For me, it's important to understand that writing is about seeking understanding, being part of the process of understanding – something is clearly expressed. If my memory could actually preserve what I was thinking about, I doubt I'd ever write anything.
— Hannah Arendt
Like many Jewish-eds exiled intellectuals, Hannah Arendt's personal experiences and intellectual developments were branded with Nazi rule and World War II. From the time she came to power as a Nazi at the age of 27 to the end of World War II at the age of 39, she experienced a life of displacement and gradually matured her thinking. Parting ways with her first husband, betrayal of her mentor and academia, fleeing her homeland, losing a great friendship, major academic breakthroughs, and the support of new friends constitute Arendt's twelve years of displacement and ill-fated fate.
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As a teenager, she showed a remarkable talent for philosophy
Arendt was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg, East Prussia, a fellow countryman with Kant. Due to her father's early death, she was intelligent and sensitive since childhood, and she had been familiar with Kant since she was in middle school, and showed a maverick personality. As a young woman, she followed the path of a typical German scholar: a fine education in the liberal arts high school, academic training in the humanities at the university, a doctoral dissertation on Augustine, etc. She was already fluent in Greek and Latin, and had a special love for theology and philosophy.
She immersed herself in the most important seminars and salons of German academia and intellectual circles of the time, presided over by the theologians Romano Guartini, Bürtmann, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marques Weber's widow Mary Anne Weber, poet and critic Friedrich Gundolph Karl Mannheim and Paul Tillich, and also established close ties with some of them, from which she was nourished by her ideas and participated in the construction of one of the greatest achievements in the history of Western philosophy.
An important figure in German academia
The young Arendt was immersed in the passion of the existential philosophical revolution that activated the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. For her, the real wars, regime changes, and inflation, although they caused inconvenience to life and sometimes made her normal life unsustainable, they were all ignored by her thinking.
Arendt and Günter Stern
In 1929, Arendt married Günter Stern, who also studied at Heidegger, and the couple supported each other academically, worked hard for each other, lived in poverty and tranquility, and worked hard to enter the German academic and cultural circles. For a time they rented a house in Berlin, which was used at night and a dance rehearsal room during the day, and even under these conditions, they were enthusiastically involved in academic discussions and cultural activities. At the time, Arendt was delving into German Romanticism. Through this study, she sought to save herself from the emotional shadow of Heidegger.
Arendt and her teacher Heidegger were involved in each other throughout their lives
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The actions of German academics with illusions about Nazi activities,
Deeply irritated her
The good wishes to pursue academic careers were gradually shattered as economic and political realities deteriorated. Stern's dissertation on professorship was rejected by Adorno. Faced with increasingly dire economic conditions, he was forced to find alternative ways to make a living, first as a journalist for a cultural column at Brecht's recommendation, and then began to write novels satirizing the Nazis. As Nazi anti-Semitism flourished, the differences in the couple's personalities became apparent in the face of a real political crisis. Later, after the Arson of the Reichstag in early 1933, Stern fled to Paris for fear of being arrested by the Gestapo. Arendt chose to stay in Berlin, and the marriage between the two survived in name only.
Staying in Berlin to fight the Nazis directly, Arendt's decision shows that she has transformed from a young scholar obsessed with the field of ideas to an actor actively involved in the struggle for reality. She began writing papers such as Enlightenment and the Jews related to Jewish historical and practical dilemmas, commenting on Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and discussing women's emancipation. The wisdom she shows in these articles stems from her reflections on her own life experiences. It was on the basis of her own sensitivity to reality that, while most people were still disillusioned with Nazi activity, Arendt had become intolerable to intellectuals who failed to understand the increasingly dark political situation.
On the other hand, during the most perilous period beginning in 1933, Arendt was also active in anti-Nazi, Jewish rescue and socialist activities similar to underground work, and her home in Berlin became a place of refuge for enemies of Hitler's regime. At the invitation of the Zionist Organization, she went to the Prussian State Library to collect extensive anti-Semitic speech, which was a very dangerous illegal activity at the time. Although all these efforts have yielded little success, her experience with the life of action has enabled her to clearly recognize the hypocrisy of life that still exists among many of the German academic and cultural elites.
