arendt krakow

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Narratives of Survival: Hannah Arendt When disaster strikes, Hannah Arendt tells us in her Isak Dinesen essay, stories can save lives. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” Creating a story out of the material of experience gives meaning to “what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings”. (Men in Dark Times, 104). In the end, stories will lead us to a to what Arendt saw as one the redeeming aspects of human life, the privilege of being able to judge. Hannah Arendt in the mid-1920s could be described as a self- assured, popular, attractive, young woman, the glorious product of German Jewish assimilation, a brilliant student of philosophy and of (Christian!) theology. She found the “Jewish question” boring and saw no impediment in her Jewish birth when she chose to write a dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine. She went to the best universities, met the best minds of her time, studied with the best teachers, who cherished her brilliance and her company, one, Martin Heidegger, famously becoming her lover and the other, Karl Jaspers, becoming a life long friend. So assured was her sense of entitlement to German and European culture in the years prior to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 that her identity seems to loom larger than life, an heiress of the ages.

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Page 1: Arendt Krakow

Narratives of Survival: Hannah Arendt

!When disaster strikes, Hannah Arendt tells us in her Isak Dinesen essay,

stories can save lives. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a

story or tell a story about them.” Creating a story out of the material of

experience gives meaning to “what otherwise would remain an unbearable

sequence of sheer happenings”. (Men in Dark Times, 104). In the end,

stories will lead us to a to what Arendt saw as one the redeeming aspects

of human life, the privilege of being able to judge.

Hannah Arendt in the mid-1920s could be described as a self-

assured, popular, attractive, young woman, the glorious product of

German Jewish assimilation, a brilliant student of philosophy and of

(Christian!) theology. She found the “Jewish question” boring and saw no

impediment in her Jewish birth when she chose to write a dissertation on

the concept of love in Saint Augustine. She went to the best universities,

met the best minds of her time, studied with the best teachers, who

cherished her brilliance and her company, one, Martin Heidegger, famously

becoming her lover and the other, Karl Jaspers, becoming a life long

friend. So assured was her sense of entitlement to German and

European culture in the years prior to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 that

her identity seems to loom larger than life, an heiress of the ages.

!!

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!!!!!

The Weimar Republic, born out of the soldiers’ revolts and

workers councils in Germany after the defeat in World War I, had

produced a democratic and exemplary constitution, in which Jews at long

last were granted political and civil equality. Most German Jews were, like

Hannah Arendt, thoroughly assimilated and thought of themselves as

inheritors of European culture. But there were Germans who blamed the

Jews for Germany’s defeat and fantasized a Jewish conspiracy, which had

somehow stolen the victory from them. The war could not possibly have

been lost without some evil machinations behind the scenes.

Even though the progressive Weimar Republic had made

possible an explosion of German Jewish cultural achievements, already

toward the end of the 1920’s it all came crashing down in hyperinflation,

unemployment and old prejudices resurfacing. Soon Nazi thugs were

roaming the streets beating up Jews and smashing Jewish shop windows.

Hannah Arendt realized early that, in the eyes of the increasingly

antisemitic environment, and perhaps also in the eyes of her married

lover, she appeared not as a European citizen, and certainly not as an

authentic German, but as a “pariah” and as a Jew. The social, emotional,

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and professional catastrophe must have been traumatic to say the least. I

would like to argue that powerful feelings inform her writing for the next

three decades, from Rahel Varnhagen to Eichmann in Jerusalem. What are

those feelings? (of shame, of rage?) We cannot really tell, but we can

discern the trail of a struggle.

At times it looked as if things may go back to “normal”. When

Arendt finished her dissertation in the summer of 1929, she must still

have been planning a German academic career as she was applying for a

grant to do work on German Romanticism. But in 1932 her old friend,

Anna Weil, met Arendt in the street and heard her say that they needed to

prepare for emigration. Weil had voiced disagreement: she had not

experienced any antisemitism. Arendt had apparently looked at Weil in

amazement, burst out, “You are crazy,” and stomped off. (Young-Bruehl,

98)

When interviewed on German television in 1964, Arendt

marked the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 as the decisive moment. But

if 1933 was the year of the turnaround, it was not because of Hitler. That

year the Nazi regime had begun pressuring ordinary Germans to

collaborate and the pressure was having an effect. Antisemitism was

spreading widely in the general population and also among the elite. In

her 1951 major study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt notes “the

terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count

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among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party

members.” (Arendt, Origins, 432)

