Alfons Söllner, Philosophische Fakultät der Technischen Universität, D-09107 Chemnitz, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected] 219

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) cism that it has had to survive, and if it has even become quite popular, then a renewed reading runs the risk of merely reproducing what is already well known, a cliché ossified in the history of the work’s reception and impact. An unprecedented kind of book that emerged out of the modern twilight of science and politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become something unique, a modern ‘classic of political thought’. The ambivalent consequences of this canonization appear in the astonishing revitalization of the debate on totalitarianism after 1989. While Hannah Arendt is implicitly present throughout, she remains in the background of the mainly technical dispute in Germany. In France, however, we find the opposite trend, and the discourse on totalitarianism is philosophical to a degree that reveals the limitations of such an approach.2

The Context of the Emigration of Political Scientists What is, in fact, meant by placing Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism in its ‘original context’, that is, in the context of contemporary debates? If we want to discourage the fashionable reception that merely smoothes comfortable ways out of the past into the present, then we have to begin with a solid definition of what we mean by contemporary debates. In order not to get lost in the jungle of the 20th century, we should aim at a middle course between two extremes. We would end up with much too narrow a definition of the context if we included only the immediate academic reception of the book, first in the United States in the 1950s and then, following its translation into other languages, in various European countries. Yet again, we would create too wide a context if we considered all of the rich history of the book’s impact up to the present day, inquiring into its place in the history of political ideas of the entire 20th century.3 In the following, I will assume that Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism can best be understood if the context of its emergence is defined by at least three considerations. The Origins of Totalitarianism is (1) a product of the political– scientific emigration from Hitler’s Germany, in which it (2) holds a specific and very significant place, by virtue of which it (3) was able to become a historical moving force behind the political thinking of postwar times. This presupposes a conception of contemporaneity which is as forceful as it is complex. For the sake of simplicity, I will posit that the political–scientific emigrants can be considered a generational group in Karl Mannheim’s sense,4 determined by specific key experiences, above all political. In our case, there is no need for elaborate research to ascertain the formative experience of the group of German Jewish intellectuals and scientists born around 1900, an experience that produced a psychological radicalization and political clarification of the experiences of catastrophe constitutive of the preceding generation, the generation defined by the First World War. The key was of course the experience of political expulsion from Nazi Germany 220 – on the one hand, a bare escape from an anti-Semitism that culminated in geno-

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism cide and, on the other, a kind of salvation by admission to a country which guaranteed survival first of all, but later also allowed for a psychological and intellectual absorption of the generation’s formative experience. At this point, however, we already need a chronological refinement. Although this generational experience is marked by the boundary stones of 1933 and 1945, it begins well before that time, not least because of the backward projection of the core events; and its resonances extend far beyond the end of National Socialism. That the political–intellectual emigration amounted to a painful disruption of German and European social and intellectual history was something that con- temporaries fully realized at the time. Its extent and, above all, its long-term consequences have only been uncovered, however, by more recent organized research in exile studies. The effects in the fields of social sciences and the humanities appear almost all-encompassing, and geographically, too, they reach far beyond the countries most directly involved in the population shifts. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to consider such scientific emigration, in conjunction with the subsequent remigrations and repercussions, an important factor in the larger processes of internationalization as a whole.5 To assist orientation in this complex field, I would propose to differentiate between two topical domains – today we speak of political discourses – and to correlate them roughly with the major conflicts in world politics, which dominated the second third of the century: on the one hand, the debate on Fascism and National Socialism of the 1930s and early 1940s, a time at which the fight against the Hitler regime and European Fascism determined political thinking; on the other hand, the theory of totalitarianism, which came to the fore during the 1950s and which partly continued the discourse on Fascism, but which simultaneously established a more general system of thought harmonizing more or less with the changed constellation of powers of the Cold War.6 The configuration of the history of ideas I have thus sketched is of a contradictory and complex nature; it shows sedimentations and overlappings, and it is furthermore subject to rapid changes. In order to indicate the framework into which I want to fit Hannah Arendt’s book, I have to work from examples. I will limit myself to the following four titles: Ernst Fraenkel, Dual State, first published in 1941;7 Franz Neumann, Behemoth, first published in 1942;8 Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution, also published in 1942;9 and Friedrich and Brzeszinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 1956.10 The selection of just these authors can surely overcome all objections, granted that the list is incomplete and that Carl J. Friedrich is conceded a special position. It cannot be denied that these books represent milestones not only of the political–scientific emigration, but also of the historical development of the two topical domains we are concerned with: the early theory of National Socialism and Fascism, on the one hand, and the subsequent overarching theory of totalitarianism, on the other. Yet an objection to the empirical basis and communicative density of the overall context projected here is more difficult to parry than a challenge to the choice of examples. Is it in fact 221

