Born in Germany to a prosperous, politically progressive, secular Jewish family, Hannah Arendt was educated at the University of Marburg and received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1929.
Briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for her research on antisemitism in 1933, she fled to Paris. Arendt escaped the Nazis again in 1941, this time emigrating to the United States. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt became an influential political theorist.
She is best known these days for her controversial analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the principal organizer of the deportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. In a series of articles for The New Yorker, subsequently published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt argued that Eichmann’s motivation was not hatred of Jews but a “terrible and terrifyingly normal” desire to obey orders and prove his loyalty to the Nazi regime.
In Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind, Thomas Meyer (a professor of philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and editor of a 12-volume edition of Arendt’s German writings) asserts that her life and work is best understood as an attempt to move beyond the limits of an allegedly timeless philosophy - and philosophy’s preoccupation with itself - by embracing politics, “which, in the final analysis, is the human sphere,” and the movement from thought to action and only then, back to thought.
Meyer is acutely aware of the limitations of Arendt’s published work. She was frequently categorical, he emphasizes, and “not always consistent.” Her arguments were not always supported by footnotes or references to secondary sources. Instead of weighing all sides of an issue, she “required her readers to make a stark choice of pro or con.”
Recently discovered archival material illuminate experiences
For these reasons, perhaps, but no doubt to the consternation of readers of his book, including this reviewer, Meyer does not provide detailed assessments of Arendt’s work.
That said, he draws on recently discovered archival material and underutilized sources in German to illuminate her experiences and ideas, about antisemitism and Zionism as well as philosophy.
By the early 1930s, Arendt had concluded that assimilation to the non-Jewish bourgeois majority in Germany had failed. With the Nazis in power, the assumption that antisemitism was merely an “opinion” held by individuals, while the majority viewed Jews as “German and nothing more,” was proving to be a fatal error.
“One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people,” Arendt would write, is that a “person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman.” And she credited Zionism with putting to an end “the dogmatic slumber” that followed confidence in the acceptance - and even embrace - of Diaspora Jews.
Active in the Paris branch of Youth Aliyah, Arendt, we learn, focused on an initiative to send children and adolescents living in France, especially stateless Jews from Eastern Europe, to Jewish settlements in Palestine, which she visited for two months in 1935.
The immigrants, though “admittedly, not a great many,” she reported, were receiving schooling and practical training in farming, played games and sang songs, for up to two years. In despair, but not yet damaged, they would be “converted into strength,” Arendt predicted, “and this strength will rebuild the country.” As tension between France and Germany increased, however, Youth Aliyah in Paris wound down its operations.
In the ensuing decades, Meyer reports, Arendt became more critical of Zionism. In “Zionism Reconsidered,” an essay published in the journal Menorah in 1945, she predicted that with the imperialistic aspirations and binary majority vs minority agenda Zionists were bringing into their national-building process, Jews and non-Jews were highly unlikely to live together peacefully in Palestine: “Heaven help us if that comes to pass.”
Supported admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine
The following year, Arendt expressed support for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine, the establishment of a Jordan Valley Authority to admit as many additional Jews and Arabs as wanted to settle there, and local councils with representatives of “these two peoples” to set up new political structures. A Jewish state, she emphasized, would not - and could not - protect minorities.
Her friends, including Gershom Scholem, Meyer writes, “must have wondered what had happened to the ‘old’ Zionist Arendt, regardless of whether that belief in Zionism had been credible in the first place.”
Arendt’s refusal 15 years later to accept conventional wisdom about victims and perpetrators in her analysis of the Eichmann trial widened the gap between them.
Relevant to Arendt’s view of antisemitism as well was her decision to reconnect with Martin Heidegger, who was her mentor at Marburg, and with whom she had a love affair in the 1920s. When Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933, Arendt ceased contact with him. But in 1950, they began to exchange notes and letters. In 1969, she participated in a commemoration of the preeminent philosopher’s 80th birthday.
Meyer speculates that the rapprochement freed Arendt to “adopt an interpretively free approach” to, in essence, demolish Heidegger’s philosophy, but not him. “Because there was a before and after,” Meyer writes, “and because she neither would not or could not undo what she had experienced with him, and any way of thinking in philosophical terms depending on whether philosophy was possible, she felt she needed to approach him.”
Her legacy, Meyer suggests, was to declare, again and again, the bankruptcy of a philosophy that defined thinking as acting. And to raise philosophy “to the lofty status it merited by explicating the priority of action as a genuine political and humane” endeavor.
The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE OF THE MIND
By Thomas Meyer
Penguin Press
560 pages; $35