An Ice Cold Imagination

Reviewing a new collection of interviews, Richard Brody takes a shot at Hannah Arendt’s most famous work, Eichmann In Jerusalem. Brody writes, “Arendt’s charge that Eichmann suffered from a ‘lack of imagination’ is actually the essential flaw of her own book”:


BM-Hannah-Arendt2006Her mechanistic view of Eichmann’s personality, as well as her abstract and unsympathetic consideration of the situation of Jews under Nazi rule, reflect her inability to consider the experiences of others from within. … [In her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus,] Arendt explains that what she found most intolerable in Germany at the time [of her escape in 1933] wasn’t the overt hostility of anti-Semites but the compromises of “friends”—of fellow-intellectuals—with the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (“coördination”), the conformity of all German institutions to the Nazi party line: “Among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak,” she says. Arendt doesn’t ascribe their compromise to any personal failings, like cowardice or careerism, but, rather, to the particular flaws inherent in intellectualism:


I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything. No one ever blamed someone if he “coordinated” because he had to take care of his wife or child. The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened. But then, at the time, I didn’t see it so clearly.


This is an astonishing passage, for several reasons.



First, Arendt reveals the ground for her belief that Eichmann was no ideological Nazi but, in fact, was just a blind functionary. Not being an intellectual, he couldn’t have had “ideas” or “terrifically interesting things” to think about Hitler, and, therefore, he couldn’t have “really believed in Nazism.” … It’s a strange badge of intellectual honor to ascribe true belief in Nazism solely to intellectuals, and it is yet another sign that the passions and the hatreds on which the movement ran were essentially beyond Arendt’s purview. Second, her charge against the intellectual class—that they invent “completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things” and get “trapped in their own ideas”—is the perfect description of her own heavily theoretical and utterly impersonal view of Eichmann.


Previous Dish on Hannah Arendt here, here, and here.


(Image of Arendt on a stamp via Wikimedia Commons)



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Published on December 11, 2013 05:30
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