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) possible to assert a binding discursive connection among these books or their authors? A simple count of citations seems rather to prove the contrary. In her book on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt quotes Fraenkel only once, Neumann twice (once positively and once negatively), and Sigmund Neumann not at all. The book by Friedrich and Brzeszinski is first mentioned in the second edition, and then merely in the bibliography. In view of the dates of publication, it is only the last of the books, of course, that can quote all of the others. Friedrich and Brzeszinski, then, quote Fraenkel once, Franz Neumann twice, Sigmund Neumann once, and Hannah Arendt four times (as many times as all the others taken together). This is a striking finding. Yet at one level, it may only indicate that the emigrants as a group displayed the features of a normal scientific community, in that mutual recognition and citation were influenced by theoretical differences, political barriers and even by personal animosities. And if one recognizes, further, that their community was not merely normal in these respects – and there are good reasons for doing so, given that the pressure caused by the need for acculturation and for survival resulted in a particularly high degree of political self-stylization and theoretical obstinacy – then one might well be astonished by the remarkable commonalities which existed among them, notwithstanding the communication barriers indicated by the sparseness of mutual citation. So, how can the position and the importance of Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism, which made a celebrity of her overnight, be situated within the design of the often critical, occasionally uncommunicative, yet remarkably con- structive conversational fabric of the émigré political scientists? In what sense can it be said that something that was an eccentric tour de force in 1951 assumed a historical key position on the developmental axis of the emigrants’ discourse? And what qualities of the book – and naturally of the author too – could explain this remarkable effect? It is obvious that these questions can hardly be discussed exhaustively here. Each of the books mentioned is far too rich in premisses arising out of its distinct origins and each one appears as a highly tension-filled product, unique in tone and inner detail, but ambiguous or even contradictory in its effects. We can merely draw some of the central leitmotifs out of the arguments and match them to the no less complex and often abstract–philosophical texture of Hannah Arendt – with the aim of pointing out the similar colouring given to common or even diverse facts, or, on the contrary, the different evaluation of the same facts. And from this it may be possible, in turn, to derive inferences concerning the change in the historical–political situation, reflected, as always, in scientific and intellectual productions. An essential limitation of my examination, however, has to be pointed out right from the start, because it simultaneously implies a preliminary methodological decision regarding the reading of the totalitarianism analysis. I will limit myself 222 exclusively to the third part of Arendt’s book, the section dealing with what

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt, in the introduction to the German edition, called the ‘crystallized totalitarian form’ and which she distinguished from the ‘origins and elements’ of the totalitarian regime. It is just this limitation that the most recent literature on Hannah Arendt refuses to accept. Her book on totalitarianism is increasingly presented as an out- line of a general history of political ideas since the European Enlightenment, as part of a theory of modernity,11 and sometimes it is even stylized into a tableau from which the heroine of that modern age, the ‘female genius’, rises.12

From the Juridical to the Sociotheoretical Construction of National Socialism: Ernst Fraenkel and Franz L. Neumann As is well known, National Socialism – like Italian Fascism, which emerged 10 years earlier – was the subject of intensive observation and scholarly study from the moment of its establishment. The resulting literature of the first hour was inextricably linked with the struggle against Mussolini and Hitler and, later, against European Fascism in its entirety. And since the furious persecutions by the new dictatorships were at first primarily directed against the political left, it was only logical that the first view of these regimes – whether under the more general category of fascism or under the more specialized category of National Socialism – was highly political in character. A trenchant ‘anti-discourse’ developed, which was mainly, but not exclusively, the domain of the left-wing intelligentsia.13 From this initial configuration associated with the political exile in the narrow sense, a second type of view should be distinguished, namely one that was no less dedicated to political opposition but that derived from this a strengthened emphasis on theory, even an obligation to venture a grand theoretical design. I would like to call this the heroic phase of the interpretation of Fascism and National Socialism, in which above all the Hitler regime appeared as the inhuman enemy who, due to his own successes, but also due to the policy of appeasement practised by the western powers, became a superhuman opponent. Typical of this second phase is an almost monomaniacal fixation on the National Socialist system of rule, corresponding with the monographic form of presentation. The books by Fraenkel and Neumann not only belong to this complex but also demonstrate the superlative levels of achievement to which the writings of the emigration, despite all limitations and obstacles, could attain.14 The key characteristics of the book published in the United States in 1941 as The Dual State may perhaps be grasped most quickly by recalling its remarkable history. Ernst Fraenkel, who had been a leading trade union lawyer in the Weimar Republic, collected the materials while staying on as a lawyer in Nazi Germany (under severe restraints), and he had to smuggle the manuscript out of Germany even before he himself managed to escape from Nazi thugs in 1938.15 223

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) Both aspects of his life in Germany after 1933 find more or less direct expression in the theoretical construction of the Dual State. Focusing on changes in legal theory and practice since 1933, Fraenkel advances the thesis that the development in Nazi Germany was characterized by the juxtaposition of two contradictory legal systems: the ‘prerogative state’ on the one hand, which steadily dissolves the old legal structures and guarantees, and the ‘norm state’ on the other, which is in retreat and whose functions are finally reduced to maintaining capitalist production and directing it towards arms production.16 The National Socialist movement has consolidated itself and is firmly in the saddle of political power, because it has successfully removed constitutional and legal barriers limiting police and other institutional powers and has brought the courts under its control. It has rid itself of its enemies by means of direct force; it has shattered the autonomy of social groups and enforced the ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of society; and it has used the perversion of legal and administra- tive guarantees to turn rascist propaganda into reality, i.e. to rob disenfranchised minorities, especially the Jews, of their legal and social standing.17 The most repugnant aspect of this analysis, however, was a thesis that must have been most painful for a qualified and dedicated jurist, a thesis for which Fraenkel nevertheless assembled detailed evidence, namely, that quite a large number of the juridical elites and authorities who had been brought up in the tradition of positivism and who conformed to their belief in legality during the Weimar Republic, had placed themselves at the service of the unjust state, if they had not already engaged themselves beforehand as anti-democratic writers who used jurisprudence to delegitimate the democratic order. Fraenkel’s premier example of this is the constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, whom he presents as someone who not only helped lift the National Socialists into the saddle but who also was the most incisive intellectual pioneer of the National Socialist conception of politics. As Fraenkel summarizes his argument, the anti-Semitic racial policy of the völkisch state is nothing but the translation into practice of Schmitt’s theory of politics as equivalent to the distinction between friend and foe. All of these perversions, however, were only made possible by the earlier effective forfeiture of the tradition of rational natural law, of the guarantees constitutive of the Rechtsstaat and the corresponding concepts of the inalienable rights of man. From this point of view, the programmatic anti- liberalism of the National Socialist ideologists was merely a final, gruesome disillusionment.18 Fraenkel’s focus on the development from a system of legal justice to system- atized injustice, as well as his normative return to natural law, may serve as starting point for showing how the analysis in Behemoth goes beyond The Dual State, and in what direction. During the later years of the Weimar Republic, Neumann had been Fraenkel’s law partner, but he had been forced to leave Germany as early as 1933, and he had completed a second degree in England, writing a dissertation 224 in political science under Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim.19 To this must be