Arendt wrote a letter to Heidegger asking him if the rumors

about his antisemitic behavior toward Jewish colleagues and his public

support of Hitler were true; he answered evasively. Other Gentile friends

on whom she counted for social and emotional support were also

beginning to give her a wide berth, and that, she assures the interviewer,

rather than Hitler’s rise to power, was a bone-chilling experience. That the

Nazis were antisemitic and an enemy to Germany’s Jews had been

“completely evident for at least four years to everyone who wasn’t

feebleminded,” Arendt had blurted out, exasperated at the difficulty of

communicating thirty years later the complexity of her motivations on the

brink of the totalitarian take over, but it was

!“…the disloyalty of friends to put it that bluntly for once… friends got in line… The problem, the personal problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. In the wave of Gleichschaltung (adjusting to the Nazi party line)which was relatively voluntary—in any case, not yet under the pressure of terror—it was as if an empty space formed around one. I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But not among the others. And I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the idea—of course somewhat exaggerated: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot.” (Arendt, Essays of Understanding, 12) !It goes without saying that she kept old intellectual friends and later

acquired many new ones, but the point she was trying to make, and which

Lisa Jane Disch picks up on, is embedded in the metaphor she uses to

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characterize this experience. To be “surrounded by an empty space, is a

striking image of abandonment.” And Dish goes on to argue that the

emptying of the public space happens when people don’t dare speak up in

the face of a violation of what is supposed to be a common humanist

norm. That may be part of what Arendt is trying to say, but Disch gets

closer to the core of Arendt’s traumatic experience when she writes, in a

slightly different context, “In Berlin of 1933, Hannah Arendt experienced

the “shock” of being made a pariah.” To turn under the gaze of others into

a pariah was devastating for Hannah Arendt, whom nothing in the

assimilated socialist and liberal milieu she had been raised in, grounded in

Enlightenment values and principles, had prepared for that experience.

We need not speculate about the nature of the psychological wound

inflicted on her, but it is important to note that even before she went into

exile in 1933, Hannah Arendt responded to the increasingly hostile

environment by saying that “when one is attacked as a Jew, one must

defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as

an upholder of the Rights of Man.” (Young-Bruehl, 109) It makes no sense

to tell your detractor that you are not a Jew but a human being. She had

learned from her friend Kurt Blumenfeld that, in the face of the

unexpected and unprecedented, i.e. Nazi terror through systematic

humiliation and degradation of German Jews, what was needed was to

fight back, to get involved in Zionist political activity; in order to keep

one’s sanity one had to counter the Nazi paranoid delusion of Jewish world

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power and Jewish vice with a counter narrative. In order to do that it was

necessary to learn to look at assimilation and Jewish diaspora history from

a Zionist perspective.

In 1933 she was already an active member of the Zionist

movement, and remained a member for ten years. That summer she

landed in prison while doing research on Nazi antisemitism, a work she

had undertaken in order to help prepare her friend Kurt Blumenfeld’s

speech to the upcoming Zionist Congress in Prague. After a few days the

Gestapo let her go, possibly because she did not figure in their files as a

political activist or, as she thought herself, because she made a good

impression on her interrogator. The day that she left the prison she fled

Germany and went to Paris where she remained, in exile, for the next

eight years.

*

Lisa Disch notes a professional shift in Arendt’s life, in fact a

thoroughgoing change in orientation during the years 1929 and 1933:

“Notwithstanding the claims of those who locate her as a descendant of

either Heidegger or Kant, I maintain that Hannah Arendt never did take up

the position within the tradition of Western philosophy for which she had

been educated. She even refused this position when it was handed to her

as a gift, as it was in Copenhagen eight months before her death, when

the Danish government awarded her the Sonning Prize for contributions to

European civilization. This was the last and probably most prestigious

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awards she received; on of several occasions where the world that had

made Hannah Arendt a pariah attempted to call her back by recognizing

her place in the very civilization in whose name she might have been

annihilated.” (Disch, Limits of Philosophy [LP), 17)

Before leaving Berlin, she had set out on a project she defined

as “educating herself on what it meant to be a Jew,” now that the Nazis

had, as it were, forced her into awareness of her Jewish birth. She

researched, edited and nearly finished writing a book based on the letters

and diary of a Jewish salonière, Rahel Varnhagen, whose rose to

prominence in Berlin in the early years of Romanticism. “I wrote it,”

