Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times

2 Hannah Arendt and the Complexities of Jewish Selfhood

We sorely need, I think, a history of German-Jewish and non-Jewish friendships, of marriages and intimate relations , their successes and failures. This would provide a necessary corrective to the view of all German-Jewish history, in the light of its terrible conclusion, as a history of unremitting hostility and estrangement. Very often, it is true, what appeared on the surface as real friendship ended in recrimination and hostility. Ritchie Robertson has recently written that such relationships were based upon a perceived inequality of power that was characterized by a sycophantic, fawning—and usually unful-¤llable—desire of the Jew to be respected by the more powerful, norm-setting Gentile.1 This, certainly, holds in numerous cases. It captures, as he reminds us, the relation of the Jewish philosopher, Theodor Lessing, to the notorious antisemite Ludwig Klages (Lessing was himself a complex example of the psychological convolutions 2 And the Hannah Arendt Complexities of Jewish Selfhood he analyzed in his most famous work, Jewish Self-Hatred [1930]).2 But it rather ®attens the more complex dynamics —the attractions and hostilities, the mutual dependencies and fears, the proud self-consciousness on both sides —that pertained, say, to the fascinating relationship between Freud and Jung.3 In need of serious examination is Gershom Scholem’s assertion (as a young man) that real friendship, authentic intimacy, could not really occur between German Jew and non-Jew. Certainly this cannot be af¤rmed in an either/or manner; the realities here are multiple. For instance , if we take the case of Walter Benjamin (a close friend of both Scholem and Arendt—and yet another source of friction between them), this highly sophisticated theorist was, indeed, uncritically admiring of (the far cruder) Bertolt Brecht, who in turn was often curtly dismissive of him. Yet, Benjamin’s friendship with Fritz Heinle, who committed suicide during World War I, was so deep that Scholem was convinced that Heinle was a Jew (which he was not).4 Moreover, as we shall see in the next chapter, no marriage could have yielded greater¤delity and trust under conditions of unremitting terror than that between the (converted) Jew Victor Klemperer and his (Protestant) wife, Eva.5 Hannah Arendt (1906–75) was an iconoclastic intellectual , political theorist, philosopher, historian, Jewish activist, Zionist (of sorts), and author of diverse works ranging from her early biography of Rahel Varnhagen to her master work on The Origins of Totalitarianism to the infamous Eichmann in Jerusalem (with its denial of antisemitism as the driving force behind bureaucratic mass murder and its indictments of the Jewish Councils as agents of Nazi destruction) to more philosophical tomes such as The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind (to name just a 42 Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer few). She provides us with an ideal example of the richness , ambiguities, limits, and complex possibilities of such intimate relations. Her prodigious published correspondence raises in peculiarly acute form issues pertaining to the vexed connection between the personal and the political realms. It graphically demonstrates the concerns that shaped the direction and nature of her creative work and the making of her original German-Jewish persona. Her exchanges of letters with Kurt Blumenfeld6 (a leader of German Zionism), tellingly entitled “Rooted in no possessions ” (“. . . in keinem Besitz verwurzelt”), and with Hermann Broch,7 that great, unjustly neglected Austrian Jewish novelist (author of the masterpiece, The Death of Virgil), are compelling. But most revelatory is the sustained correspondence with non-Jews who played crucial roles—personally and intellectually—in her life. One such obvious example is that of her friend Mary McCarthy.8 It was, however, with non-Jewish German men that the passions and in®uences were really played out, the issues illuminated. (Perhaps Scholem’s dictum concerning the impossibilities of intimacy was made in the spirit of the German Männerbund tradition and thus meant to apply only to relationships between men.) The respective correspondence with her lover and teacher from the Weimar years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger9 (the highly controversial relationship is re®ected in an exchange of letters spanning ¤fty years); with her lifelong mentor and friend Karl Jaspers;10 and with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher,11 render very questionable the claim that such German-Jewish relationships and intimacies were virtual impossibilities. Indeed, they exemplify precisely the kind of dialogues Scholem claimed never existed: dialogues in which Jewishness often played an explicit, even...