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism added his inclusion in the late 1930s within the émigré Institute of Social Research, a research setting where he could articulate a modified Marxism. While these factors are decisive for the history of science, the publication of Behemoth was an important event from a political standpoint as well, because it analysed the inner structure of National Socialism at a moment when the United States was about to enter the war against the Axis Powers and when everything depended upon revealing in its entirety the aggressive dynamism and the destruc- tive potential of the enemy they had to overcome. Opening with a penetrating and self-critical depiction of the Weimar Republic, Neumann was so overwhelming- ly successful in his attempt that Behemoth is recognized, even today, as the first comprehensive interpretation of National Socialism, a work which has served several generations of researchers in contemporary history as the benchmark for their own work.20 Three main steps in the argument must be distinguished. In his analysis of National Socialism’s political system, first, Neumann relies on a thesis that anticipates his overall interpretation. Although the ideological struggle against liberalism and democracy had been in the forefront during the establishment of National Socialism, and although it had been wrapped in the rhetoric of the ‘totalitarian state’, none of this meant that the National Socialist movement’s claim to the subordination of the authority of the state had been implemented without qualification. Rather, state and party entered into a scarcely definable symbiosis, which required hotly contested compromises, and which could lead to the ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of all political and social life only on this basis.21 Neumann can describe this novel construct of everyday power and bureaucratic rationality most readily by adhering to Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership, enriched by an extensive survey of the ideological formation and practical application of the National Socialist worldview. Accordingly, Neumann reconstructs the origins of the concepts of Volk and race in 19th-century Germany as well as their ‘modernization’ in the direction of political anti-Semitism, with interest primarily in their use for legal and economic discrimination against Jews. Corresponding externally to the domestic declaration of enmity are the theories of German Lebensraum and the superiority of the Germanic race, theories which not only destroyed international law, but became terrible reality during the Second World War.22 The analysis of the economic system, second, is of special concern to Neumann. The keen methodological plea for the primacy of the economy and, accordingly, for the unabatedly capitalist character of economic activities under National Socialism do not, however, lead to a failure to recognize the great shifts of the 1930s and 1940s.23 Neumann shows in detail, demonstrating his point at the instance of the reorganization of the economy in the field of force between the state and heavy industry, that the great improvements in the economic cycle pro- ceed through the juxtaposition and interaction of two great orbits. On the one 225

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) hand, the private capitalist sector is characterized by concentration processes and rapid monopolization, which are enabled to unfold an unimagined dynamism precisely by the fact that the dirigiste interventions of the state (above all, compulsory cartels, price controls and not least the regulation of the labour market) are all deployed for the increase of profit seeking. The state sector, on the other hand, functions as a ‘command economy’, without, however, transforming the economy as a whole into a planned economy. Far from such transformation – and this is the culmination of Neumann’s argument, a claim that gains credibility by its closeness to empirical reality and that permits the argument to stay close to Marxist theoretical premisses – the state’s robbery of property through the ‘aryanization’ of Jewish assets and the ‘Germanization’ of alien industries benefits above all the titans of the private economy. Even in 1944, in his second edition, he does not consider reversing this conclusion in the light of the advanced war economy, but rather announces a fusion of politics and economy in collective crime: ‘The practitioners of violence tend to become businessmen, and the businessmen become practitioners of violence’.24 The third part of Behemoth spells out what this means sociologically and, to this end, it develops a combined theory of classes and elites, which later became known as the ‘polycratic theory’. According to Neumann, a new and towering structure of power had emerged in Germany, installed by direct violence and sustainable only through the most aggressive means, by use of terror and propaganda. Still, the ruling class appeared not so much as a unified formation but, rather, as a motley conglomerate of political, social and economic ‘clumps of power’, whose interest conflicts are barely concealed by the völkisch ideology, which is itself without form. Only in the unscrupulous application of violence both at home and abroad are the ruling powers at one.25 In the face of the four organizational pillars of the National Socialist regime – Neumann distinguishes party, ministerial bureaucracy, army and economic leadership – the mass of the population is powerless and helpless. As was the case with other autonomous social milieux all destroyed by the suppression of democratic institutions, the working class, which had been the strongest political force in the Weimar period, was now at the mercy of the direct dictates of capital and of the authoritarian state bureaucracy. The compulsory organizations created by National Socialism, such as the Deutsche Arbeitfront (German Works Front), were nothing but a shimmering facade behind which wage undercutting and slave labour prevailed.26 That Neumann’s ambitious structural analysis of the National Socialist social order culminates in a tract on legal and political theory of the state shows, among other things, how far he has come on his path from labour advocate to political scientist. The thesis that the raison d’être of the National Socialist regime can be grasped above all in the destruction of legally constituted rights and the filling of 226 the resulting vacuum of fear by propaganda and terror was epitomized in a con-

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism clusion that was as much a statement of principle as a negative judgement. Behind its pathos lay the dimly suspected mass murder of European Jewry. Neumann described National Socialism as a ‘non-state’, thus emphasizing the chaotic elements, at once rational and atavistic, that gave the regime its incredible destructiveness. In the writings of Thomas Hobbes, whose theory of the state provides Neumann with the barest minimum standard, the Old Testament myth of the Behemoth meant just that.27

From Historical Sociology to Typological Political Science: Sigmund Neumann and Carl Joachim Friedrich In the following sketch of the theory of totalitarianism I will commit a faux pas that a historian could normally not permit himself. I will attempt to characterize the all-too-familiar concept of totalitarianism by reversing, in a manner of speaking, the diachronic principle and calling the canonical apex of the theoretical development into question. While it is commonplace in the historiography of the totalitarianism concept that its temporal and substantive culmination lies in the 1950s and that its classic formulation can be grasped in Friedrich and Brzeszinski’s book, published in English in 1956 and translated into German in 1957, I would like to put stress on a different author of the 1940s, Sigmund Neumann, who also assumes a rather heterodox position in the totalitarianism debate. In contrast to our state with regard to the as yet insufficiently studied debate on fascism, we are relatively well informed about the history of the emergence of the concept of totalitarianism, which originated among liberal opponents of Musso- lini’s Fascism in the 1920s, moved through several, mostly conservative, emigrants, such as Waldemar Gurian and Eric Voegelin in the 1930s, until it finally became a topos as well, in the first years of the Second World War, for the left- liberal and social-democratic emigrants. Representative of the latter segment are, for example, the publications of a former Communist like Franz Borkenau, who hardly gets, however, beyond a crude, mainly politically intended, equation of ‘red fascism’ and ‘Nazi Bolshevism’.28 For the late 1940s, however, the secondary literature shows a certain embar- rassment, which is often covered up by postulating a sort of breathing space in research on totalitarianism, explained by the Soviet Union’s entry into the anti- Hitler coalition. Finally, the 1950s are arrayed under a paradigm of the concept as rendered scientific, whereby the historiography of the concept appears to blend organically into the discipline of political science. And here, once more, the theory of Friedrich and Brzeszinski appears as the normative as well as evolution- ary endpoint towards almost everything inclines. Their book becomes the ‘classic of the theory of totalitarianism’, and political science becomes the stadium in 227

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) which the relay race among the researchers on totalitarianism ends. Left over as the only relevant counterexample is Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism – but of that, more later!29 As regards Sigmund Neumann, one should begin by pointing out a general dis- crepancy. Although he belongs significantly to the history of the emigration of political scientists, his achievement, except for his older account of the Weimar party system,30 has until now hardly been reconsidered. This applies above all to the work that he himself considered his most important, Permanent Revolution. How should this book, which was published in 1942, in the same year that Franz Neumann’s magnum opus appeared in the United States, be given a place in the development of the concept of totalitarianism? This is by no means a rhetorical question, since, more than any other item in the treasure house of the intellectual emigration, this book has fallen into neglect, despite the fact that it not only formulated the methodological problems posed by the theory of totalitarianism, but also solved them in a manner worthy of emulation.31 This high assessment may well be risked if one takes as criterion the high level of problem awareness in Permanent Revolution, and its methodological rigour. Almost everything turns, for Sigmund Neumann, on the single question, which is almost programmatically taken as point of departure: how is it possible to carry out a comparative analysis of social systems taken as a whole? Comparison as a methodological problem is actually at the centre of attention from the outset, all the more since Neumann builds on the assumption that Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Russian Bolshevism are by no means prima facie identical.32 It is only on the basis of three case studies that delineate the historically diverse starting points that he develops, in a second step that may be called historical– inductive, a set of five problem areas to which totalitarian regimes react with the same or similar strategies. Neumann speaks of the ‘premise of stability’, ‘action instead of program’, the ‘quasi-democratic foundation’ of politics, of ‘war psychology’, and of the ‘leadership principle’.33 In implementing this two-step program, Neumann adheres consistently to the comparative method, through which the broad and masterfully invoked material is joined together in a historical mosaic of the three countries that gives credit to both resemblances and differences. Still, at the end, it is naturally the shared characteristics that cumulate, so to speak, and whose careful synthesis gives clear definition to the concept of totalitarian regime. In this connection, it is noteworthy that Neumann does not restrict himself to the three contemporary totalitarianism ‘candidates’, Italy, Germany and Russia, but that his comparison also includes the western democracies – a special procedure he calls ‘definition by contrast’.34 The following points are of primary importance for the inner structure of totalitarian regimes. First, there is the installation of the leadership principle, which is not, however, conceived as 228 purely monocratic but, rather, implies the strong participation of a group who

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism execute the power, called ‘political lieutenants’ by Neumann. Over against this leadership, second, there is a more or less amorphous mass, which is a residue of bourgeois society and described in social-psychological terms as ‘mob’.35 Third, the institutional centre of totalitarian rule is the ‘one party state’, which spawns the political elite, on the one hand, and, on the other, drills and controls the masses, thus establishing the communication between state and society.36 While the institutional security apparatus of domination is not reluctant to use thoroughly conventional means, such as plebiscitarian will-formation and bureau- cratization, as well as militarization and state control over education, the distin- guishing characteristic of totalitarian techniques of domination consists of ‘fear as political weapon’, which includes the increasingly effective steering of the masses through propaganda and warmongering.37 This analysis is rounded out by a view of the aggressive war launched by Hitler and initially tolerated by Stalin, until the Soviet Union ends up on the other side and becomes a combatant. The regime-specific state of tension of this designedly unceasing movement, the ‘permanent revolution’, leads with inner necessity to ‘the international civil war’, as Neumann titles his final chapter – and this in 1942! And this exclamation point of recent history could easily be the starting point for a comprehensive reflection on the contradictions and anachronisms in which political emigration abounds. In the case of Sigmund Neumann, it is obvious that the frank counterposition of totalitarian and democratic principles of order with which the book ends had to come into diametrical contradiction with the military order of battle of the time. And here we can probably find one of the main reasons why Permanent Revolution had almost no impact during the 1940s. It simply did not fit into the then current situation, at once highly politicized and internationally conditioned, as the Soviet Union became the most important ally in the battle against the Fascist Axis Powers, whose defeat was not yet in sight. If one ventures a leap from this point to the middle of the 1950s and confronts the totalitarianism book of Friedrich and Brzezinski38 with the decisive question of all totalitarianism studies, so subtly formulated by Sigmund Neumann, the question about the methodological possibility of carrying out a comparison between systems, what changes would come into view, and how would they be connected with the pretensions of rendering the subject scientific, which in the field of totalitarianism analysis emanate especially from political science? What advances can be recorded, or are there also backward steps which may be the price of ‘scientization’? On one level, the answer to these questions is rather obvious. One simply has to look at the much greater amount of historical and empirical material that the authors of the mid-1950s had at their disposal. This does not refer to the greatly increased flood of sources, documents and analyses of National Socialism alone, but even more to the greater detachment possible, after the death of Stalin and the revelations of the 20th Party Conference, towards developments in the Soviet 229