Arendt said in the Gaus interview, with the idea: I want to

understand.” (Disch, [18] p. 18)

If the urge to find an adequate form for this self-education

motivates her writing, and if by projecting herself onto this biography and

by recounting the life of an assimilated Jewess who wound up as a

conscious pariah Hannah Arendt appears to “have accomplished a

cathartic, even auto-analytic act,” Arendt did not come to the project with

an unfurnished mind. (Kristeva, 128)

Arendt herself speaks of a great bankruptcy of life, which was

not just personal. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Erich Cohn-Bendit

and other German exiles, seeking refuge in Paris in the 1930’s knew that

the bankruptcy included 600.000 German Jews and, as soon became

clear, the systematic murder of more than one third of the Jewish people.

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So that when Hannah Arendt wrote the last two chapters of the Rahel

Varnhagen book, she did so against the background of a very concrete

and personal knowledge about a good part of this tragedy. It is not

surprising, then, that the last two chapters of the Varnhagen book read as

if they were written entirely from within a Zionist framework. Expressly

critical of assimilation—the year is 1938—Arendt keeps scolding and

upbraiding Rahel for her naïveté, for her social ambition, for her stubborn

refusal to admit, until her death-bed, that her Jewish birth had not been a

“the greatest shame,” of her life but instead a source of pride, “something

she on no account wished to have missed.” Obviously, by the same token,

Arendt was also scolding herself, or her younger self, for having entered

the bargain of assimilation, noting that for most people it had been

possible “to assimilate only by assimilating to antisemitism also.”(Arendt,

RV, 256)

During her exile years in Paris, Arendt worked for Jewish and

Zionist organizations sending children and young people to what was then

still called Palestine. Once in New York, where she arrived in 1941—having

fled the camp of Gur, crossed the Pyrennés and waited to cross the

Atlantic for three agonizing months in Lisbon—she kept writing and writing

about various aspects of Jewishness. In January 1943, she published “We

refugees” in The Menorah Journal. “The Jew as Pariah: The Hidden

Tradition” appeared in Jewish Social Studies in April 1944. Articles arguing

for a Jewish army, for a federation of Arabs and Jews in Palestine, for

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resistance to the right wing elements in the Zionist movement flowed from

her pen in a steady stream.

The strange thing about her influential study from 1951, The

Origins of Totalitarianism, is first its much debated, very innovative, but

perhaps not entirely coherent theoretical method, and, secondly, the

many insights into the nature of unprecedented, hitherto unimaginable

phenomenon that was the modern totalitarian superpower and its culture

of fear and terror, which killed six million Jews and started a war which left

fifty million dead in Europe. Arendt, incidentally, did not believe we had rid

ourselves of the totalitarian temptation and thought that it may very well

reappear in the future.

If the title of Origins is a something of a misnomer and the tri-

partite structure—Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism—is not wholly

convincing, the narrative sketches—of Disraeli, of the Dreyfus affair, of

Rahel Varnhagen, of the characters in Proust’s novel are superb and

convey, in depth, and in much fascinating detail, the nature of this new

20th century phenomenon of totalitarian terror and systematic

dehumanization. It should in the future be more fully explored. The

reason for this is that most Arendt scholars are philosophers or political

theorists and few literary scholars have approached her texts qua

literature. Arendt is rather unique among Holocaust scholars in focusing

attention on how antisemitism is used to add a quasi-religious,

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millenarian, dimension to Nazi discourse and propaganda—and in doing so

in the narrative mode.

I would like to suggest that Arendt’s writing for more than

thirty years, from 1929 to 1963, bears witness to an urge to make sense

of the catastrophic turn of the German-Jewish symbiosis. First Arendt

writes the biography Rahel Varnhagen, then she follows up with a series of

sketches, stories and insights, narratives of survival, if you wish, in which

she struggles to get her mind around the radical newness—and the radical

evil—of Nazi antisemitism and its perverted logic, leading to the Holocaust

and the murder of European Jews, while at the same time, trying to

create, out of the rubble of the assimilationist dream, a new Jewish

collective identity and tradition A COUNTERNARRATAIVE How does she do

that? From 1929 on, she voices a desire to reclaim the imposed pariah

status of the Jew, to use it as what, Judith Butler calls “a foothold for

power; a satisfying position from which to speak.” This search to reclaim

the pariah position could be seen as culminating in the publication of

Origins in 1951.