At the time, what struck Arendt most was the fact that she repeatedly mentioned in her later studies of totalitarian politics, the naïveté of Germany's cultural celebrities about realpolitik crises and the more serious tendency to go with the flow. Arendt later called them "educated philistines", who possessed noble ideals on the one hand and were unrealistic on the other.
So when they are forced to engage with real life, they graft their ideals onto real people, movements, or trends. Coupled with the sense of crisis prevalent in European intellectual circles after World War I, it is believed that European culture is in a crisis of decline. This led to the widespread obsession of German academic and cultural circles with hitler and the Nazi political movements. Arendt had set herself the ideal of entering academia, and she regarded these academic and cultural celebrities as her peers. Arendt, as a Jew, was not shocked by the Nazis' anti-Semitic remarks and deeds, but what really shocked her was the betrayal of her friends.
Her former lover, Wiser, came to her home in Berlin and excitedly announced: "A great time has arrived. In his speech at the Inaugural University of Freiburg, Heidegger declared that "the greatness and nobility of this nation's awakening" were proclaimed. These things made people like Arendt feel utter helplessness, despair, and anger. This phenomenon, which Arendt called "the darkest scene" of Nazi rule, fundamentally changed Arendt's attitude toward thinkers.
Shortly after working for the Zionist organization, Arendt was suddenly arrested and interrogated by the police. Thanks to a german police officer who had just entered the road, she responded with dexterity and was finally released after 8 days of detention. Arendt then went into exile. She fled first to Prague, then to Geneva, and finally to Paris in the autumn of 1933. It was not until his arrival in New York in May 1941 that Arendt spent eight years in exile in France.
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She went into exile in Paris to fellowship with literati such as Benjamin
When he first arrived in Paris, Arendt was still living with Stern. Their lives are very poor, and because they have no legal status, they can only work in very low-level, meager jobs and live in small hotels. Arendt worked for various Jewish organizations and individuals, which provided her with a source of livelihood but, more importantly, accumulated a wealth of real-world political experience. She was actively involved in Zionist activities, helping Jewish philanthropists fund Jews in exile, participating in institutions that trained Jewish youth, and assisting in escorting them to Palestine.
While working for Baroness Lothilt in sponsoring jewish charities, Arendt gained a fresher understanding of the mechanisms of survival within the Jews. The Lothilt family was a prominent parisian who secretly controlled the "Council of Elders of Judaism in Paris", which had a wide influence among French Jews, especially exiled Jews. When the French government discussed the issue of Jewish society and exiles in its own country, it often consulted the "Presbyterian Church".
However, these "Presbyterian" leaders often prevented their members and other Jews in Paris from openly participating in political organizations. Fearing that the overt political activities of the Jews would provoke anti-Semitism and the xenophobia of the French, they always tried to compromise with the persecution through covert prying campaigns. Arendt referred to these Jewish leaders as "upstarts", who always wanted to hide their Jewish identity and try to win temporary Jewish tranquility by currying favor with the political authorities. Those who soberly asserted their Jewish identity and dared to openly engage in political activities as a Jew were called untouchables by Arendt.
She believed that only the Untouchables could develop a true political consciousness and most effectively counter nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric and activities. The distinction between the Untouchables as rebels and the upstarts as conformists became a fundamental principle of Arendt's political thought, from which she established the criterion for true political consciousness and later used it to analyze the problem of racial discrimination in American politics.
In addition to the practical political practices mentioned above, Arendt was also actively involved in French cultural activities. However, compared with the period before the Nazis came to power, she was no longer associated with pure scholars, but literati with strong practical concerns such as Zweig, Brecht, Benjamin, Raymond Aron, Alexander Kojève, Sartre, Kovare, etc. These rich social activities have inspired her to broaden her horizons and mature her thinking. She discussed Marxism with Benjamin and attended Kojève's famous seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, while Kovaré introduced them to a philosophical magazine.