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) bloc. To this must be added the fact that Brzezinski was an expert on Russian- dominated societies, a renowned Sovietologist. Yet, can the same positive assessment simply be extended to the subtlety of the theoretical construction and to the methodological implementation of the totalitarianism analysis? I cannot answer this question in detail, here,39 but I would like at least to scratch the glossy surface of this classic of political science with the following three reflections: 1. The six ‘general characteristics’ of totalitarian regimes are put on cheerful dis- play right at the beginning of the book,40 in its introduction, but from the statement of them it is not clear how the type of totalitarian dictatorship can arise out of them, especially because at the same time the thesis is advanced that the totalitarian form of rule is a regime type sui generis that represents a genuine historical novelty. 2. Linked to this is the theoretical and empirical justification of the overdrawn assumption of monopolization, as it is evident, first, in the leading role ascribed to the unitary party, and later also in the final three systems characteristics (communications monopoly, arms monopoly and economic monopoly). Is this perhaps the expression of a questionable tradition of political science, namely its state-centredness, which would then, in turn, come into conflict with the initial thesis of the novelty of totalitarianism – or is a theoretical model plausi- ble in the case of Bolshevism simply being projected back onto National Socialism? 3. The entire line of reasoning shows an insistent trend towards a concentration on the methods of rule, that is, an inclination towards a technological interpretation, which is partly grounded on the assumption of the increasing importance of technology in modern society, but that may also be partly linked to the (unjustified) affinity between the science ideal presupposed here and the instrumental rationality of totalitarian socialization.41

‘The Superfluousness of Man’: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophical Interpretation of Totalitarianism The contemporaneous context in which Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism has its place is certainly an ambiguous and contradictory web, and it does not entirely lose its amorphous character by our positing delimiting dates in the early 1940s and at the end of the 1950s and by our laying down the relationship between science and politics as the substantive framework. If one sought to move from this context to an analysis and assessment of the book itself, it would involve ‘fitting’ a singular phenomenon into a historical continuum. Yet, it is just at this point that misunderstandings begin, because the book’s extraordinary impact was obviously due exactly to the fact that it did not ‘fit’. Hannah Arendt’s book on 230 totalitarianism appeared on the intellectual stage of the postwar period as a down-

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism right surprise coup, and it is this quality that forces conclusions about both author and substance upon us, not the other way around.42 Thus, the dry scenario of the history of science and of political theory has to be dramaturgically rebuilt, in some such manner as this: what is being enacted is a scene from American intellectual life of the early 1950s; the scenery consists, on the one side, of the huge massif composed of the theories of Fascism and National Socialism, which had raised themselves from legal analysis to social theory and in which the totalitarian system of rule appeared as a functional component of a machine dedicated to war and destruction, which can be subdued only by force of arms. On the other side, we have the open plain of the debate on totalitarianism, which has had new life breathed into it by the ideological needs of the cold war, but which was committed to the imperatives of scientification by the comparative perspective as well as its integration into the disciplinary development of political science.43 What were the elements of the surprise when a more or less unknown New York essayist entered the scene with a book that suddenly joined, as if from the ambush of faraway sociohistorical studies of 19th-century Europe, a debate that was as explosive politically as it was theoretically unresolved? I would like to distinguish three of these elements of surprise.

The Thesis of the Singularity and the Novelty of Totalitarianism The assertion that totalitarian regimes are a phenomenon sui generis and that they represent something new in political history was certainly made earlier.44 But Hannah Arendt, in the forceful manner that later made her so feared, gave this proposition an extraordinary sharpness and asperity that were bound to gain notice. In her formulation, totalitarianism appeared as something ‘totally new’ in the history of mankind, as an outrageous and shocking phenomenon, moreover, which did not permit historical or scientific detachment. Her thesis was turned into outright provocation, however, only through two twists inherent in the peculiar construction of the book itself, which unintentionally turned a gesture of disarming naivety into an attack on the foundations of the established historical and social sciences. Hannah Arendt questioned the two basic convictions of scientific research, belief in continuity as well as causality in historical and social processes, and she did so without grandiose reasonings about the complex methodological and theoretical presuppositions affected by this. And second, she plunged into a rather obvious contradiction as far as the historical bearing of her book is concerned, since the chapters on anti-Semitism and on imperialism, no matter how extensive and weighty they were, could only appear, according to the conventions of the historian’s craft, as a prehistory that must have prepared the way for the emergence of totalitarian rule. A discussion of the methodological foundations of Hannah Arendt’s book on 231

