I
FOR MUCH OF THE 1920S AND THE EARLY 1930s, HANNAH ARENDT, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers shared a common world of thought and experience. In particular,
* they shared a sense of the thoroughgoing crisis within modernity;
* they radically questioned the subject-centered inversion of the relationship of world and human being since Descartes;
* they viewed modern society, mass democracy, and liberalism as part of a breach in tradition in modernity;
* they shared an antipathy toward neo-Kantianism and all other transcendental philosophy, as well as an attendant awareness of the irretrievable loss of all metaphysical certitudes.
However, they reacted differently when confronted with the political reality of their time. At the end of Weimar republic, only Arendt comprehended the ever-growing violent anti-Semitism as ushering in a new era, whereas Karl Jaspers criticized anti-Semitism in terms of liberal reason. At that time Heidegger believed anti-Semitism was a necessary evil in order to forge the national renewal of Germany. Last, Arendt, Heidegger, and Jaspers held divergent views concerning the nature of German-hess. Whereas Heidegger and Jaspers felt a shared obligation to renew German universities in the name of a national resurrection, young Arendt felt her being-different as a Jew in a substantial way. In 1933 they had still shared a common way of thinking, but the world in which they had done so had fallen apart. One has to keep this in mind when reflecting on the relation between these three thinkers after the catastrophe.
Nonetheless, their common origins in the nascent "philosophy of existence" of the twenties influenced these three thinkers throughout their lives, and in some way these origins always retained a hold on them. Of course, even within this common origin, each assigned very different status to both the individual points of critique, and all three diverged in the conclusions they were subsequently to draw from this critique.
Among them, Hannah Arendt possibly went the furthest after 1945 in terms of the consequences she drew from her critique of modernity. She put the collapse, or better the self-destruction of the tradition of modernity, front and center, which for her most visibly manifested itself in the disappearance of the political sphere. Her project was thus to sound out the conditions of possibility of a world in which the political would have a place. For Heidegger, National Socialism, fascism and Soviet communism were part and expression of a deep crisis of the West, which expressed itself primarily in the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology, a process he termed "forgetfulness of being" (Seinsvergessenheitct). The genocide perpetrated against the Jews of Europe as well as the destruction of European nations and states was for him only one appearance among several of that crisis. Much as he had in the twenties, he called an opening of thinking for and toward Being.
Karl Jaspers linked questions of moral philosophy, questions as to guilt and responsibility, to the question of the meaning of human existence and the transcendental grounds for justification thereof.
In hindsight, the critique of modernity and the respective attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust in the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Arendt highlight different facets of a tableau, which in their differences point to the uniqueness of these three authors' respective approaches, and which in their totality offer an overview of different approaches to the phenomenon of the Traditionsbruch, the breach in tradition that culminated in the events of the twentieth century.
II
IN SEPTEMBER 1946, A YOUNG FRENCH PHILOSOPHY TEACHER NAMED Jean Beaufret had visited Heidegger in his hut at Todtnauberg. In a letter he sent Heidegger after that visit he had posed the question how one could restore meaning to the term "humanism": "Comment redonner un sens au mot humanisme?" It was in response to his question that in 1946 Heidegger published his first text after the end of National Socialism, the so-called "Letter on Humanism."
Partly in response to the pervasive nihilism of the prewar and war years, the humanist perspective was hotly debated in France, both in Paris and in the provinces, where Beaufret taught. In the course of the controversy, two different currents of thought came to dominate the debate: Marxism and existentialism. The Parisian journal Les Temps Modernes played host to a celebrated debate on the topic. Jean-Paul Sartre programmatically asserted that existentialism was a kind of humanism (Sartre, 1965 [1946]), and shortly thereafter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote on the communist promise of humanism (Merleau-Ponty, 1961 [1947]). The question of humanism lay heavily in the air when Heidegger decided to address it.
