(Continuation from last issue)
The need for social association as an expression of political attitude, Hannah Arendt showed in elementary school and continued throughout life. After seeing the Reichstag burn in November 1933, she knew it was time for political activism.
In her opinion, challenged by reality, the philosophy that was supposed to provide man to act in a moral way, failed. The intellectuals were no better prepared to act against the nazification of the country. And many of the intellectuals of that time were not even aware of the nazification. Instead, university professors decided to preserve their positions and ambitions to become "great", placing themselves "above the situation". They essentially became slaves to their own way of thinking and cowardice. However, Hannah Arendt chooses differently.
Vigilant as she has always been, concrete political activism begins. After divorcing her first husband Gunter Anders, also a philosopher and Marxist, the son of famous child psychologists Wilhelm i Clare Stern, comes to Berlin and organizes meetings for people from communist and Jewish organizations in his apartment. During a visit to the library, where she was tasked with gathering a synthesis or genesis of anti-Semitic statements through the media, she was arrested.
That luck followed Hana throughout her life is also shown by the fact that she was released from prison after eight days, because she met a young inspector, who until then was involved in criminal investigation, and still had not sunk into the blind system of (non)thinking, so he did not it was logical for him to keep a young doctor of philosophy, who was reading a newspaper in the library, locked up.
After this event, realizing that things will only get worse, he leaves Germany and goes to Paris. During the day he cooperates with Jewish organizations, and in the evening he expands his otherwise rich social circle.
Together with compatriots Bertolt Brecht i Arnold Zweig creates an intellectual community with locals Sartre, Camus, Simon de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty i Breton. In Paris, she meets and becomes close with another Jewish exile, Walter Benjamin, whom the world remembers as the most famous "flâneur" and recorder of the cultural fabric of Western civilization. Walter Benjamin will have a great intellectual influence on Hannah, and she will repay him by preserving and representing his legacy as friends know best - breathing new life into it.
In Paris, Hana meets and Heinrich Bliher, a communist and a key member of the left-wing Marxist wing in Germany, a close friend of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and left-leaning French intellectuals. Bliher came from a poor family, but his wit, charm, fairness and desire for knowledge made him a great and influential intellectual.
He was not Jewish. Hanna and Heinrich were married until his death in 1970. It was a marriage of great love. Hana was delighted to receive the two things she needed most - the love of her life and her own unity. She said that he was "the guardian of her solitude". Solitude, from which she created her thoughts and thanks to which we enjoy Arenta's works.
Until 1939, France kept its doors open for Jewish refugees from Germany, but then decided to limit their movement and formed refugee camps where all arriving Jews had to be. Among them were Heinrich in the men's camp, and Hana in the women's camp.
The camp was a place where Hana could simultaneously feel the consequences of wrong policies and test the limits of endurance of humanity and life in general. Samantha Hill very delicately and effectively from this part of Hana's life, he presents the two most important questions. Suicide and despair. As Hana states in her letters, the moment of suicide was only mentioned once in the camp, and that in the sense of collective suicide.
Arendt finds the explanation for this in the fact that no one in the camp felt the personal misfortune and meaninglessness that would make them resort to such an act, but shared a collective fate together. In the later essay "The Destruction of Six Million", Arendt states that hope and despair are two sides of the same coin, which turn people towards the past and the future.
Arendt poetically points to the destiny and verses of the Polish poet Tadeusz Borovski, who was in Auschwitz as a young man, and witnessed the existence of a collective hope, not for a better tomorrow, but for the return of the world and life as it once was, only to put his head in a gas oven six years after liberation. For Borovski, life after everything that happened was unbearable because the old man could never return. In the collection of stories and poems "Here for Gas Rooms, Ladies and Gentlemen", Borovski says:
"Never before in human history has hope been stronger than man, but it has also never done so much evil as in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught to give up hope, and that is why today we are disappearing in the gas chambers."
With this, Arendt points to hope, which can be a dangerous barrier in planning the action of social networks and creating new beginnings that humanity should strive for.
After being rescued from the camp, Hanna and Heinrich, with the help of Jewish-American organizations, get two visas to stay in America. On the ship, which was taking them to the continuation of an extremely meaningful life, they also carried the suitcase of Walter Benjamin, who in Portobo, on the verge of complete exile, still decided to commit suicide, remaining an individual until the end. In the suitcase was the manuscript of Benjamin's work "Theses on the Philosophy of History". While crossing the Atlantic, they read aloud to the other refugees:
"The tradition of repression teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must hold to a concept of history that contains this important thought. Then we will clearly understand that it is our duty to provide a real state of emergency, and it will improve our position in the fight against fascism."
Hannah Arendt was 35 years old when, after two world wars, she sailed to the USA. Hana was lucky in her life. In her transition period, which is well known to all those who have changed places of residence, Hana was a domestic helper in an American family, studied English and was smarter and more intellectually mature than ever. It was a time of new beginnings that Arendt constantly stood for.
In addition to the American way of life, Hana got to know their politics, which was different from the traditionally European left and right orientation, and whose experience of the Republic greatly influenced her political views, considering the Republic a real chance for freedom.
What impressed her the most about the USA was that it was never a national country, so it was far from malignant nationalism and chauvinism. Citizenship was tied to the Constitution, not ethnicity or race.
After the outing in household chores, Arendt returns to writing and academic life, i.e. the beginning of writing her works from the "American period" and the professorship. As the organizations that helped her find a job were Jewish, the question of belonging to the Jews was constantly repeated. True, it would be repeated even without them.
