Politics in Letters
While waiting in 1941 in Lisbon for her departure to the United States, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jewish activist Salomon Adler-Rudel: "This whole emigration reminds me of the good old board game Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht in which you throw the dice and, depending on how many points you get, you are allowed to advance or you have to go back and start over." She started over from the very beginning in the New World. Having gotten away to America, she began to write for the New York "aufbau". As a forum for German-speaking Jews in the free world, this emigrant newspaper became more than a focal link to world affairs and politics for Arendt. In fact, Arendt's contributions to "aufbau" between 1941 and 1945 are the actual precursors to her work as a political theorist.
Between Europe and America
Hannah Arendt was born in Hannover in 1906 and died in New York in 1975. Born into a secular, liberal family, she grew up in Königsberg, East Prussia, the town shaped in the spirit of its famous philosopher-son Immanuel Kant. Even as a high-school student, she read the writings by the great thinker who was active during the time of the Enlightenment in her native Königsberg and laid the foundation for modern philosophy with his work on the "Critique of Pure Reason." During the winter semester 1924/25 Arendt enrolled for studies in Theology, Ancient Greek and Philosophy at the University of Marburg. Her thinking was strongly influenced by the charismatic philosophy professor Martin Heidegger and her dissertation advisor Karl Jaspers. After earning her doctoral degree in Heidelberg in 1928, the new Ph.D. graduate started a relationship with Günther Stern. He was the son of the famous psychologist William Stern who had "invented" the intelligence quotient. At age 23, she married her fiancé who became a widely read author under the pseudonym Günther Anders during the post-war period. Arendt now lived in Berlin. After the National Socialists came to power and following a temporary stint in jail, Hannah Arendt – her marriage with Günther had failed in the meantime – left Germany and arrived, traveling via Prague and Geneva, in 1933 in Paris. Here she met Heinrich Blücher who became her second husband in 1940. Blücher was from a non-Jewish blue-collar family background and a former member of the Jewish youth organization "Blau Weiss." From the very beginning, he demonstrated his solidarity with the victims of anti-Semitism. In 1932, he even entered into a fake marriage to give a Lithuanian Jewess German citizenship. Blücher emigrated around the turn of 1933/1934, also to Paris. He was leading the lifestyle of an illegal loafer when he met Hannah Arendt, who was newly displaced and starting to draw attention and influence as a committed functionary of the Jewish cause.
In 1941, the couple emigrated via Lisbon to New York, where Arendt began writing for "aufbau." From 1946 to 1948, she worked as an editor for the Jewish publishing house Schocken Books. She then started writing as an independent author. In 1963, she held a professorship for Political Theory in Chicago and after 1967 at the New School for Social Research in New York. Previously, she had been invited to guest professorships at elite universities such as Princeton and Berkeley. After the war and during the years until 1968, she returned to Europe several times. For example, the Organization [for] Jewish Cultural Reconstruction dispatched her to Europe in 1949 to secure Jewish books and cultural items. In 1951, Hannah Arendt, who had in the meantime become a U.S. citizen, published "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in a collaborative effort with her husband. The book was translated into German in 1955 and became a stepping stone to fame for the unlikely researcher pair – Heinrich had been a tenured philosophy professor at Bard College since 1952. Arendt wanted to understand how the horrors in Nazi Germany and under Stalin's iron fist could have happened, the nature of the mechanisms that had provided the dictators with the opportunity to attract such a great following and that allowed them to commit such unspeakable crimes. She analyzed National Socialism and Stalinism as related systems of power and consequences of anti-Semitism and Imperialism. Once again in 1961, she drew worldwide attention with her reporting on the trial against Adolf Eichmann, head of Nazi logistics on how to murder the Jews.
"Very thin, strong threads"
Hannah Arendt was a passionate letter writer and a virtuoso in the art. Correspondence was her platform for intellectual exchange and an emotional anchor in exile. "It is such comfort to hear from friends. Such letters are like very thin, strong threads about which we want to tell ourselves that they are still able to hold the rest of our world together," wrote Arendt in a letter to Gershom Scholem. She tied many such threads. It was very seldom that these threads were subjected to great tensions triggered by political controversy and that their endurance was tested. Her critical attitudes on Communism and Zionism placed Arendt in the position of an outsider, causing friendships to break apart.
