Visible Spaces
Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience
Description:... Explores the influence of German-Jewish history and of her own Jewish experience on Arendt's political thought. Summarizes Arendt's ideas on antisemitism and its German particularities, expressed in "Rahel Varnhagen, " "The Origins of Totalitarianism, " and her articles on Zionism. Discusses the problem of guilt and responsibility in a totalitarian state, especially the Germans' responsibility in the Nazi period, issues raised in Arendt's correspondence and polemics with the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld and with Karl Jaspers, as well as in her early postwar essays. Ch. 6 (pp. 223-251), "The Obscurity of Evil, " analyzes Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial and the heated debates it aroused. Explains her critique of the trial by her interpretation of the Holocaust as a Nazi attack on mankind, not only on the Jewish people, and by her need to understand the Nazi regime as a model of a totalitarian system, refusing to recognize antisemitism as an essential element. Argues that Arendt did not succeed in penetrating the obscurity of Eichmann and Nazi evil.
Show description