Or it may very well be that the search did not come to an end until Arendt

witnessed the Eichmann trial and reported on it for The New Yorker—a job

for which she volunteered. Seyla Benhabib discussing the subtitle of the

Eichmann book, A Report on the Banality of Evil, quotes Arendt writing to

Mary McCarthy, in October 1963, saying that she “wrote this book in a

curious state of euphoria… and ever since I did it, I feel—after twenty

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years [since the war]—lighthearted about the whole matter.” (Benhabib,

Eichmann in Jerusalem, [EJ], 65) And , says Benhabib, by “lighthearted”

Arendt did not mean that she was joyful, flippant or carefree; she meant

that her heart was lightened by having shed a burden. By voicing in public

the shame, rage, and sadness she had carried in private for thirty years,

she was finally unloading some of the burden history had placed on her.

!*

!Seyla Benhabib has observed that “the personal story of Rahel

Varnhagen, of her circle of friends, the failure of her salon, the political

naiveté of her generation of Jews are like a negative utopia of Arendt’s

concept of political community in her subsequent works. Nonetheless, this

cluttered and at times awkward youthful text retains themes, issues, and

preoccupations that are much closer to the nerve of Arendt’s existential

concerns than some of her subsequent formulations.” (Benhabib, EJ, 13)

Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), the daughter of a Berlin jeweler, gathered

in the “garret” of the large house the family owned on Jägerstrasse in

Berlin, from 1790 to 1806, the most brilliant crowd of her time: including,

the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, prince Louis-

Ferdinand of Prussia, Ludwig and Friedrich Tieck, Goethe and more. “She

was,” “in the words of Julia Kristeva, “not really rich, not beautiful, not

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particularly graceful… but she benefited from the philosemitism of Fredric

II of Prussia.” In Amos Elon’s account, the popularity of Rahel’s salon, as

well as that of other Jewish salonières, was more of a spontaneous

occurrence, new ideas breaking up the stuffy atmosphere of beer halls

and all male gatherings. Aristocrats, writers, philosophers, and members

of the rising bourgeoisie met on neutral ground, as it were, in the salons

held by Jewish women. These gatherings did not constitute social

acceptance of Jews or women. Rather the Jewish salon appeared as a free

space outside the conventions of the society. None of the Gentile visitors

to Rahel’s salon are known to have invited her back. Her first fiancé, the

aristocratic von Finkenstein, managed to keep the engagement secret

from his family for several years and when the family was informed he

was unable to resist their opposition to the mésaliance; the other men

who fell in love with Rahel do not seem to have entertained the possibility

of marrying her. When the mood, with the Napoleonic wars in 1806,

turned patriotic, these illustrious visitors abandoned Rahel’s salon and she

became quite isolated. While Rahel mourned the loss of the glorious

moment “What happened to the time when we were all together! It sank

in 1806. Sank like a ship, carrying the most beautiful gifts, the most

beautiful pleasures of life.” Arendt’s comment, by contrast, is rather

cutting: “Berlin society left the Jewish salons with unmatched

rapidity.” (Arendt, R.V., 167)

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Benhabib notices that “In telling Rahel’s story, Hannah Arendt

was bearing testimony to a political and spiritual transformation that she

was herself undergoing. There is a mirror effect in the narrative. The one

narrated about becomes the mirror in which the narrator also portrays

herself.” (Benhabib, Pariah and Her Shadow, 11) One could also say that

Arendt espouses without qualms a wider consciousness than that of poor

Rahel—and by implication also wiser understanding of Arendt’s own,

younger, more blue eyed self.

“By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon

hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, Arendt sought to understand how her

subject’s conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness

illuminated the conflict between minority status and German

nationalism.” (Stephen J. Whitfield, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/

jsource/index.htlm)

!The book can of course be read in many ways: as Hannah

Arendt’s auto-biography, as a political pamphlet, or as deconstruction of

the ideology of German-Jewish symbiosis. Although, Arendt clearly wants

the reader to empathize with both Rahel’s ambitions and her tragic

predicament, she has nothing but scorn for her assumption that by

receiving these illustrious guests in her home, she would shed her

Jewishness and acquire a prestigious position as a married woman in the

Christian world.