Heidegger's response to Beaufret's question about the meaning of the concept "humanism," unlike his personal writings from 1945 and 1946 in which Heidegger attempted to explain his role in the Nazi years, and much like his lectures on Nietzsche of the 1930s, sheds considerable light on the paths of thinking on which he was launched by his own involvement in National Socialism, as well as on those which he refused to tread (Heidegger, 1991). Against the debate over "German guilt" (Jaspers, 2001; Grunenberg, 2001), which the end of National Socialism had ushered in among the world public, the Protestant and Catholic churches and the German Bildungsburgertum, Heidegger refused to join those who called for a new moral age after the (self-)destruction of all values.
He based his critique of the traditional moral understanding of humanism on the assertion that a universal "forgetfulness of being" expressed a thoroughgoing crisis in the West. His answer to Beaufret's question starts with a fundamental critique of the traditional concept of humanism. He questioned the moral connotation of the term, which was based on the Enlightenment's claim to universality and its understanding of human rights, and criticized it as an empty phrase, which could be put to any use whatsoever. "When thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as a techne, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes" (Heidegger, 1977: 197).
His point was the following: In modern times the term "humanism" had become a banal saying that cannot be renewed or filled with meaning just by simply relying on it as a guide to morally irreproachable action. A thinker should not entrust thought to the custodianship of its application, but rather--and here the familiar line of inquiry of Being and Time appeared again--understand from the side of Being. Humanism, according to Heidegger's reading of the term, would not consist in mobilizing dormant moral dispositions and their subsequent applications to a "praxis," but instead in unearthing the capacity to think and to exist in orientation toward Being. For Heidegger, this goes along in regaining a relationality of Dasein, which had previously been eclipsed by the illusion of autonomy. According to him this means nothing other than that the thinker needs to retreat into the purity of thinking:
But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being
he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he
must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the
impotence of the private. Before he
speaks man must first let himself be claimed by Being, taking the
risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only
thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed
upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of
Being (Heidegger, 1977: 199).
Heidegger here strikes an arc to Being and Time: Man should discover the way back to himself, "for this is humanism: meditating and caring, that man be human and not inhumane, 'in-human', that is, outside his essence. But in what does the humanity of man consist? It lies in his essence" (Heidegger, 1977: 199). This essence (Wesen) has no normative foundation, but rather rests on an openness vis-a-vis the appearance of Being.
Once again, Heidegger retreats from a kind of thinking oriented toward its direct application. The "Letter on Humanism" does not see Heidegger "grappling with National Socialism." Neither the concept nor the historical phenomenon is thematized, while remaining under the rubric "forgetfulness of being," along with almost the entire history of modernity. The events between 1933 and 1945 thus represented for Heidegger nothing more and nothing less than the preliminary climax of a crisis that had begun long ago.
Given the generalness of his questions, there was nothing to force Heidegger to thematize his own concrete personal actions. Thus his critique of the breach in tradition that occurred in modernity was at the same time much more sweeping than those of other thinkers and in its generalness inapplicable to his own personal "case." It fell short because it was so far-reaching--that was Heidegger's dilemma. His critical self-inspection never transcended the critique of the "applied thinking" within modernity, and it carried a warning for thinkers never to lapse into this short-circuit of thinking. His self-critical turn remains within the framework of philosophical reflection; the responsibility of the private person and citizen Heidegger during the Nazi period would have decisively gone beyond that framework. Of course, one can object that leaving behind the continuity of this framework would have constituted the appropriate response, but Heidegger never managed to do so.
In the "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger on the one hand opted out of the return to a philosophy of values upon which the European intelligentsia had embarked after 1945, and of which Jaspers in some respects represented the leader. But on the other hand, he resisted the militant impulse of French existentialism, whose main representative, Jean-Paul Sartre, presented it as an alternative to the classical Enlightenment humanism. At the same time, he took no part in the German debate on the "guilt question."
While it had still been possible to derive from Being and Time a demand for the realization of an authentic life that would be open to Being, Heidegger's position after 1945 became more modest. Ethics after catastrophe for Heidegger meant the excavation of a thinking that "thinks the truth of Being as the primordial element of man as one who ek-sists" (Heidegger, 1977: 235). Heidegger thus once again broke down the dichotomy of Sein and Sollen, he retreated and waited, open for that which may come, but that openness was also obscure, at times to the point of unintentional comedy.
