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Archive for April 14th, 2015
Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship
Hannah Arendt was a bad friend. She stuck by Martin Heidegger after the war, even though she was presumably all too aware of the anti-Semitic line of thinking he pursued in his Black Notebooks, where he convolutedly argued that the Holocaust had been the responsibility of the Jews. Heidegger was her “supreme teacher,” according to Nixon, and his “almost complete silence” regarding her own successes, let alone his unforgivable wartime behavior, was not enough to keep Arendt away. “To be recognized by Heidegger,” in Nixon’s neat phrasing, “was, for Arendt, to be recognized.”
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem argued for the Holocaust as a crime against humanity, in which the German people had first resolved to do harm to the fabric of the world, and only secondarily selected the Jews as their victims. The intention was to render the Shoah a crime against all people, not merely the Jews, but it was another example of her difficulty with the notion of Jews as a people set apart. Invested in friendship, Arendt found being a friend to the Jewish people a challenge too far.
After publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was targeted for opprobrium by many of her fellow Jewish intellectuals, appalled by what they saw as her shoddy reasoning and misaligned sense of blame. Isaiah Berlin had her blackballed at Oxford. Her old friend and mentor Kurt Blumenfeld rejected her approaches, and died soon after without ever reconciling with her. Her longtime friend Gershom Scholem, with whom she had collaborated to preserve and promote the work of Walter Benjamin, was even angrier. In a letter written soon after Eichmann’s publication, he called “the banality of evil” a “catchword” and a “slogan.” “He charged Arendt with irresponsibility,” Nixon observes, “with misreading the role of the Jewish agencies under Nazi occupation and with lacking a ‘love of the Jewish people’—Ahabath Israel.”
Arendt had been judged by many of her old friends to have crossed an invisible line that separated thoughtful criticism from outright blasphemy, and unsentimental rationality from thoughtless brutality toward the dead. Loyal to her friends, she was notably lacking in generosity toward her fellow Jews.
_ Saul Austerlitz, ”The Hannah Arendt Guide to Friendship“, New Republic, March 9, 2015
“God gives us hope for good works and the power to carry them out. Therefore, we should be very careful not to ignore God’s good help but rather participate in God’s works of salvation with obedience and faith.”
