Mother of the Mind's Children

By Stefan Kanfer

HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Yale University; 563 pages; $25

Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. Hannah Arendt always knew the difference; her critics sometimes did. In the disparity lay the tragedies and consolations of a career still sparking debate 19 years after the appearance of her most controversial book.

Rarely has a character been formed so early. In her vast, indulgent biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl records a note made by Frau Arendt in 1908, when Hannah was less than two: "Mostly she talks her own language which she enunciates very fluently. Understands everything." By Hannah's adolescence, that could no longer be considered a mother's exaggeration. She was far ahead of her class at Konigsberg, and at Marburg University she began a lifelong affair with philosophy, and a shorter, scarcely less passionate one with a philosopher.

The liaison prefigured the tension of a lifetime. Martin Heidegger, the great analyst of anxiety and a founder of existentialism, was an upright professor, 17 years older than his star pupil, trained as a Catholic, the father of two sons. Arendt was 18, freethinking, Jewish. These disparities were as nothing compared with the ones that followed. In the '30s, Arendt remained a Jew; Heidegger became a Nazi.

By that time, the intense, attractive scholar had fled the country. She left behind a series of frayed but unsevered connections: with Heidegger and with Germany. In Paris, and later in New York, she and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, lived as stateless persons, their brilliance appreciated only by a growing group of refugees. Bluecher was never to regain his European status as orator and political activist. But he was merely a talent; his wife was a genius. Was America preoccupied by war? Never mind, she would observe and wait. Her time would come. Was English new and difficult? Very well, she would immerse herself in it. Her books would benefit. Heinrich made notes of new phrases: "Tickled to death"; "Hit the jackpot"; "Make a mess of it"; "Nifty chick!" Hannah made lists of concepts and categories.

Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism.

Origins was more than a theory, it was a performance. Every page bristled with challenges. Arendt could crowd more into a paradox than some colleagues could set down in a volume: 'In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would . . . think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Totalitarian movements "conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself." In a totalitarian state, "the innocent and the guilty are equally undesirable." The narrative was marred by inconsistencies--too little attention was paid to Stalin's lethal excesses, for example, a flaw corrected in later editions. But the book's originality, its amalgam of political analysis and literary criticism of figures as disparate as Proust and Lawrence of Arabia, gave it the freshness and immediacy of art.

Arendt entered the political vocabulary; it was impossible to discuss modern history without confronting her great structure. The style was set for her other works: On Revolution, The Human Condition, Men in Dark Times. All of them subtly examined the differences between the mass and the mob, and searched for the contingencies that formed the modern temper. By 1954 she was famous enough to star in Randall Jarrell's comic novel, Pictures from an Institution, thinly disguised as Mrs. Rosenbaum: "She looked at the world like a bird, considering; and you, too, considered; but you could not make up your mind whether she was a Lesser Bird of Prey or simply a songbird of some dismaying foreign kind."

Young-Bruehl is particularly acute in her analysis of the bird's personal and marital style. "When we were young enough to have children, we had no money," recalled Arendt. "And when we had money, we were too old." Her books became the Bluechers' "children of the mind." She overlooked Heinrich's flirtations; he regarded her affectionately as "the meteor." Together they were rulers in what Jarrell dubbed the "Dual Monarchy," presiding over a circle of artists and historians.

On the subject of her work, the biographer, Arendt's former graduate student and now a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is a little too charmed. "One of the qualities [she] most saliently lacked," notes Young-Bruehl, "was moderation in discourse." That is like saying that the Himalayas lack flatness. In her 1959 article "Reflections on Little Rock," Arendt attacked school integration: "Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?" Four years later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt decided that Nazi villainy was one of process, not people. Eichmann the war criminal was no monster; he was, instead, an instance of the "banality of evil." More offensive, in the eyes of many scholars and critics, was her charge that the Jewish councils of Europe met the Hitlerian threat with passivity and thus shouldered a burden of guilt in the "final solution." The fury that greeted her work still echoes. She was called a Jewish anti-Semite, a peddler of "pseudo-profundity." Historian Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August) accused her of a "conscious desire to support Eichmann's defense."

Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz referred to Arendt's deliberate "perversity." Of all these furious counterattacks, Young-Bruehl comments disingenuously, "The low intellectual level of the controversy was largely determined by the editorial policies of the major magazines and journals."

Unhappily, about some subjects a lofty analysis is not always possible. Mass murder is one of them. Arendt's reputation never really recovered from her most discussed and least significant book. Yet even in Eichmann she aimed not for heat but for light. As Hannah Arendt makes clear, the writer did not wish to mitigate radical evil but to trace its genealogy back to the roots. Her attackers never quite appreciated her resolve; but then, she never fully understood those Holocaust survivors who were reinjured by her charges.

To the end, widowed and alone, despite incessant and often unfair criticism, she continued to work, the avian eyes considering the world. On the night of her death in New York City, in 1975, a paper was rolled into her typewriter, the first page of a final book. The title was Judging.

--By Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

" 'I said to myself: if it is possible to do so decently, I would really like, still, to stay in this world.' This calm acceptance and appreciation of life ... echoed through her work for years. It deeply informed Eichmann in Jerusalem but it was most obvious in an essay she wrote about Pope John XXIII, whose funeral was held in Rome while Arendt was there in the summer of 1963, vacationing after the publication of the Eichmann book. She described this simple, proud, self-confident Pope, a man whose willingness to judge and to trust his judgments was remarkable, and she found his faith inspiring. This faith, she felt, was manifest in the words he spoke on his deathbed, 'his greatest words.' 'Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.