III
THE SAME PERIOD WITNESSED HEIDEGGER GRAPPLING PRIVATELY WITH the aftereffects of National Socialism on his professional and private life, a reflection that is sustained if not always consistent. This reflection took place in letters. "Examination" of what had occurred "will take the rest of our lives," Heidegger wrote to Karl Jaspers in 1949 (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 165) Of course, by "examination" he meant something closer to the task of thinking, rather than public reckoning with complicity and responsibility. Heidegger in fact includes Jaspers in a common "we": the accomplices and the persecuted, he claims, share in the fact that they cannot pull away from what has happened. Jaspers at the time felt this overture was presumptuous. Moreover, Jaspers criticized what he saw the vagueness of Heidegger's segue from the concrete situation of his own person, the German university and of partitioned and occupied Germany to a generalized critique of modernity, which understood National Socialism, like communism, as the expression of a crisis of the West. In fact, Heidegger's letters are of two minds at times. One can read them as attempts at evasion, but one can just as easily get the impression that Heidegger--having escaped anything but unscathed from the disaster of 1933-34--had simply reached a radical conclusion: never again to leave the place of ontological thinking in order to step into the field of action or political reasoning, not even if it was to explain his dalliance with National Socialism. The result is paradoxical: The famous German philosopher, at the very moment when the entire world demands a public explanation for his early and energetic championing of National Socialism, withdraws demonstratively into the realm of thinking and of silence. While Heidegger points to the Platonic dualism between the true ideas and merely phenomenal everyday reality, from which philosophy has to "extricate" itself, Jaspers pushes for an open and public debate on the issues, including personal ones. Speaking, he insists, has to take place here and now. "Those mystical speculative thoughts"--an allusion to Heidegger's fashion of posing questions--"must lose their naivete so that they do not hold us spellbound and allow us to miss what is really necessary for the age" (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 174). However, Heidegger never took up Jasper's appeal to the responsibility of the reflecting citizen.
In 1950, Jaspers wrote to Heidegger
that you seemed to me to behave toward the manifestations of
National Socialism like a boy who dreams, who doesn't know what he
is doing, who doesn't know how blindly and forgetfully he gets
mixed up in an undertaking that looks to him like something
completely different than what it is in reality, and then stands
before a pile of rubble and allows himself to be driven further"
(Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 186).
In this context, Jaspers sent Heidegger a copy of his book, The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage), which had appeared the same year as Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," 1946. The offer contained within this gesture found no response from Heidegger. But he did pick up the metaphor of the "a boy who dreams." In a letter I find harrowing he lets down his guard, and paid no mind to how much he exposed himself in the process. He painted his accepting the Rektorat of the university in 1933 as though he had sleepwalked into the post, goaded on by his colleagues. The meaning of this step, the effect it would have on a whole generation of his students, he claims, had remained entirely unclear to him; all he thought about was "the university." "But I immediately fell into the machinery of the office, the influences, the power struggles and the factions. I was lost and fell, if for only a few months into what my wife describes as an 'intoxication of power.' I only began see more clearly as Christmas of 1933 ..." (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 188).
Heidegger thus regards himself as someone who simply got caught up in the undertow of the time. And it was obvious that for him that ominous pull had not ended with the fall of the Nazis: anticipating a future in which the Soviet Union would conquer all of Europe, a worry shared by many at that time, he worried that they too would act repressively toward him. He claimed that, even at this time, his name was at the top of a Soviet "enemy list."
Only two years later, in July 1952, Jaspers reacts to that letter. He admits to having reservations vis-a-vis his former friend and brother-in-arms and he notes that Heidegger had not engaged with his book on The Question of German Guilt. And he frontally attacks the tendency on Heidegger's part of approaching National Socialism and his own personal experience in this context only through the categories of fundamental ontology. This same tendency, he adds, also disturbed him when it came to Heidegger's view of communism. Heidegger had argued: "For us as well there is no avoiding it, and every word and every piece of writing/s in itself a counterattack, if all of this does not play itself out in the political, which itself has long been outplayed by other relations to being and leads a pseudo-existence" (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 190). Heidegger thus makes clear reference to his basic concept, namely that the breach in Western tradition--which is to say modernity's break with the ancient Greek and Roman tradition of thinking--led to a kind of hubris that now, in a time of crisis, philosophy must reflect upon. For Heidegger, this crisis of course encompasses "the political" as well.
