arendt krakow
TRANSCRIPT
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.
!!
!!!!!
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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)
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
“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
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
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
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. !
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 !
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.