The Need to Remember
GITTLEMAN, SOL
The Need to Remember Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism By Stephen J. Whitfield Temple. 338 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Sol Gittleman Professor of German, Tufts University Perhaps...
...Whitfield studies The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) with the same scrupulous commitment that motivated Arendt, but he is driven by an even stronger sense of urgency...
...But roughly 20 million perished in each kingdom of suffering...
...Into the Dark is a thorough analysis of Arendt and the evolution of her ideas...
...Arendt noted the extent of Communist and Fascist cooperation in the last Weimar years...
...She claimed no religious affiliation, yet freely acknowledged her Jewishness...
...Whitfield reminds us that she did allow differences...
...When Arendt first set down her ideas nearly 30 years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she recognized that she, too, might not be believed...
...skeptical of American liberalism or parliamentary democracy...
...And there is no better way to make the point than by re-examining the works of the thinker who first suggested it, Hannah Arendt...
...Like Rosa Luxemburg, she had no "fraternal warmth" for the Jewish people...
...As he says at the beginning of his book, he is trying "to fulfill the obligation of remembrance...
...Once again, the data were unverifiable...
...and driven by the overriding desire to let the world know not only what evil really meant, but what it might still come to mean...
...One of the pieces of the puzzle that was Hannah Arendt leads Whitfield to speculate about where she would stand on the political spectrum today...
...She was not a political scientist, yet she wrote one of the most influential books on political theory of this age...
...Having specialized in classics and philosophy (her doctoral dissertation was on the idea of love in St...
...The two nations shared a spiritual universe that easily transcended their declared ideological conflicts...
...Ultimately, she was a cosmopolitan, who defied evil and refused to accept that such forces as Stalinism and Hitlerism could "destroy the essence of man...
...He is writing for a young generation with no clear picture of the meaning of totalitarianism—or, for that matter, appreciation of the nature of authoritarianism...
...Above all, she dreaded the residual influence of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, and feared the forces that might keep it alive...
...Augustine), she was not notably equipped for a life of political theory...
...She was not a trained historian (and suffered a great deal of criticism on that score), yet one can scarcely find a historian studying our era whose bibliography does not include both of her major works...
...His article, "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," was finished in 1942, but for over a year psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals rejected it: "Editors assumed Bettelheim was exaggerating...
...They regretted that his data were unverifiable...
...If she were alive today, her thoughts no doubt would once again "be charged with the feeling of peril...
...Whitfield's lively examination does not spare Arendt criticism of her inconsistencies and shortcomings...
...Reviewed by Sol Gittleman Professor of German, Tufts University Perhaps the most unnerving moment in Stephen Whitfield's discussion of Hannah Arendt's theories of totalitarianism comes when he describes Bruno Bettelheim's efforts to explain his experiences at Buchenwald and Dachau to his American colleagues...
...But her training in Weimar Germany, her extraordinarily versatile mind and ferocious intellect, and her acceptance of the pariah's role in a society deeming Jews singularly fit for genocide provided her with the worldview that informed her work...
...She used dates arbitrarily, for example, and she knew relatively little about the impact of Hitler's and Stalin's personalities on the movements they directed...
...In fact, Hannah Arendt defies categorization...
...most admiring of Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger...
...After all, in Belzec concentration camp 600,000 people were murdered, and there was only one known survivor...
...Because we still live under the threat of totalitarianism in various forms, possibly Stephen Whitfield's greatest service is to confront us with the potential horrors and to urge upon us—and most important, our students —the need to remember...
...But, there remains a touch of the Frankfurter Schule in her...
...From her vantage she saw the dissolution of any distinctions separating Right from Left when confronting the phenomena of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia: Together they constituted "the burden of our times...
...The author paints an interesting portrait of a complicated Weimar Jewish intellectual hovering somewhere between contempt for her people and a grudging acceptance of her birthright...
...Whitfield shows how her insistence that Jewish leaders abetted the Holocaust stemmed from a lifelong anti-Zionist bias...
...They wondered why he had not kept written records while he was an inmate...
...More specifically, he seeks to undo the distortion of historical understanding wrought during the past 20 years when the New Left cast doubt on whether Stalin had ever been a totalitarian and the revisionist historians of Nazi Germany suggested that, had Hitler died in 1937, he would have been recorded as one of Europe's greatest statesmen...
...These consummate evils, absolute and radical, required a theory to account for their introduction of total terror into political life...
...Perhaps this accounts for her opposition to any kind of national chauvinism, which inevitably led her to reject Zionism...
...Whitfield quite rightly realizes it is time to recall the way it was, to set the record straight and demonstrate to this generation that Stalinism and Nazism represent the darkest moments of civilization...
...She also observed that after the Molotov-Rib-bentrop Pact the word "Fascism" was no longer used pejoratively in the Soviet Union...
...In 1948, she joined Sidney Hook and Albert Einstein in protesting Menachem Begin's visit to the U.S., condemning him as one who "preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority...
...But with a moral determination that overcame her grim pessimism, Arendt relentlessly chronicled what she considered the greatest blight of modern civilization ?0th century totalitarianism...
...For both Nazism and Stalinism there was, to her mind, no precedent, no tradition...
...He suggests that she might have been included, or at least mentioned, in George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945...
...They noted that his observations could not have been replicated...
...Since Arendt's work was written, we have had Manson, Jonestown, and the Son of Sam to bear out her theory of the banality of evil...
...In Nazi Germany victims died from a program of systematic extermination, while in the USSR death usually resulted from deprivation and neglect...
...Hermost controversial notions appeared in the 12 pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem where she accused Jewish society of a moral collapse that aided the Third Reich...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 24