Jaspers took this remark as an attack on his responsibility as citizen. If he and Heidegger were to sit face to face, he replied, then Heidegger would "today experience my flood of words, in anger and in adjuration of reason" (Heidegger and Jaspers, 2003: 196). He explains that he worries about the question whether looking at matters the way Heidegger does is not tantamount to aiding catastrophe. With his "visions," Jaspers charges, Heidegger actually obscures the view on that which is at hand, which is present, and which is concrete.
Is not a philosophy that surmises and poetizes in such sentences in
your letter that produces a vision of something monstrous, is this
not in turn something that prepares the victory of totalitarianism
by separating itself from reality, just as before 1933 philosophy
to a great extent made ready the acceptance of Hitler? [...] Are
you about to appear as a prophet who points to something
supersensible on the basis of a secret revelation, as a philosopher
who leads us away from reality?. [...] With things like this, one
wonders about authorization and rehabilitation (Heidegger and
Jaspers, 2003: 197).
Clearly, the voice that had spoken to Jaspers in Heidegger's letter was that of the tempestuous Heidegger of the prewar years, who had declared all existing conditions null and void. To make matters worse, Jaspers even pointed Heidegger to Hannah Arendt's "great book," The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In his attack, Jaspers took aim at fundamental positions of Heidegger's thought, but in particular the intersection of thinking, acting, and responsibility. He regarded Heidegger's ontological line of argumentation as pure obfuscation. One can sense Jaspers' disappointment, his impatience and his feelings of moral superiority between the lines. Until the two stopped exchanging letters in 1963, Jaspers remained tenacious, referring to what he thought was still necessary on Heidegger's part in even the short missives. But Heidegger never reacted to his promptings.
IV
JASPERS' BOOK, THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT, IS TO THIS DAY considered a milestone of German postwar discourse. But what was Jaspers' intention in pursuing this "question"? In order to understand the text, it is essential to realize that it was originally written as a series of lectures Jaspers gave during the winter semester 1945-46 (the first term after the end of the war) at the University of Heidelberg under the title "The Intellectual Situation in Germany" ("Die geistige Situation in Deutschland").
Jaspers addresses his audience in a plural "we." The philosopher thus relies on a rhetorical trick, addressing himself as part of the audience whose confused feelings he thematizes. In reality, Jaspers' feelings had never been confused: driven from his university post in 1937, he and his Jewish wife lived in constant fear of deportation untill the end of the Nazi regime. Jaspers' audience, on the other hand, is composed young soldiers who had just returned from the war, wounded men, and young women who had been in the service of the National Socialist party and government. They all share a peculiar emotional disposition, "intoxicate [themselves] with feelings of pride, of despair, of indignation, of defiance, of revenge, of scorn." What Jaspers asked of his listeners was nothing "but that we put these feelings on ice and perceive reality" (Jaspers, 2001: 6).
But Jaspers' listeners remained skeptical when it came to his arguments. They had come to the famous philosopher, whom the end of the war had left strangely uncompromised, hungry for knowledge and prepared to learn. But what Jaspers had to say elicited mostly incomprehension. The young men had been to the front, the women had endured the bombings of the cities. They had all lost relatives and friends, were marked by inner and outer devastations, by the destruction of the cities, by hunger, by joblessness, and a general ambivalence about the future. And now they were faced with a monstrous accusation: to be guilty of the annihilation of the European Jewry, and the destruction of Europe. They reacted to this responsibility that the world public and thinkers like Jaspers assigned them with rejection, with anger, and with cynicism. In their eyes the victors' policies were mendacious and belied the Allies' pretensions to representing the side of humanity. To them, after the end of the war the Nazi dictatorship had simply been replaced by a dictatorship of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. In his memoirs, the publisher Harry Pross, at the time a student of Jasper's, tells of the reactions among the students in the lecture hall:
No one would have dared interrupt the lecture. There was not
supposed to be any conversation between the students and the
professors in the old lecture hall. Then [after the end of the
lecture] the philosopher left, somewhat stiffly, without casting a
single glance left or right. The students sat tight, as they had
always done. "Pretty meshuggener," one murmured as he walked out.
"At least you don't have to say 'Heil' any more," his friend
replied (Pross, 1993: 135).
The situation Pross captures so vividly describes well the Babylonic confusion of discourses pervading the chaos of the postwar period, in which the official Protestant and Catholic churches, the Allied forces, and remaining Nazi holdovers all fought for their influence on the emerging society.
Jaspers spoke of guilt in the context of the idea that the Germans would have to undertake a collective process of spiritual purification in which they would accept the crimes committed in their name as being their responsibility in some higher sense. Only this collective acceptance would pave the way into a new life:
Clarification of guilt is at the same time clarification of our new
life and its possibilities. From it spring seriousness and
resolution. [...] We must seize the happiness of life, if it is
granted to us for intermediate moments, for breathing spells--but
it does not fill our existence; it appears as amiable magic before
a melancholy background. Essentially, our life becomes permitted
only to be consumed by a task. The result is modest resignation. In
inner action before the transcendent we become aware of being
humanly finite and incapable of perfection.
Then we are able without will to power, to struggle with love in
discussing truth and in truth to join with each other. Then we are
capable of unaggressive silence--it is from the simplicity of the
silence that the clarity of the communicable will emerge (Jaspers,
2001: 113).
The way Jaspers connected the attempt to understand the most recent past to the basic philosophical questions about existence and its meaning was not all that different from Heidegger's. But while Jaspers directly confronted the collective mentality and the questions of existence arising from it, Heidegger stripped these questions of all historical concreteness and folded them back into the realm of universal and basic questions. Whereas Jaspers posed basic moral philosophical questions anew, Heidegger wanted to return even "behind" those basic questions, because he was convinced that those very basic moral questions had been hijacked by a zeitgeist that was itself not innocuous. But Jaspers wanted to be concrete and he did not hesitate to cross the boundary to practical philosophy:
The Kantian question "What shall I do?" is no longer sufficiently
answered by appeal to the categorical imperative (though that
imperative remains ineluctably true), but it must be supplemented
by founding all ethical [sittlich] action and knowledge on
communication. For the condition for the truth of the universal
propositions on which I base my action is none other than is the
mode [Weise] of communication, in which action is undertaken
(Jaspers, 1986: 29).
Jaspers wanted to salvage individual responsibility from the annihilation of individuality under National Socialism and communism. But, rather than on an atomized individuality, he wanted to found that responsibility on communication--that is to say, communicative relationality. This road was not open to Heidegger, since communication for him was always a matter of publicity and public sphere and thus the province of "das Man," which obscured rather than clarified the authentically important questions. Jaspers however conceptualized communication as "clarity" (Helligkeit). It is hard to imagine a more dramatic difference of approaches to the question of existence.
Hannah Arendt, who had received her doctorate from Karl Jaspers in 1928, but whose friendship with Jaspers began in earnest only in 1945, remained skeptical when it came to her teacher's moral-philosophical approach to the problems of the day:
Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty without having done
anything specific as it is to feel free of all guilt if one
actually is guilty of something. I have always regarded it as the
quintessence of moral confusion that during the post-war period in
Germany those who personally were completely innocent assured each
other and the world at large how guilty they felt, while very few
of the criminals were prepared to admit even the slightest remorse
(Arendt, 2003: 28).
V
FOR ARENDT, IT WAS NOT GUILT BUT RATHER POLITICAL JUDGMENT and responsibility that was the order of the day. This had been her central topic since her first research into the elements and origins of totalitarianism. But the postulate of responsibility was tied to a political commonweal whose foundations had been profoundly shaken. However, judgment could not be suspended---even not under dictatorship. She thus agreed with Jaspers that a new opening of civil life was possible only through the medium of the public sphere. The public sphere was the core province of the political because it was the place where plurality made its appearance. The destruction of the public sphere was the first goal of National Socialist rule; communism too tolerated no free public communication.