While a student in Marburg, Arendt had an affair with the married Martin Heidegger. The connection with him endured even after the end of their illicit liaison. The friendship only ended with Arendt's death in 1975. Nevertheless, their relationship was never free of conflict. As early as in a letter from the winter semester 1932/33, Heidegger rejected Arendt's charge of being an anti-Semite. This highly ambivalent relationship with Heidegger was one of the reasons why Arendt perceived the tensions between German philosophy and Jewish tradition so acutely. Arendt and her dissertation advisor Jasper, on the other hand, developed a friendly relationship that was built on academic discourse. Between 1926 and 1969, they exchanged letters several times every week. Immediately after the war, philosophical questions regarding guilt and responsibility were dominant.
Very different pen pals
The exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, her husband over many years, runs like a central theme through her life. The letters contain their history of the time period from 1936 to 1968, the milestones in their ever-changing lives like their first meeting in exile in Paris, the escape to the United States and Arendt's attending of the Eichmann trial. This correspondence documents the fact that the political thinker owed many a realization on ideology and totalitarian party structures to her husband, and vice versa. Thus was the confluence of Blücher's Communist experiences with Arendt's Jewish, yet emancipated identity and the free spirit of Kant in which she had grown up. Arendt also corresponded with U.S. writer and women's rights activist Mary McCarthy. These letters reveal Arendt's personal, more emotional side. In her exchanges with authors such as Alfred Kazin, Uwe Johnson and Hermann Broch this was different. One fundamental thread that runs through the letters to and from Broch is, for example, the struggle for the intellectual, political and human challenges of the aftermath, the time after the Nazi horrors. The letters Arendt exchanges with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich in 1942 also focus on the question of what concrete political action should look like during the post-war period and the outlook for political restructuring in post-war Germany. The letters with Benno von Wiese stopped because of the "abyss" that opened up between them. The academic German linguist and literature expert, whom Arendt had known since her student years at the university, had joined the NSDAP in 1933. On October 17, 1953, he wrote to Arendt he understood that "you don't want anything to do with me anymore." Arendt answered – politely. But the chasm manifested itself again in 1964, when von Wiese, insinuating his own entanglements with the Nazis, wrote in an essay "remembering the past can certainly not mean that an entire generation that has been active in civil service for decades [since the war] should now to be publically denounced." He continues: "We succumbed to the zeitgeist." A horrified Arendt rebutted on February 3, 1965, indeed, he had not fallen victim to the spirit of the times but more quickly than many others to his anxiety over his "public career." She reacted differently to a letter by Melita Maschmanns. In 1933, as a 15-year-old, Melita had joined Hitler's youth organization for girls Bund Deutscher Mädel and had advanced in 1945 to speaker for the Reich Youth Leadership, the Reichsjugendführung. The former supporter of National Socialist ideals wrote a book in 1963. Here, Maschmann faced her personal failure. She send a copy of the book accompanied by a letter to Hannah Arendt. Arendt commented: "I get the impression that you are completely honest (…)."
The points of friction in the correspondence with Kurt Blumenfeld, German lawyer and functionary of the Zionist organization in Germany, that Hannah Arendt cultivated between 1933 and 1963 always involved the question of Zionism and the limits of assimilation. Repeatedly, both Arendt and Blumenfeld, with the latter emigrating to Palestine in 1933, addressed the issue that they saw themselves not only as persecuted for opposing the National Socialist regime; but they also conducted debates in their letters in which they expressed their deep horror for the "world of the Loyal Subject, the proverbial Untertan" This view found its reflection in Arendt's definition of the Jewish "Paria" In her publicist work for the publication "aufbau" she also referred to Blumenfeld. For example, on January 30, 1942, she commented on the "strong and pure echo of the remarks by Kurt Blumenfeld regarding the question of a Jewish army several days ago at the New World Club." In 1942, Blumenfeld traveled to Geneva for the International Zionist Congress. Afterwards, he attended the historic Biltmore conference in the United States where the decision was made to organize a Jewish state – indeed a "slap in the face," says Arendt, for all efforts and initiatives that had promoted the seeking of conciliation with the Arab population and those who had promoted a bi-national or federative state. Both, Blumenfeld and Arendt keenly perceived Biltmore as a political defeat, but they drew different consequences from it – while Blumenfeld attempted to find equilibrium between criticism and consent that was built on doable realities, Arendt's criticism became more poignant. She was not willing to allow the principles of freedom and independence take a back seat in the face of difficult historical conditions.