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) totalitarianism is not my present purpose.45 I therefore refrain from a critical review of her belated justifications, which seem doubtful enough, such as the distinction between the ‘origins and elements’ of totalitarian rule and their ‘form of crystallization’.46 Similarly one might want to explore the possibility that Hannah Arendt increased her emphasis on the thesis of the singularity and novelty of totalitarianism precisely because of the attention this provoked in scientific circles. A very good starting point for such an investigation would be the text Ideologie und Terror, first written in 1953 for the Jaspers Festschrift. The article by that name which replaced the final chapter in the second American edition is not identical with the original, and one interesting passage missing from the American version exhibits a reverse movement, as if Hannah Arendt had wanted to dam in the unprecedented alarms she had produced with the discontinuity thesis of her book and, in a sense, to take the thesis back. This text accordingly features formulations such as: It is not the novelty as such that occasions horror, but the fact that this novelty explodes the context of continuity in our history, as well as the concepts and categories of our political thought. When we say that this should not have been allowed to happen, we mean that we are unable to master these happenings with the great means of our past, sanctioned also by a great tradition, in either political practice or in historical–political thought.47 On the other hand, directly following this passage, she tries to place the phenomenon of totalitarianism into the framework of the traditional doctrine of types of state, in this case Montesquieu’s typology of political ethics – arriving at the well known conclusion that the ‘actual novelty’ of totalitarian rule resides not so much in the quantitative increase, but rather in a new quality of ideology and terror, in its elevation to the level of the central constituents of political rule as such.48 While it is obvious that in such reflections Hannah Arendt achieved a new level of literary quality in the confrontation with totalitarianism, our context also shows us what Hannah Arendt left lying, as it were, when she formulated her specifically philosophical version of the theory of totalitarianism. Above all, she neglected, as is evident from a glance at the two Neumanns, the high-quality and thoroughly accessible explanatory potential available in the newer sociological traditions of theory to address the inner coherence and functional differentiation of totalitarian regimes, whether in the form of Marxist social theory or in the form of the humanistic structural sociology in which Sigmund Neumann was rooted. She furthermore neglected the arsenal of methods of comparative social and political research, inclined towards relativization and detachment, a line of research which, at the end of the 1940s, was admittedly only in an embryonic stage, but which, from today’s point of view, constitutes an indispensable basis for any approach to the theory of totalitarianism.49

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism General Interpretation in the Spirit of the German Existential Philosophy That leads us to a second and probably even stronger surprise effect of the book. How could Hannah Arendt so magisterially cast to the winds these preparatory works, and how were they replaced? Or, in other words – because asking after an ‘omission’ does not fit the temperament of this writer, even at her debut – what was the source of the power and intensity that made her totalitarianism analysis so distinctive, right from the beginning? Or is it necessary to go so far as to seek the special effect of this analysis precisely in the fact that she demonstrated the limits of science vis-a-vis the phenomenon of totalitarianism and nevertheless insisted that one had not only to speak of this phenomenon, but also to make it a starting point for a new and universal mode of speaking and thinking? That her specific way of arguing and her literary elegance had something to do with a pronounced philosophical talent was already evident in the early 1950s. Where this remarkable gift came from, however, and, above all, what constituted the preparation, the philosophical fine-tuning, as it were, of the interpretive instruments she deployed, these matters we know in detail only now, by virtue of the intensive biographical research attracted to Hannah Arendt in recent years. The individualization to which she has been subjected has distinguished her not only from the broad collective biographical approaches of exile studies, but it has also turned a small scientific wonder into a high fashion that possesses international glamour and does not even shy away from scandal.50 One may judge this literature with its lovable hero-worship as one will. In parallel to it and altogether persuasive, there is research from the standpoint of the newer historiography of philosophy that shows that the remarkable dynamism that drove Hannah Arendt’s political thinking from the 1950s is in fact best understood if one recognizes that basic concepts are at work in it that have been adapted straight from the German existentialist philosophy of the Weimar Republic, specifically from Martin Heidegger and, in a somewhat toned down version, from Karl Jaspers. Of course, it should be added right away that Arendt’s adaptation of these basic concepts aimed from the outset at a transformation of them, indebted, first, to her personal history of learning, and, second, to the drawing out of consequential philosophical lessons from the totalitarian experience. Her book on totalitarianism is nothing less than the first fearsome monu- ment along this difficult path.51 It is no exaggeration, in fact, to read the book’s chapter on totalitarianism as a bold philosophical coup, whose remarkable unity and consequent linguistic urgency become especially obvious when one attends to the intonation and the leitmotif-like reappearance of basic anthropological concepts such as ‘loneliness’, ‘worldlessness’ and ‘destruction of human nature’. Right from the introductory chapter, it plunges into philosophical totality, inasmuch as it diagnoses the condi- tion of the individual in mass society as the ‘destruction of connections to the 233

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) world’.52 This motif persists in the account of totalitarian propaganda and totalitarian organization, which become ‘totalitarian’ precisely through the destruction of connections to the world and relations among people and their replacement by an ‘iron bond’. The description of the totalitarian form of rule, in the stricter sense, then, rather pushes aside the traditional institutions of the monopoly of power – the state apparatus and the military – in order to exhibit, at first in the secret police, the distinctively totalitarian instruments of rule: ideology as the destruction of reality become total, and terror, as the practical translation of the same principle. In the concentration and extermination camps, finally, Hannah Arendt detects ‘the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule’,53 and, thus, the essential principle of totalitarian rule, which eludes functional analysis because neither violent sadism nor annihilation of opponents is practised here, but, rather, an ‘attempt to make man superfluous’.54