The path of Arendt's thinking seems equally far removed from Heidegger's reflections, so much so that one could safely speak of separate worlds. But behind these two worlds there took place in those years a lively debate about the crisis of modernity, with these two thinkers at its center, fallen, contaminated, struggling to understand, struggling to find a path. The density of this exchange is much more evident between Arendt and Heidegger than between Arendt and Jaspers.
The greatest difference between Arendt and Heidegger was the experiential ground of their respective thinking: Hannah Arendt's "ground" sprang from the deep shock over the breach in tradition that had occurred in the real world, and which was represented at its most extreme by the death camps and the gulag of the totalitarian systems. Heidegger understood the breach in tradition basically in reference to antiquity. This forced him to abstract from the actual lifeworld. The path to concrete historical events was blocked to him; he thought they were mere epiphenomena of a much deeper crisis. Arendt, however, the origins of whose personal experience and thinking lay spread out over two continents, felt compelled to approach thinking from the side of the concrete historical events that represented the breach in tradition, and thus in the medium of intellectual and political history.
Both, however, started from the same question: What were the causes of the breach in tradition in modernity?. For Heidegger, that breach consisted in thinking's turn away from Being and toward the reflecting individual inaugurated by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, which, he claimed, created the illusion that the individual could produce reality out of itself. The modern world and the modern subject had fatally come to depend on a self-constructed Gestell, from within which it was difficult to find access to an authentic world. Since 1933, Arendt harbored great reservations against any such critique, suspecting it of being apolitical. Instead, she had plumbed the depths of the totalitarian world, in particular its subterranean historical, cultural, and political dimensions. In order to sound them out, she delved into the elements, motives, and mentalities of anti-Semitism, imperialism, racism, National Socialism and Soviet communism.
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger were convinced that modern liberalism, too, was an expression of the breach of tradition in modernity, a conviction they shared with a great many of their generation.
"National Socialism is the spawn of the hell that is called liberalism, in whose pit Christendom and Enlightenment both perished" (Arendt 1942). (1) This seemingly merciless verdict of Arendt's from 1942 resonates with Heidegger's thoughts on the matter, but also with the judgments of many Weimar intellectuals such as Georg Lukacs, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and many others. Heidegger too thought that modern mass democracy (as the basis of modern liberalism) had blocked people's access to that which was essential for humanity. Both agreed that modernity's breach in tradition was essentially self-generated and had not been foisted on it from without. When Heidegger claimed this, it was part of his approach to life, to action, and to experience. Arendt, on the other hand, radically questioned the approach to political life and to its intrinsic historicity. Her research into anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, and totalitarianism had led her to a critique of the purely observing philosophical mode of thinking, and its tendency to abstract from the world of experience. Consequently, Arendt focused on the role of the individual as citizen who had responsibilities--even in times of total domination. But in order to feel responsibility, citizens must be able to judge what is going on and to act according to their judging. For Arendt, then, the category of judging was fundamental for a philosophy that is confronted with totalitarianism. In her view, the philosopher, too, must not leave the world when its destruction is imminent: s/ he must take a stand, as a thinker as well as a judging citizen. She never abandoned that critical stance, even after reconnecting with Heidegger in 1950.
The fruit of that critique was the book that she had completed before she left for her first postwar journey through Europe and Germany: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). (2) The book consists of three more or less self-sufficient parts, dealing with anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. (3) Each of the three parts takes the shape of a grand historical narrative. In the first part on anti-Semitism, Arendt takes the reader to Germany, France, and England, explaining the social structure and political constitution of European societies, the lack of secure political position of European Jewry in those societies. She then approaches imperialism from a somewhat unusual side, namely the question how the bourgeoisie's expansionary drive undermined the legal, institutional, and political framework of democratic nation-states. Behind this structural analysis disguised as cultural history there lurks a radical critique of traditional theories of Christian anti-Semitism. Arendt insists that it was the Jews' politically weak position in modern society that led to or gave rise to modern anti-Semitism, rather than the traditional Christian hatred of Jews. It seems that she leaned toward a Marxist critique, which wanted to tie the origins of anti-Semitism to the socially "dis-placed" role of the Jews. But in contradistinction to Marx she does not put her hopes into the fall of the bourgeoisie, but instead into the political organization of Jews and in the vindication of the political sphere in European societies. Contrariwise, she regarded the lack of political self-organization among Jews as one of the causes of their social and political isolation, which, in the end, had made possible their political, moral, legal--and physical--annihilation.