Arendt and Scholem
"Jews are dying in Europe and they are being thrown in the ground like dogs." This is how Hannah Arendt closed her letter of October 21, 1940 addressed to Gershom Scholem in which she noted that Walter Benjamin, fleeing from the Nazis, had taken his own life at the age of 48 in Port Bou. In the beginning, Arendt and Scholem were united by the literary work of their mutual friend; moreover, they both worked independently of each other on a revolution of the Jewish self-image. Born in 1897 in Berlin and a convinced Zionist, Gerhard "Gershom" Scholem had left Germany already in 1923. Until his death in 1982, the religious historian taught in Jerusalem. With his studies on Jewish mysticism he opened up a novel conception of Judaism and the Kabbala. He was attracted to Arendt's research, such as her biographical study of Rahel Varnhagen who, being the hostess of her own Berlin salon, enjoyed the general reputation of being the protagonist of a successful German-Jewish dialogue. Arendt's analysis, however, had been more differentiated.
In the course of their correspondence, with Arendt living in New York and Scholem in Jerusalem, the world of the European Jews came increasingly into focus. In 1946, some dissonance crept into their letter-writing that was triggered by Arendt's criticism of Zionism. Scholem believed such criticism was an affront to the threatened Jewish existence in Palestine. As much as Scholem was in favor of the opportunity to criticize freely in terms of a fundamental principle, just as much did he demand solidarity with the Zionist project; all the more so in view of the Nazi destruction and the fighting and attacks in Palestine. This is how the editors of the "Arendt-Handbuch" summarized the conflict between them. The dispute surrounding Arendt's report "Eichmann in Jerusalem" in 1963 then led to the complete breakdown of their relationship and they both went their separate ways. In her report Arendt criticized Jewish representatives during the time of the holocaust; she argued that Nazi maneuvering had been successful in muddying the clear delimitation between persecutor and persecuted victim. Scholem voiced a radical rejection of her thesis. Contrary to Scholem, Arendt welcomed the death penalty for Eichmann; but she criticized the role of the Jewish councils during the shoah discussing the issue as to whether action is possible at all under totalitarian conditions. Gershom Scholem admonished on December 20, 1963 that Arendt's "representations of the Jewish behavior under extreme conditions" were not a "well balanced judgment" but an "overstatement slipping at times into demagoguery." In her replication, Arendt countered she felt misunderstood. She stated, the question "that I have raised is that of collaboration by Jewish functionaries." She believed the same situation had applied for both sides, Jewish victim and Nazi perpetrator alike: "There was always a space for free decision and free action,"thus ran Arendt's provocative hypothesis. One last time, their late mutual friend Benjamin refereed their friendship, as he had done when he was still alive. Scholem was invited to come to New York for a presentation on Benjamin in 1964 and suggested an – apparently final – meeting with Arendt. Soon afterwards, the correspondence that had ranged over more than two decades ended – in utter silence.
As different as Arendt's letter-writing partners were, they have one thing in common: all of them can testify to the uncompromising attitude of the philosopher. Arendt believed openness was absolutely essential in any exchange. She was striving for "thinking without a net" – Denken ohne Geländer. She fought for freedom and democracy while "confronting all conventional perpetrator-victim dichotomies head on," as stated in the preface to the hardbound edition of her collected contributions for "aufbau." Over the past ten years, Arendt's views and thinking have raised a great deal of renewed interest, especially in the United States and in Europe. Her controversial and provocative theories on totalitarian domination take on new relevance in the midst of a crisis of orientation that has taken hold of Eastern and Western societies alike, even if in different ways.
Katja Behling is a journalist and publicist. She lives in Hamburg.