The Practical Uses of ‘Philosophical Exaggeration’ for the Analysis of Totalitarianism Even the harshest critics have had to concede that Hannah Arendt presented a highly original contribution with her first publication in the United States, the intellectual urgency of which was above all connected with the dynamism of her philosophical mode of speech. At the same time, it was often suggested in the contemporary reception that the existentialist philosophical emphasis noticeable throughout the book, while it probably did not harm the clarity of the argument, did cover up sensitive empirical deficits. Thus it was argued that Hannah Arendt, who designated only National Socialism and Stalinism as totalitarian regimes in the strict sense (and not Italian Fascism, nor the Socialist regimes after Stalin), lacked sufficient knowledge of Soviet developments or that she paid insufficient attention to the inner structures of National Socialism, especially to the role of the economy. Yet it is also possible to reverse this same train of thought, which feeds on the mistrust between philosophy and science, and to ask whether it is not precisely to the ‘philosophical exaggerations’ that research – then as now – owes important insights into the inner logic of totalitarianism of both Fascist and Bolshevik types. For our context, it is of special interest whether Hannah Arendt’s philosophical approach furthered or impeded disinterested – that is, historical or social- scientific – research on totalitarian societies. It is in the weight of this question that I suspect lies the third shock impact of Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism book, not so much at the time of its appearance, perhaps, but from the perspective of today. In conclusion, then I would like simply to list some of the achievements of the book, limiting myself to the domain within the bounds of our context, in order to 234 offer some guidelines for future detailed comparison:

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Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism 1. The legal-theoretical analysis associated with Fraenkel, as well as the polycratic theory associated with Franz Neumann, are already rudimentarily present in Hannah Arendt’s work – in any case, more clearly than is indicated by her citations. 2. The concentration on the perpetual movement of the ‘mob’ and its institutional integration into the practice of domination, characteristic of Sigmund Neumann, is just as crucial to Hannah Arendt. 3. Of greatest originality – and really fruitful for the analyses of both National Socialism and Stalinism – is Hannah Arendt’s observation that the actual intensification of terror did not happen at first and that it was not directed so much against the political opponents, but rather that it started only after the regimes had established themselves and that it was therefore directed ‘potentially against everyone’. 4. As regards the key role of the secret police in safeguarding political domination, Friedrich and Brzezinski evidently not only felt themselves inspired but also required to let themselves be corrected by her.55 5. What remains is the large complex of the mass exterminations, which has since then increasingly become the focus of attention for both politics and science – in concrete terms, the gulag and the Jewish genocide. In this respect, Hannah Arendt’s place in the history of science seems to be marked by a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, her book on totalitarianism, by virtue of its vehement existentialist interpretation, has turned this aspect into something that clearly cannot be overlooked or neglected by research, not least because of her contentious – and to this day controverted – thesis, especially as applied to the Holocaust, of complete economic anti-rationality. On the other hand, it is obvious that consequential, that is, historically detailed and sociologically fertile study of the Holocaust was inspired not mainly by Hannah Arendt, but, as evidenced above all by the work of Raul Hilberg, by the structural theory of Franz Neumann.56 It would be just as childish and inappropriate, especially in Germany, to initiate a retroactive competition among the authority figures of contemporary historical consciousness, as it would be inviting – and by no means irreverent – to ask whether Hannah Arendt would have gone along with the inflationary remem- brance policy, which has latched on to the metaphor of the ‘uniqueness of the Holocaust’. Would she perhaps have dissented from this mixing of politics and science, and would she have done so by means of just that obstinacy of philosophical reflection in the face of a retrogressive public, in which critique and public morals become indistinguishable, which was to become so important in her entire future work?

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European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) Notes

1. From the point of view of its impact, it has probably outrun the ‘other’ philosophical classic of emigration, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno ([1947] 1972) The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Boston: Herder & Herder. 2. Compare Eckard Jesse (ed.) (1996) Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Enzo Traverso (ed.) (2001) Le Totalitarisme: Le XX siècle en débat. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. 3. The immediate American reception is documented in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982) Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 406–12. A comparative history of the book’s influence is lacking, as far as I know. The 20th-century context is outlined in Alfons Söllner, Ralf Walkenhaus and Karin Wieland (1997) Totalitarismus: Eine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Traverso (n. 2), esp. pp. 9–110. 4. Karl Mannheim (1928) ‘The Problem of Generations’, in Karl Mannheim (1952) Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. and tr. P. Kecskemeti. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 276–322. 5. The results of research on emigration are presented in a concise summary in Claus- Dieter Krohn (ed.) (1998) Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 6. See Alfons Söllner (1998) ‘Von der Faschismus – zur Totalitarismus?’ in Peter Weiss Jahrbuch, vol. 7. Opladen: Westdeutscher. Alfons Söllner (1996) Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der Emigration: Studien zu ihrer Akkulturation und Wirkungsgeschichte. Opladen: Westdeuscher Verlagh. 7. Ernst Fraenkel (1941) The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. New York: Oxford University Press. 8. Franz L. Neumann ([1944] 1966) Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944. New York: Harper. 9. Sigmund Neumann (1965) Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War. New York: Praeger. 10. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956) Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. 11. Seyla Benhabib (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 111–68. 12. Julia Kristeva (2001) Le Génie feminin: La vie, la folie, les mots: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Paris: Fayard. 13. Typical of this genre is the political pamphlet; books are rather the exception for the social-democratic left. See Hermann Heller (1931) Europea und der Faschimus. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. At the other end of the democratic spectrum we often find sympathy with the new regimes. See Gerhard Leibholz (1933) Die Auflösung der liberalen Demokratie in Deutschland und das autoritäre Staatsbild. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. 14. Other examples from the same period, which can however not be analysed here, are Karl Loewenstein (1939) Hitler’s Germany: The Nazi Background to War. New York: Macmillan. William Ebenstein (1943) The Nazi State. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Almost every emigre political scientist wrote at least one essay against Hitler. 15. The emergence of The Dual State is now documented in detail by Alexander von Brünneck, ‘Vorwort’, in Ernst Fraenkel (1999) Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 7–32. Baden Baden: Nomos. 16. While this political–scientific thesis is retained, its class-theoretical foundation is weakened on the way from the German ‘primary dual state’. 236 17. Cf. esp. Fraenkel (n. 15), pp. 53–155.