In the book's middle part, modernity is considered from another perspective, that of newly emerging racism. Retrospectively, this chapter makes clear, the racism that came to the forefront during the second half of the nineteenth century could be turned so successfully against the Jews because politically they belonged to no single "party" to which they could have turned for protection. Only the tenuousness of their position allowed racism to lay such uncontested hold to the "Jewish question," without much resistance from religion, tradition, or morality. But what distinguished this modern racism from traditional racism? Arendt describes its emergence in a process of disintegration, in which the long-established political tradition of the core European countries fell apart. Nation-states were no longer significant in the age of imperialism, but spheres of influence in which the "mother state" was retooled as a mere agent of expansion.
In hindsight, then, imperialism would represent another rupture in modernity, in which economic expansion and racism undermined political tradition, and thus enabled the development of a new murderous kind of anti-Semitism. Thus, the preconditions for the decline and eventual self-dissolution of the more or less democratic world would have existed even before the opening of World War I.
Arendt describes in detail how this new kind of rule, total rule, arises from the ruins of the collapsed class society and its party structure. Instead of traditional political culture and its institutions, the "interwar" years in Europe were marked increasingly by "movements," which only accelerated the decline of parliamentary governments. The "mass age" was Arendt's term for this great disintegration, within which the totalitarian movements of Soviet socialism and National Socialism gained a foothold in Europe. Ideology, propaganda, terror, and the rule of a clique that recruited itself in permanent rotation from the mob created a "fictitious world" that coupled disdain for the world of facts with a promise of salvation. The individual was at their mercy. The traditions, customs, and habits that could have offered it safe harbor lay in shambles. In this context, the seizure of power of the National Socialists was an event in which a group that was outside of the political order seized a golden opportunity to take control of a crumbling civil society.
In the book's concluding part, Arendt turns her eye to her own intellectual milieu and thus also her great love, Martin Heidegger. She tells vividly of the deracination among the German intelligentsia after World War I, whose intellectual and artistic protagonists had entered the war with the same idea they would eventually leave it with: to destroy the tottering ruins of bourgeois society. From Arendt's point of view, the role and the influence of the European elites in the twentieth century had undergone a total reversal since the age of imperialism: no longer did the elites command the mob (that is, the anti-state and anti-political mass movements across Europe); instead, the mob commanded them, until the mob's leaders no longer required the elites at all. In the end, there were no elites anymore to prevent the Nazi movement from realizing their goal: establishing a system of total terror and ideology. What to a superficial glance may present itself only as the historical relativization of the task of the intellectual was in fact a withering critique of the mentality of an entire profession, Arendt's own, that could not have been sharper.
The question that arose from this story of European decline for Arendt was the following: What were the effects of totalitarianism on any attempt at continued life or a new beginning? In her view the breach of tradition that found its expression in National Socialism was irreparable. It had turned Europe's political self-understanding upside down. People emerged from these events as though abandoned, facing a world that they themselves had destroyed. Whether they could make a new start and thus take up the promise once formulated by St. Augustine--"initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit" ("That there might be a beginning, man was created before whom nobody was")--had to remain an open question (Arendt, 1979: 479).