According to her own admission, Hannah Arendt was part of the Zionist organization from 1933 to 1943 because of the "Jewish question", which she considered a purely political issue. However, she was never a nationalist and saw the nation as a separate entity from the state.
She was very aware of the danger of anti-Semitism, but she rejected the thesis of eternal anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt was not with the Zionists after 1943 because she rejected their ideological matrix. She believed that Jews should have their own homeland, but she was against a Jewish nation-state. She advocated that the European Federation guarantee security when the nation-state system was destroyed, as it has already happened.
If nation-states cannot provide basic human rights for all their citizens, then for Arendt, it is a political obligation to fight for a political body that can make this possible. In "The Sources of Totalitarianism" the above is defined as "the right to have rights". These thoughts of Arendt will be many times a point of great conflict with some prominent Jews. And the biggest conflict will happen during her reporting from the trial to Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In the same year that she received American citizenship in 1951, Hannah Arendt publishes her capital work "The Sources of Totalitarianism", which is still a place of great polemic and frequent misunderstanding. Trying to better understand the phenomenology of totalitarianism, Arendt uses a similar process of developing materials as Walter Benjamin in his work "Theses on the Philosophy of History".
The method does not imply a linear course of historicism, but the "crystallization" of various elements that phenomenologically depict totalitarianism. For Hannah Arendt, one of the main characteristics of totalitarianism is - loneliness, as opposed to solitude, which we mentioned earlier and which is necessary for reflection and political action. Loneliness, as Arendt claims, is the goal of totalitarianism and the main form of terror that totalitarianism implements.
The moment people are lonely, it is much easier for totalitarian governments to control them, because it is much harder for lonely people to unite, since they lack the connections necessary to organize and rebel. Political action requires action and cooperation. While "loneliness is closely related to uprootedness and redundancy, the lack of a place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others, loneliness is the opposite.
In solitude, the self is realized, which is confirmed in its identity, only by the trust of a worthy company of its equals. In loneliness, a person loses trust in himself as a partner of his thoughts and elementary trust in the world necessary to experience any experiences. The self and the world, capable of thought and experience, are lost at the same moment.”
One of the ways in which a totalitarian regime contributes to loneliness is the systemic blurring of reality and fiction, and the inability to clearly see the line between what is true and what is false. In this impossibility of recognizing truth and lies, the subjects give up trying to find out in general. Another important moment in "The Sources of Totalitarianism" is the collapse of the border between private and public life, which was preceded by the liberalization of private or economic interest into the public or political sphere.
What we would call the privatization of politics today. Arendt analyzes how businessmen, out of a desire to expand the market, introduced their business models into the political space, and took over positions in the state, guided by their private and not political interests. That is, subordinating political to private and economic interests.
As he states: "Businessmen became politicians and were declared statesmen, while statesmen looked serious only if they spoke the language of successful businessmen." The uneven distribution of goods, embodied in private interests, was incompatible with the need for stable institutions. All this led to the equating of economic/private interests with political interests. Therefore, there is a socialization of private and public, increasing class differences and at the same time destroying political institutions.
Arendt returned to Europe for the first time in November 1949, as executive director of the Commission for the Reconstruction of Jewish Culture. The ugliest impression upon her return was left by the destroyed German cities, and the most beautiful feeling she had was when she heard people speaking her native language on the streets. The language remained.
In a TV interview, Arendt said that she had met people who, after learning about Auschwitz, had forgotten their native language - German, out of shock. She was not one of them. For her, language is a space that enables our existence through thinking. We think with language. As she said, "During those difficult years, the German language did not go crazy."
And only in German did she know her favorite poetry by heart. The author of the biography relates part of her return to Europe and her return home to her friends, who are the unbroken thread of Hana's life. After correspondence with Jaspers and his wife Gertrud, immediately after the liberation, their live meeting followed.
For Hannah Arendt, it was one of life's greatest treasures - the fact that they were alive, that they saw each other again, and that they would be able to talk again. The fact that such a conversation was still possible was an example of pure luck. Nowhere else, as in the relationship with close people, does Hana prove her theory about the continuity of life, about the source with a hundred beginnings. These relationships are not only with friends, but with people in general, who were of great importance to her. One of them is i Martin Heidegger. After 17 years of silence, they spoke, in that space that Hana calls private, underscoring love as apolitical.
For her, love is a relationship between two people turned away from the world, turned towards each other, and that is why it is completely opposite to politics. After so much that happened between Heidegger and her, Hanna introduced two terms to consider - forgiveness and reconciliation. For her, forgiveness is bad for the relationship between two people, because it establishes a hierarchical system in which the one who forgives is placed above the one who is forgiven, while reconciliation signifies continuity with a new beginning.
For the relationship with Heidegger, Hana decided to reconcile. Heidegger admitted to his wife that Hannah Arendt was the greatest passion of his life and that he wrote "Being and Time" thanks to her. Thanks to Heidegger, Arendt also wrote her great work "Conditio humana" in 1958.
Contrary to Heidegger's theory of being "thrown into the world", Arendt propagates participation in the world through thought and action. In order for a person to be able to participate and observe the world experientially, you must have clear boundaries between private and public. Private for seclusion and reflection, and public for action, showing the world and testing your thoughts.
Arendt in "Conditio Humana" criticizes the mass society that has socialized everything to such an extent that a clear border between these spaces has been lost, which, paradoxically, due to great individualization, has created a unique space in which thought, private movement is narrowed. One has nowhere to escape because everything is public. Now more than ever. Love should also be kept strictly private, because this is the only way we provide it with the necessary freedom.
(End in next issue)
Bonus video:
