For Jerry Kohn

Copyright © Richard J. Bernstein 2018

The right of Richard Bernstein to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2863-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bernstein, Richard J., author.
Title: Why read Hannah Arendt now / Richard Bernstein.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050361 (print) | LCCN 2018002934 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509528639 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509528592 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509528608 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975--Criticism and interpretation. | Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975--Political and social views.
Classification: LCC JC251.A74 (ebook) | LCC JC251.A74 B47 2018 (print) | DDC 320.5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050361

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

I have dedicated this book to Jerry (Jerome) Kohn, a friend for more than twenty-five years. Jerry has done more than anyone else to make Hannah Arendt known to the international public. He has been a judicious editor of her published and unpublished works. His own writings on Arendt are always perceptive and illuminating. He has been an inspiration in my own journey with Arendt. I want to thank Professor Carol Bernstein for reading and editing my manuscript. She is, without doubt, my toughest and most incisive critic. Caecilie Varslev-Petersen helped to prepare this book for publication. Once again, I want to express my gratitude to Jean van Altena, who has skillfully edited my manuscript. John Thompson, who suggested that I write this book, has always been a source of encouragement.

When Hannah Arendt died in December 1975, she was known primarily because of the controversy about her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the phrase “the banality of evil.” There was a circle of admirers and critics in the United States and in Germany who were knowledgeable about her other writings, but she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker. In the years since her death the scene has changed radically. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages. All over the world, people are passionately interested in her work. There seems to be no end of books, conferences, and articles focusing on Arendt and her ideas. Recently discussions and references to Arendt have overflowed social media. Why this growing interest – and why especially the recent spike of interest in her work? Arendt was remarkably perceptive about some of the deepest problems, perplexities, and dangerous tendencies in modern political life. Many of these have not disappeared; they have become more intense and more dangerous. When Arendt spoke about “dark times” she was not exclusively referring to the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. She writes:

If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better or worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by “credibility gaps” and “invisible government,” by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth in meaningless triviality. (Arendt 1968: p. viii)¹

It is hard to resist the conclusion that we are now living in dark times that are engulfing the entire world. Arendt claims that even in the darkest of times we can hope to find some illumination – illumination that comes not so much from theories and concepts but from the lives and works of individuals. I want to show that Arendt provides such illumination, that she helps us to gain critical perspective on our current political problems and perplexities. She is an astute critic of dangerous tendencies in modern life and she illuminates the potentialities for restoring the dignity of politics. This is why she is worth reading and rereading today.

But who was Hannah Arendt? I will begin with a brief sketch of some of the highlights of her life that shaped her thinking. She was drawn to Machiavelli’s appeal to the goddess Fortuna (roughly translated as “luck,” “chance,” “contingency”). Luck, as we know, can be good or bad. Unlike her close friend, Walter Benjamin, who always seemed to experience bad luck and finally committed suicide, Arendt’s Fortuna was favorable at crucial moments in her life. Born in 1906 into a German–Jewish secular family she became an outstanding member of a gifted generation of German–Jewish intellectuals. In the early 1920s she studied with Germany’s outstanding philosophers and theologians, including Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Bultmann. With the ominous growth of the Nazis and their rabid antisemitism, Arendt agreed to help her Zionist friends by doing research on Nazi antisemitic propaganda. In 1933 she was apprehended and interrogated for eight days. She refused to reveal what she was doing but was finally released. This was an extraordinary piece of good luck because we know that many others in similar circumstances were murdered in the cellars of the Gestapo.

Arendt then decided to leave Germany illegally. She escaped through Czechoslovakia and made her way to Paris – the refuge for many Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Arendt was officially stateless for eighteen years until she became an American citizen. This is a primary reason for her sensitivity to the plight of the stateless and to the troubled status of refugees. Illegal German exiles in Paris faced the problem of not having official papers permitting them to work, so many led extremely precarious lives. Arendt had the good fortune to secure employment with several Jewish and Zionist organizations, including Youth Aliyah – the organization that sent endangered European Jewish youths to Palestine. In Paris she met Heinrich Blücher, who came from a German gentile family, had participated in the Spartacist uprising, and had been a member of the German Communist Party. They were married in 1940. In May 1940, shortly before the Germans invaded France, French authorities ordered all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fiftyfive to be sent to internment camps. Arendt was sent to Gurs, a camp in southern France near the Spanish border. In an article written shortly after Arendt arrived in New York, she ironically refers to a new kind of human being created by contemporary history – “the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends” (Arendt 2007: 265). Arendt managed to escape from Gurs during the brief period when the Nazis invaded France. Many of the women who did not escape were eventually sent to Auschwitz on the orders of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt had been separated from Heinrich and her mother when she was interned. She was lucky again because she managed to be reunited with them – once again by a series of fortunate accidents.

Now the challenge became how to escape from Europe as a stateless illegal German–Jewish refugee. The problem was twofold: how to get a visa for the United States, and how to get out of France and travel to Portugal to take a ship to New York. There are disturbing parallels between the Kafkaesque difficulties that European Jews experienced and the horrendous obstacles that Syrian Muslim refugees now confront in seeking legal entry into the United States. In each instance, there has been enormous suspicion and hostility directed toward these refugees and excessively severe visa restrictions. Fortuna (almost as if Arendt was protected by the goddess) intervened again. Hannah and Heinrich were able to secure visas from Varian Fry who headed the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille. They managed to avoid the French police who were searching for them, succeeded in escaping from France, traveled across Spain, and arrived in Lisbon where they waited three months for a ship to take them to the United States. In May 1941 Arendt and her husband arrived in New York. Hannah’s mother arrived a month later.

Retrospectively, we can see how lucky Arendt was, how chance events meant the difference between life and death. She might have been murdered in Berlin when she was interrogated. She might have failed to escape from Gurs and eventually been sent to Auschwitz. She might have failed to get a visa and, like so many Jews stranded in France, been sent to a German concentration camp. Arendt arrived in New York at the age of thirty-five barely knowing any English. Her mother tongue was German and she always loved the German language, especially German poetry. Before 1941 she had never been in an English-speaking country. Nevertheless, Arendt set out to master English. Assisted by friends who helped to “English” her writings, she started publishing articles in local Jewish periodicals. She found work with Jewish organizations, including the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, and she secured a position as a senior editor at Schocken Books.

In 1944 she submitted a proposal to Houghton Mifflin Press for a book that she proposed to write. She called it “The Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism – Imperialism – Racism.” She spent the next four years intensively working on her book. She changed her mind several times about its scope and contents. Relatively late in the process of writing she decided to change the focus and deal with totalitarianism. In 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book of more than 500 densely written pages, was published. In its final form it consisted of three major parts: Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism. The Origins was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the study of totalitarianism. Actually, the title is misleading because one might be led to believe that Arendt is giving a historical account of the origins and causes of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But Arendt’s project is quite different. She set out to trace the disparate “subterranean elements” that “crystallized” in the horrible originality of totalitarianism. As with all her major writings the reception of The Origins was controversial – and still is. Nevertheless, it established her as a major political thinker. For the next twenty-five years Arendt continued to publish provocative books and collections of essays, including The Human Condition, Rahel Varnhagen, Between Past and Future, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, Men in Dark Times, On Violence, Crises of the Republic, and (posthumously) The Life of the Mind. Since her death, many of her unpublished manuscripts have been published and continue to be published. I do not plan to give a survey of her work. Rather, I will concentrate on a set of central themes that are relevant to problems and perplexities that we are facing today. I want to show why we should read Hannah Arendt today – how her life and work illuminate the current dark times.