Arendt's book was unusual not just in its narrative form and its historical orientation; it differed greatly from the way in which most contemporary historians and political scientists, to say nothing of philosophers and literary historians, explained historical phenomena scientifically. If one considers how Arendt's colleagues, such as Carl J. Friedrich, Franz Neumann, Sigmund Neumann, Ernst Fraenkel, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin approached the phenomenon from their respective juristic, historiographic, economic, philosophical, sociological, or critical perspectives, the antisystematic character of Arendt's argumentative style seems almost anarchic by comparison. It would however be more accurate to speak of a systematic refusal of traditional scientific methodology. Arendt wanted to approach the phenomenon in a very particular way, upon first glance almost a kind of bricolage. In fact, this approach was ultimately motivated by a radical critique of the methodology of social science. Here she was again very much Heidegger's student. She tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon, even if the method should be found to be part of the problem. There was no other path for her "according to [her] powers of comprehension," as Kleist once put it (Kleist, 1999: 573)--she refused to assume an analogy between the phenomenon of totalitarianism and all traditional types of domination, such as dictatorship or tyranny.
The book would have scandalized Heidegger. The volume's expressly philosophical parts required some work on the part of the reader to find. Heidegger was, as he himself stated on several occasions, a slow reader. Heinrich Blucher, Arendt's second husband, professed he had a hunch that Heidegger would never read the book, even once Jaspers had written a preface (Arendt and Blucher correspondence, 2000: 272-274). If he ever had heard about the book--even if only from friends--he must have had ambivalent feelings about it. For on the one hand he could not but have agreed with her excavation of the abyss hidden within modernity, on the other he could hardly have countenanced her transition from the sphere of philosophy into that of political narrative. And in no case would he have assigned anti-Semitism so central a role in the fracture of Europe. On a more personal level he would have felt that her harsh criticism of the "front generation" radically misjudged him. Jaspers, who added a preface to the German edition of 1955, further emphasized Arendt's thesis of the absolute novelty of totalitarianism, its incommensurability when compared to all previous forms of dictatorship and tyranny.
VI
BEHIND THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVES THAT RUN THROUGH ARENDT'S book, there lies a profound engagement with philosophical thinking and its relation to the world. Arendt investigated the breach in tradition, which had its origin in the split between philosophical thinking about the world and acting and judging in that world. This split, inaugurated in Platonism and pushed to a radical extreme by Marx, had pulled the two worlds so far apart that they came to face one another almost antagonistically--the "useless" world of thinking and the utility-oriented world of work and labor. It was this disposition that for Arendt was behind the erosion of political order and meaning in modernity, rather than some kind of crisis of culture.
In her philosophical notebooks she lets the reader know that, starting in the early 1950s, she turned to the basic conditions under which a political new beginning after the breach of tradition might be possible. To that end, she once again studied Heidegger's writings and put his thinking in relation to the classic Greek texts. If one traces Arendt's work on and with Heidegger's categories in the 1950s and 1060s, it becomes clear that those categories change precisely when confronted with those classic Greek texts. This was due to the fact that her analysis of the breach in tradition in Western history had led her to conclude that the severed tradition could not simply be mended. Here she was in absolute agreement wit Heidegger. But to her the most deleterious consequence of the breach in tradition was the destruction of the political sphere. Thus she began a solitary dialogue with the absent Heidegger on the subject of how a common political life of human beings could be founded.
As a counterweight to Heidegger's attempt to think the meaning of existence from the perspective of death, she pointed to birth as a coequal condition of existence. In her view, a human being's space of action unfolds between death and birth. In that she followed Thucydides and St. Augustine. Creating meaning does not end with a person's physical death. Human beings create what can be traditioned into the future: the story of what has happened (the great deeds, the catastrophes), as well as the common or shared, what the classics since antiquity had labeled "summum bonum" or "public happiness." Arendt shared the late Heidegger's critique of the fetishization of action--which had basically been a self-critique on Heidegger's part--and she turned it into a positive. Not will to power--that is to say the hypostasis of will in action--is at the heart of our activity, but neither is the individual's withdrawal from the world, the letting-happen Heidegger advocated after his deep fall. Her alternative to a violent forcing-into-being of a new world--Heidegger's program in the early 1930s--is to make possible a plural world in which individuals can come to exist in reference to one another. This is what Arendt means when she says world, and her considerations on this topic are very close to Karl Jaspers' philosophical advocacy