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122 Eleven Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil The intense intellectual and emotional impact exerted by Hannah Arendt ’s The Origins of Totalitarianism1 upon a whole generation of readers during the 1950s and through the 1960s has been well documented and is in no need of rehearsal here.2 Any re-reading of the work, any appreciation of its cultural significance and the role it has played, will have to seek the reasons for this. Its appearance satisfied a number of real, indeed urgent, though often unarticulated and perhaps even unconscious, needs. It would thus be wise to recall that in 1951, and for at least a decade after that, there were painfully few serious attempts to forge the theoretical, historical, and conceptual tools necessary to illuminate and explain the great cataclysms of the twentieth century.3 To this day, in fact, it is difficult to find satisfactory accounts able to coherently and persuasively integrate these events into the flow of this century’s history. In its sweep, tone, and content Arendt’s seemed, at last, to provide an account adequate to the enormity of the materials and problems at hand.4 As Alfred Kazin recalls: Hannah Arendt “became vital to my life . . . it was for the direction of her thinking that I loved her, for the personal insistencies she gained from her comprehension of the European catastrophe.”5 At the time, to be sure, most readings of Arendt were relatively naive, innocent of the personal and philosophical baggage and the political and existential predilections that shaped and guided her analyses.6 Yet even then it was obvious that neither in method nor aim was this a conventional work of history. Even if one did not possess the term, it was clear that this was a highly sophisticated Kulturkritik animated by the attempt to comprehend, and in some way overcome, “the burden of our times” (the title of the more appropriately named British edition). The work, I must hasten to point out, was not only a guide to the 123 Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism Jewish perplexed. Dwight MacDonald, for instance, hailed the book as the greatest advance in social thought since Marx7 and, early in her friendship with Arendt (April 1951), Mary McCarthy proclaimed that she had been reading The Origins “and the marvel of its construction,” “in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line in the grocery store. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought of, at the very least, a decade. . . .”8 The work evoked such a response from many intellectuals because in an overarching way the “meaning”—and perhaps the still remaining, if fragile, promise—of the century seemed somehow to be laid bare. As one perceptive critic had it, the book was itself “a myth useful to the very time it analyzes.”9 Arendt, it bears repeating, was not interested in the ordinary writing of history: “The representation of the past through the chronological arrangement of all the available evidence struck her as trivial. She had no interest in explaining how something came to be, step by step.”10 Rather, she pursued a kind of didacticism,11 a Heideggerian concern, in Michael Marrus’ words, “to present events as mere surface phenomena, reflecting deeper, subterranean currents of meaning.”12 It is, I would suggest, this overall meaning-endowing propensity that partly accounts for Arendt’s current almost auratic status in our culture—Martin Jay, by no means a slavish follower, recently characterized her as a “charismatic legitimater ”13 —and the subsequent attempt by various camps to appropriate her thought.14 General though her appeal was, it was particularly powerful for many of her Jewish readers. Her capacity to remove the Jewish experience from parochial settings, to lift it from a “ghettoized” frame and integrate it into the marrow of world—or for her what was virtually synonymous, European or Western—history, indeed, to make the former virtually constitutive of the latter, provided a kind of dignity and importance to an existence that had come perilously close to extinction. The emphasis on situating the Jews at the storm center of events, combined with the desire to grasp anti-Semitism at its deadliest level, made The Origins particularly beguiling and attractive.15 Irving Howe relates how, after reading Arendt, his generation “could no longer escape the conviction that, blessing or curse, Jewishness was an...

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