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18. Carl Schmitt is the major target throughout the Dual State; see esp. Fraenkel (n. 7), pp. 191–201 and pp. 251–9. 19. Franz L. Neuman (1986) The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society. Leamington Spa, England: Berg. Helmut Dubiel and Alfons Söllner (eds) (1984) Wirtschaft, Recht und Staat im Nationalsozialismus: Analysen des Instituts für Sozialforschung 1939–1942. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. 20. Neumann (n. 8). On the origins/emergence of the Behemoth, see Gert Schäfer, ‘Nachwort’, in Franz L. Neumann (1977) Behemoth: Struktur und Praxis des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 633–776. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. 21. Fraenkel (n. 15), pp. 68–113. 22. The pertinent chs 3–6 of the first part have long been overlooked in the economist interpretation of the Behemoth. See Neumann (n. 8), pp. 83–129. 23. Ibid., pp. 293–361. 24. Ibid., p. 660. 25. Ibid., pp. 365–99. 26. As a former labour lawyer, this aspect was of special interest to Neumann (ibid., pp. 400–58). 27. Ibid., pp. 459–70. 28. Franz Borkenau wrote a number of books while in exile in England. The best known is: Franz Borkenau (1940) The Totalitarian Enemy. London: Faber & Faber. The social- democratic context is comprehensively analysed in William David Jones (1999) The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 29. It is interesting that a description such as the one by Abbot Gleason, which is not interested in the history of theory, remains free of this finalization. Abbot Gleason (1995) Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press. 30. Sigmund Neumann (1932) Die deutschen Parteien: Wesen und Wandel nach dem Krieg. Berlin: Juncker & Dünnhaupt. 31. Söllner et al. (n. 3), pp. 53–73. 32. Neumann (n. 9). 33. Ibid., pp. 1–43. 34. Ibid., pp. 44–5. 35. Ibid., pp. 73–95. 36. Ibid., pp. 118–41. 37. Ibid., pp. 198–203. 38. Friedrich and Brzezinski (n. 10). 39. A comprehensive answer is given in the historical work by Hans J. Lietzmann (1999) Politikwissenschaft im ‘Zeitalter der Diktaturen’: Die Entwicklung der Totalitarismustheorie Carl Joachim Friedrichs. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. 40. Friedrich and Brzezinski (n. 10), pp. 13–23. 41. It is no accident that the momentous renewals of the concept of totalitarianism are connected with the withdrawal of the technicist ideal of knowledge. See Hans Maier (ed.) (1997) Totalitarismus und politische Religionen : Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, vols 1 and 2. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Achim Siegel (ed.) (1998) The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 42. That insight has to do with the ‘breaking up of the historical continuum’ and was one of the basic maxims of Walter Benjamin, with whom Hannah Arendt was well acquainted in Paris during the 1930s. 43. On the standing of the theory of totalitarianism in the context of the cold war, see 237

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Gleason (n. 29); on the development of the discipline of American political science, see Raymond Seidelman (1985) Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 44. E.g. by the historian Carlton J.H. Hayes (1940) ‘The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western Civilization’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82: 102. 45. An attempt in that direction is made by Seyla Benhabib (1996) The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. A critical position is now taken by Richard Wolin (2001) Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 31–69. 46. Hannah Arendt (1991) Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Munich: Piper Verlag, 2nd edn, pp. 13–14, introduction to German edn. Note that this German edn includes additional prefaces and changes developed by Arendt during the early 1960s and not available in the original English-language edns of 1951 and 1958. I shall refer to the German publication for such materials, although some were first written in English and almost all appeared in some form in subsequent English-language edns. See Ursula Ludz (2003) ‘Hannah Arendt und ihr Totalitarismusbuch: Ein kurzer Bericht ueber eine schwierige Autor–Werk–Geschichte’, in Antonia Grunenberg (ed.) Hannah Arendt- Studien 1: Totalitaere Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie, pp. 81–94. Berne and Berlin: Peter Lang. 47. Arendt (n. 46), p. 705. 48. The famous passages show a new intensity in the formulations, too, compared to the previous chapters on the secret police and the concentration camps; see Hannah Arendt (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 437–59. 49. This is the firm conviction of all updatings of the totalitarianism debate – among those who are more sceptical because socioscientifically oriented, as well as among the humanistic who are more attuned to her philosophical mode. With regard to the first see Juan J. Linz (2000) Totalitarianism and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. With regard to the second cf. Maier (n. 41). 50. The book by Young-Bruehl (n. 3) still was a solid political–intellectual biography. The dramatization started when the romance between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger became known. See Elzbieta Ettinger (1995) Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The glorification reached its peak with Kristeva (n. 12). 51. Most convincing in this respect are several essays by Benhabib (n. 45), pp. 96–103 and pp. 169–92. 52. Arendt (n. 46), pp. 523–4. 53. Arendt (n. 48), pp. 441. 54. Ibid., p. 457. 55. For greater detail, see Lietzmann (n. 39), pp. 131–41. 56. Raul Hilberg and Alfons Söllner, ‘Das Schweigen zum Sprechen bringen: Ein Gespräch über Franz Neumann und die Entwicklung der Holocaust-Forschung’, in Dan Diner (ed.) (1988) Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, pp. 175–200. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer.

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