They were drawn to her freedom from social convention, and to the exquisite sensibility that informed her cult of Goethe, her extensive correspondence, and her love affairs. When Arendt first discovered Rahel, in the late nineteen-twenties, she recognized her as both a tutelary spirit and a cautionary tale. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it. When, in , she went to Marburg University, she entered into the study of theology and philosophy as into her own inheritance, even though she recognized that they might be uncomfortable subjects for a Jew.
Yet Arendt could not have suspected just how fraught her encounter with philosophy would turn out to be. Like all the most enterprising students, she enrolled in a class with Martin Heidegger.
But the affair became a kind of highbrow scandal in , when Elzbieta Ettinger, a professor at M. Understandably, after a year of covert meetings and emotional confrontations, Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where, in Jaspers, she found a more equable teacher. It is just possible to glimpse in the letters the pain that the affair caused Arendt—above all, by enforcing a sense of powerlessness. I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore.
My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying: but I am your child, I am your Hannah. The full significance of her experience with Heidegger did not unfold, however, until the early nineteen-thirties. By that time, Arendt was already in exile from the land of her birth.
In the spring of , just after Hitler took power, she began to do clandestine work for a Zionist organization, documenting anti-Semitism in the new Germany. The loss of meaning in the modern world is characterized by the underlying conditions of homelessness, rootlessness, and loneliness. In the final pages of Origins Arendt identifies loneliness as the underlying cause of all totalitarian movements.
Loneliness, she writes, is the common ground of terror. The German word Arendt uses for loneliness is Verlassenheit , which means a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Totalitarianism destroys the space between people by ruining their ability to think and their relationships with themselves. And in this, loneliness is dangerous because it destroys the space of solitude, which is a necessary condition for thinking. S hortly after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt accepted a position as a visiting professor at Princeton University, where she was the first female faculty hire.
The following year, with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, she began working on her second book, intended to be called Totalitarian Elements of Marxism , which was framed as a follow-up to The Origins of Totalitarianism. She thought the most serious gap in Origins was the lack of conceptual analysis around Bolshevism, and she wanted to take a closer look at the ideologies and methods of totalitarian regimes and the legacy of Marxism.
With a fellowship from the foundation, Arendt spent March to August in Europe, conducting research in various libraries, while visiting with her friends Anne Weil and Alfred Kazin.
Unofficially she continued working for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, lecturing in various cities, and taking time for a holiday in St. In Origins , Arendt had underscored the importance of ideology to the creation of the Nazi state.
Embedded in the elaborate bureaucracy and obfuscating language and legal rules of the Nazi government, ideology served to inure people to the murderous reality of the regime. Eichmann testified that, in fact, he did know what he was doing and went on at great length describing how good he was at his job.
But, for Arendt, knowing and thinking were not the same thing. To know meant to know how to do something—such as how to coordinate transportation. To Eichmann, what would have been wrong was any failure to do his job. This was neither blind obedience nor the performance of a mere cog in a wheel.
What had happened, Arendt wondered, to make so many people thoughtless? But not only in Germany. In one of the most frequently quoted passages from the book, she even assigned a measure of responsibility to some of the victims. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized or leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.
She was thinking about thinking. I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theological, or philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil. However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.
Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? Who were they? Arendt recounted several stories from the Jerusalem trial to illuminate the lives of the ordinary people who demonstrated the capacity to think that Eichmann so manifestly lacked.
One such person was Anton Schmid. At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.
What had become banal — and astonishingly so — was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.
Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.
Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations. Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding.
Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself.
She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy. Like the legal philosopher Yosal Rogat before her, Arendt did not think that the history of anti-semitism or even the specificity of anti-semitism in Germany could be tried. She objected to Eichmann's treatment as a scapegoat; she criticised some of the ways that Israel used the trial to establish and legitimate its own legal authority and national aspirations.
She thought the trials failed to understand the man and his deeds.
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