On Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, one of twentieth century’s most famous political theorist and philosophers was catapulted to global fame with her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann – the key architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was abducted by the Mossad from Argentina and in a daring operation was spirited back to Israel where he was made to stand trial. The trial had all the trappings of a theatre – the symbolism of Jerusalem, the global press corps swarming around and the testimonies of victims and survivors being beamed to television homes around the world in real-time. Life magazine even published a series of stunning photographs of Eichmann’s life in prison. Seeing them, it’s simply hard to imagine the monstrosity he was accused of .

Arendt’s coverage of the trial was published in the New Yorker as ‘The Banality of Evil’. For Arendt, giving Eichmann the halo of a monster was unnecessary and futile. For her, he was nothing more than a petty bureaucrat thoughtlessly following orders with any critical examination of its moral implications. A part of this view was also shaped by her mentor, the Existential philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers was against giving the Nazis (or any monster for that matter), the recognition and mythologizing they craved. “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that is what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria”. Years later, as she sat in the courtroom in Jerusalem and heard Eichmann speak, Hannah Arendt began to understand what her mentor had meant. An evil as banal as bacteria was in front of her. Understandably, the reception of her reportage by the Jews was hostile who found her refusal to label him perplexing.

Lyndsey Stonebridge, in ‘We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience’ writes that in the eight months preceding Arendt’s essay, the New Yorker also published Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” the text that would become The Fire Next Time – a landmark text in the canon of Black America’s struggle. (Remember, this was during the heydays of racial segregation, Martin Luther and Little Rock Nine)

With a stunning moral, political, and historical clarity that now looks nothing less than visionary, between them Carson, Baldwin, and Arendt laid out the threats to the human condition on earth: endemic and violent racism, reckless greed, overconsumption, unthinking technological change, and environmental catastrophe—the poisonous masterplots of modern life.

One of the greatest criticisms levelled against Arendt has been her choice of one of her lovers. At eighteen, Arendt began an affair with her professor, the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger later became a supporter of the Nazis but managed to recover his reputation through strategic distancing and retractions. The affair remained a controversial chapter in Arendt’s life and cast a shadow over her reputation. Critics questioned, “How could someone who wrote so insightfully about totalitarianism and stateless persons become involved with a Nazi sympathizer?”

Arendt eventually falls in love and marries Heinrich Blücher – a political activist who remains her staunch allly till his death. It is also believed that during his final years, the poet WH Auden proposed to Arendt and was rebuffed. I’m yet to find more details about this episode except for an obituary written by her on Auden’s death which begins with:

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends.

During WWII, Arendt flees Paris and lands up in the US. Her experiences shape her thinking about refugees, human rights and about the evils of totalitarian regimes which culminated in her magnum opus ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’.

During the 2019 revolution that hit the streets of Lebanon, a mural drawn in a parking lot went viral. “It showed a woman wearing a red dress, sitting on a bench, absorbed in reading. Behind her shoulders, men opened their mouths and raised their fists demanding to be seen, heard, and reckoned with. The book the woman was reading was the Arabic translation of Hannah Arendt’s ‘On Revolution’

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