Arendt's friends
After Stern left France for the United States in 1936, Arendt began to associate with Heinrich Blücher, a former Communist who had fled Germany, and the two became partners. What Blücher brought to Arendt was something entirely different, the experience and wisdom that came from the long realpolitik struggle. Born into a working-class family, he grew up with a hard life, was poisoned by air bombs in World War I, joined the Spartac regiment led by Liebknecht and Luxembourg after the war, and played an important role in rebuilding the German Communist Party after the defeat. He introduced Arendt into the Marxist tradition, and she began to read deeply the works of Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, among others. She spoke highly of Marx, and despite her disagreements on many fundamental issues, she always acknowledged his important influence on her. In addition, the one who influenced her the most was Rosa Luxemburg, whose personality and thoughts have always revered Arendt.
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Lose Benjamin forever as a friend
Even the impoverished and disappointing exile ended in August 1939, and the French government began to forcibly concentrate the exiles. First Brucher was placed in a shelter, and then Arendt was imprisoned in May 1940. Life in the shelters was not long, but it was the closest they were to death, as many of those who did not escape from the shelters were later sent to death camps by the Nazis.
When the French puppet government issued a notice in October 1940 calling for exiles to surrender to the government for self-registration, Blücher and Arendt intended to flee France. The process of leaving France is quite thrilling. The Arendts were granted a visa to the United States with the assistance of an "Emergency Rescue Committee" organized by Albert Herchmann, who would later become a prominent economist. They smuggled into Spain and then took a boat to the United States. In the end, they managed to reach the United States, but what was extremely sad was that their friend Benjamin, after getting a visa to the United States, was blocked at the Spanish border, so that he finally committed suicide. Arendt carefully preserved the manuscripts that Benjamin had given them at the last moments, including the famous Compendium of the Philosophy of History. While waiting for the cruise ship in Lisbon, they read Benjamin's masterpiece together.
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She has endless passionate thinking
Arriving in the United States meant are are at bay of safety in stormy times. She soon learned English and began to make a name for herself in academia, but given her academic experience in Germany, she was not enthusiastic about developing in the academy, but instead became involved in a Zionist magazine, Construction, became a columnist, and continued her work on current affairs and political commentary.
As the news from Europe grew grim, Arendt devoted more and more energy to the actual political struggle. She actively proposed the creation of a Jewish legion to wage a tit-for-tat struggle against Hitler, and pondered the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in order to solve the Jewish problem. But these reflections did not yield the desired results, with the former ignored by Jews in the delicate position of American politics and the latter temporarily abandoned by herself because she knew the final solution to the Nazis. They learned only the astonishing news of the Holocaust at the end of 1942.
For them, the news itself was already unbearable, but in the circumstances at the time, what was even more frightening was the general indifference of American society to the news. Arendt must engage with his fellow Jews, who recognized the gravity of the situation, in the wake-up and the revelation, in organizing rallies, giving speeches, attending performances, trying to wake people up from their dullness as quickly as possible. In this process, Arendt's uniqueness was his insistence on exposing the responsibilities of influential leadership within the Jews in the course of the catastrophe, their obedience to political currents at every turn, their cooperation with the Nazis in Germany, their right-wing ideology in France, and their accommodating patriotic fervor in the United States. This so-called consideration of the overall situation always forgets the political position of the Jews themselves, and the result is to push their own countrymen step by step toward disaster.
When the news of the liberation of Paris came on May 8, 1945, Arendt was so excited that the couple opened champagne to celebrate the good news while looking forward to the arrival of a new life.
Arendt ( back row , second from left ) , who has lived in the United States for many years , is with friends
In New York, 1973
Excerpted from Beijing News Book Review Weekly
Chen Lianying |