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From Arendt’s perspective in 1930, this was a preposterous

notion. For of course, philosemitic rhetoric did hold out to Jews, in the

name of the Enlightenment equality, civil rights, and rehabilitation after

having been treated for centuries as a despised people. But in return, the

Jews were expected to shed the particularity of their Jewishness, which

the majority perceived as negative and defined as parochialism, as a

tendency to band together and as a lack of conviviality.

There was nothing to loose but some archaic, tribal and

primitive patterns of behavior. By allowing themselves to be integrated

into Gentile culture one by one, they would gain access to “universal

brotherhood,” to humanity as such. Hannah Arendt notes that nothing was

said about social integration; it was generously and naïvely assumed that

if all other impediments were removed and people were able to think

rationally, there would be no obstacles to Jewish integration into all strata

of German society.

Instead, the very opposite happened, that after a few years of

tolerance and enthusiasm for the enlightened way, the fashion of

attending Jewish salon ended and a wall appeared, which to Rahel was

invisible, as it indeed remained to other Germans up until the Hitler

period; a wall of intricate psychological and social taboos and

impediments, of unspoken thou-shalt-nots and imaginary lines in the

sand; lines that materialize when they happen to be crossed. It was an

invisible wall, a set of social codes, which assimilating German Jews

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mostly would choose to ignore or repress. It is symptomatic that

Gershom Scholem’s assimilated father, who threw his son out of the house

upon hearing of his intention to study Judaism and the Talmud, had a

social circle made up almost entirely of Jews. One way of putting it is to

say that Rahel’s function in the text is to be a model whose actions make

invisible walls, visible; thereby proving the existence of social walls.

“In some circumstances the existence of walls can only b be

demonstrated by the existence of broken heads,” Arendt commented

wrily. (Arendt, R.V., 254) Indeed, one could say that the story of Rahel

Varnhagen works as a model on a larger scale, allowing Enlightenment

values to be checked against social reality; as if the Rahel life story was

an experiment with which to measure the results of the struggle for

political and civic rights for European Jews in the last three centuries.

Judging by the Rahel experiment, then, Jews had been deceived by the

Enlightenment discourse , by people like Dohm, Mirabeau, Abbé Grégoire,

and even by Mendelssohn, one of their own, “lured by philosemitic

promises out of their two-thousand-year-badger’s-hole.” Indeed, as Karl

Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt, when she asked him to read Rahel

Varnhagen before publication in 1956, “the book proves that it is

impossible for German Jews to live in Germany.” (see Barnouw, 60,

passim) Although that was a difficult notion for a decent man and a

German to accept, it was to Hannah Arendt precisely the point. Life was

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indeed impossible for German Jews in 1933; within a decade most

German Jews had either emigrated or perished.

In Hannah Arendt’s view, once the first enthusiasm and the feel

good of Enlightenment sentiments had worn off, assimilation proved to

have been impossible. Not only her own generation, but already Rahel

Varnhagen and other German Jews, from the time of Moses Mendelssohn

on, had been politically naïve. She is rather hard on herself and on them

and does not take into account that, in the period of emancipation, there

was precious little awareness among German and French Jews, that

Clermont de Tonnerre’s caveat at the Jewish emancipation debate in

L’Assemblé Nationale: ”everything to the Jews as individuals, nothing to

the Jews as a nation,” caught the Jews in a double bind. Only if Jews were

ready to give up their existence as a collective body, i.e. their autonomous

institutions, which they had kept from ancient times and throughout the

middle ages, would they be granted civic rights. The contract seemed

promising when it was offered and officially signed in at Le Grand

Sanhedrin meeting in Paris in 1806. But as to this very day, only a

sovereign nation has the ability to defend human rights and enforce the

law, every Jew giving up his place in the collective body of his own people

in exchange for supposedly “natural” rights as an individual member of

the majority puts himself at risk.

The problem of the status and the rights of minorities has been

the preoccupation of Western governments since Woodrow Wilson

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formulated the principle of self-determination at the Paris Conference after

World War I. And the problem is perhaps more acute in a country like

Germany than in France; more intractable where the nation is represented

as organic than contractual. Yet the difficulty for the outsider to

assimilate into an imagined community, which entertains the myth of its

own organic unity ,remains nevertheless even in France. The tragic fact

throughout the 20th century was that in a Europe of homogenizing nation

states, it was impossible to solve the Jewish question on an individual

basis, yet emancipation required that the Jews assimilate qua individuals

not as a people or as an ethnic/religious group. This was also the Zionist’s

argument against assimilation: in the face of rising antisemitism from

1870 on. Assimilated Jews in Europe, no matter how integrated or

wealthy, increasingly were perceived by the majority culture qua Jews.

Even a Rothschild could suddenly feel himself transformed, in Arendt’s

*

Most of Hannah Arendt’s academic or theoretical texts are

widely known. “We refugees” one of the less known texts from 1943, tells

the story of Hannah Arendt’s flight from the enemy. The narrative of how

she managed to survive comes to us, for once, in less abstract terms, told

in her own voice. We hear what it felt like in daily life to be a refugee and

a stateless person.

“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life we lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expressions of feelings...once we

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were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride in the subway without being told we were undesirable... we already are so damnably careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth certificates were filled out— and why Hitler didn’t like us.... (Arendt, WR, 56-60) !Hannah Arendt believed that human beings needed to be inserted in a

circle of friends and elements that connect them to the world. She thought

such insertion was essential for the formation of a person’s identity, for

one’s sense of purpose in life, and ultimately, for sanity and survival.

“Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own if their social, political and legal status is completely confused.” (Arendt, WR, 62) German Jewish refugees, like herself, were at risk just as the unemployed

had been in Germany during the Depression; they were being made to

feel superfluous as human beings, by the Nazi persecution machine but

also by the collaborationist government of wartime France. It was a

terrible time to be the disturbing stranger at the margins of other people’s

lives. There was a need to fight back. There was a need for affirming an

alternative Jewish tradition for those German and European Jews, who like

herself, had survived but whose sense of what they stood for, their life

narrative, had collapsed. For this purpose she borrowed the notion of

“conscious pariahs” from the dreyfusard and 19th century Zionist, Bernard

Lazare, whose book, Job’s Dungheap, was the first she published when

she started working in 1948 for Schocken in her new home city, New York.

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“Pariah” is a loaded term. It betrays, depending on how one

wants to interpret it, either the strength of Arendt’s feelings of injury in

the early 1940’s or something of a tin ear to the emotional impact of

words, perhaps both. It is, however, increasingly being appropriated by

Arendt’s readers and followers in academia as a neutral, descriptive term,

which I find rather problematic. For Arendt the label, “conscious pariah”

could be transformed into a weapon and a badge of honor.

The attitude of those few, whom, following Bernard Lazare, one

may call “conscious pariahs,” would be people who were taking a position

which gave them the means to counter the Enlightenment eurocentric

discourse with a different narrative, thereby undermining and relativizing

it. Hannah Arendt proposes here the use of the term “conscious pariah” in

the same way as Judith Butler proposes to counter other injurious speech

with “subversive resignification”: the insubordinate use of a derogatory

term or authoritative convention to defuse its power to injure and to

expose “prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions by which they

proceed” (Butler, ES, 157, 158)

Oddly enough, Hannah Arendt’s conscientious and devoted

biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, avoids to stress the pain of exile,

shame and rage underlying such terms as “pariah” conscious or otherwise.

She chooses as title for the biography “Hannah Arendt, For Love of the

World.” Clearly combining “love” and “world” on the front cover of a

book, which purports to analyze Hannah Arendt’s life and work, suggests

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an affirmative and “positive” attitude. In the process what gets lost is the

sense that the affirmation was arrived at great emotional cost, but above

all that what Hannah Arendt does affirm is meant to be subversive. In a

well-known letter to Gershom Scholem, written during the Eichmann

controversy, she affirms the fact of her Jewish birth. Elsewhere, and not

only in “The Jew as Pariah, A Hidden Tradition,” she affirms and embraces

above all the position of the “conscious pariah.”

Yet, not just to affirm but to embrace a pariah identity to the

point of speaking and acting politically and aesthetically from a conscious

pariah position, something a little more is required. And that something,

Hannah Arendt finds it in Franz Kafka’s stories, above all in K. the main

character in Kafka’s last novel, The Castle.

Kafka’s K. takes Enlightenment values literally. He is an

emblematic figure, who consciously assumes the position of critical

outsider in a world, which reneges on its Enlightenment promise to treat

all human beings with the respect due to them on the basis of them being

human beings, and on that quality alone.

“The Castle is the one novel in which ...the hero is plainly a Jew; et even there what characterizes him as such is that he is involved in situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life.... !“K. in his effort to fit in and to become indistinguishable from everybody else is interested only in universals as articulated in Enlightenment, in things which are common to all mankind. His desires are directed only towards those things to which all men have a natural right. “(Arendt, JP, 84) !” An outrageous demand in the opinion of the villagers. ...He demands no more than that which constitutes every man’s right and will be satisfied

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with no less. His entire ambition is to have “a home, a position, real work to do,” to marry and “to become a member of the community.”... Because, as a stranger, he is not permitted to enjoy this...he alone, he thinks must fight for the minimum, for simple human rights. And just because he seeks nothing more than his minimum human rights, he cannot consent to obtain his demands—as might otherwise have been possible—in the form of an act of favor from the Castle.” (Arendt, JP, 85) !The rights bestowed on all human beings in accordance with

Enlightenment principles are said to be inalienable and natural and yet, all

over Europe refugees, stateless people, immigrants come to the

depressing realization that as naked human beings they seem have no

rights whatsoever. (Arendt, O, 341-384) Kafka’s K. is a man of goodwill,

who asks for nothing out of the ordinary, only his rights as a human being

and he is being told by the inhabitants of the village that there is no such

thing in “real life” as the rights of the stranger or the rights of the little

man, that the world is a wicked place and that he had better get used to it

Both in the 1944 Kafka vignette in Jewish Social Studies I have

been quoting from, and in the longer revised essay, entitled “Franz Kafka:

a re-evaluation,” which Arendt published in Partisan Review that same

year, she insists that “only those things are real whose strength is not

impaired but confirmed by thinking...thinking is the new weapon—“it is

the only one with which, in Kafka’s opinion ,the pariah is endowed at birth

in his vital struggle against society.” It is interesting that the notion of

thinking, not ethics, is singled out by Arendt already in 1944 as the saving

humanist quality and that, in 1963, Eichmann, in her eyes, stands accused

precisely of being unable to think. That lack is what makes him such a

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typical product of a specifically 20th century kind of evil. Also the last book

she was writing before passing away in 1973, was devoted to explaining

what she meant by “thinking” and why it was so important.

Nevertheless, K. insists on his rights and does not give up the

fight and Arendt comments on how “much could be accomplished, if only

one simple man could achieve to live his own life like a normal human

being... The whole struggle remains undecided, and K. dies a perfectly

natural death; he gets exhausted.” (Arendt, JP pp. 87 and 88) But then

again, his is a different death from that of Rahel Varnhagen. And the

difference is that in the case of K., the conscious pariah, embodied in

Kafka’s last novel, The Castle, there is no shame.

!Literature cited !Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. (Love in Saint Augustine) Berlin: J.Springer, 1929. !Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewess, New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1957; revised edition with an introduction by Liliane Weissberg, Baltimore, 1997. !Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” from The Menorah Journal, January 1943, pp. 69-77. !Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” from Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2. April 1944, pp. 99-122. !

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Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism New York, 1951, revised edition with an introduction by Samantha Power, New York, 2004 !Hannah Arendt, “Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963,” a review in The New Yorker, 1968, of Parmenia Miguel, Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen. !Hannah Arendt, “On humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing” an address on accepting the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg in 1959, published in Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, New York, 1969 !Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Banality of Evil, New York, 1963. !Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Edited and with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman. New York, 1978 (a collection of articles on Jewish issues written between 1942 and 1966, including the above mentioned “We Refugees,” and “The Jew as Pariah. The Hidden Tradition” ) !Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, Jerome Kohn ed.,New York, 1994. !Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces, Baltimore, 1990. !SeylaBenhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen from Political Theory,” Vol. 23, No. 1 February 1995, 5-24. !Seyla Benhabib, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Dana Villa, ed., Cambridge UK 2000, p. 65 !

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Lucy S. Dawidowicz, with David A. Altschuler, Hitler’s War against the Jews, New York, 1978 !Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, Ithaca: 1994. !Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933, New York, 2002. !Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Chicago, 1961 !Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Ross Guberman trans.,New York, 2001 !Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt For Love of the World, second edition, New Haven, 2004.