ERRERA: When people say that American Jews are very Americanized, not just Americans but Americanized, what are they getting at?
ARENDT: One means the way of life, and all these Jews are very good American citizens… That is, it signifies their public life, not their private life, not their social life. And their social and their private life is today more Jewish than it ever was before. The younger generation in great numbers learn Hebrew, even if they are from parents who don’t know any Hebrew any longer. But the main thing is really Israel, the main thing is: Are you for or against Israel?
Take, for example, the German Jews of my generation who came to this country. They became in no time at all very nationalistic Jews, much more nationalistic than I ever was, even though I was a Zionist and they were not. I never said I’m a German, I always said I’m a Jew. But they now assimilate. To what? To the Jewish community, since they were used to assimilation. They assimilated to the Jewish community of America and that means that they then of course, with the fervor of new converts, became especially nationalistic and pro-Israel.
ERRERA: Throughout history, what has ensured the survival of the Jewish people has been, mainly, a religious kind of bond. We are living in a period when religions as a whole are going through a crisis, where people are trying to loosen the shackles of religion. In these conditions, what, in the current period, comprises the unity of the Jewish people throughout the world?
ARENDT: I think you are slightly wrong with this thesis. When you say religion, you think, of course, of the Christian religion, which is a creed and a faith. This is not at all true for the Jewish religion. This is really a national religion where nation and religion coincide. You know that Jews, for instance, don’t recognize baptism and for them it is as though it hadn’t happened. That is, a Jew never ceases to be a Jew according to Jewish law. So long as somebody is born by a Jewish mother—la recherche de la paternité est interdite [he is forbidden from trying to find out who his father was]—he is a Jew. The notion of what religion is, is altogether different. It’s much more a way of life than it is a religion in the particular, specific sense of the Christian religion. I remember, for instance, I had Jewish instruction, religious instruction, and when I was about fourteen years old, of course I wanted to rebel and do something terrible to our teacher and I got up and said “I don’t believe in God.” Whereupon he said: “Who asked you?”
ERRERA: Your first book, published in 1951, was called The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this book you tried not just to describe a phenomenon but also to explain it. Hence this question: In your view, what is totalitarianism?
ARENDT: Oui, enfin… Let me start with making certain distinctions upon which other people… They are not agreed upon. First of all, a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny.
When I analyzed a totalitarian government, I tried to analyze it as a new form of government that wasn’t known before, and therefore I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. Among these, I would just like to remind you of one characteristic which is entirely absent from all tyrannies today, and that is the role of the innocent, the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn’t have to do anything in order to be deported or in order to be killed. You were given the role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. With respect to this, no government before has killed people for saying yes. Usually a government kills people or tyrants kill people for saying no. Now, I was reminded by a friend that something very similar was said in China many centuries ago, namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better than the disobedient who oppose. And this of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism, in that there is a total domination of men by men.
Now, in this sense there is no totalitarianism today, even in Russia, which has one of the worst tyrannies we have ever known. Even in Russia you have to do something in order to be sent away into exile, or a forced labor camp, or a psychiatric ward of a hospital.
Now, let’s for a moment see what tyranny is, because after all totalitarian regimes arose when the majority of European governments were already under dictatorships. Dictatorships, if we take them in the original sense of the concept, of the word, are not tyrannies; there’s a temporary suspension of the laws in the case of an emergency, usually during a war or civil war or such. But, anyhow, the dictatorship is limited in time and tyranny is not…
ARENDT: When I wrote my Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III or et cetera. I found in Brecht[h] the following remark: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.” Now, that Hitler was an idiot was, of course, a prejudice of all—of the whole opposition to Hitler prior to his seizure of power. And therefore a great many books tried to justify him and to make him a great man. So he [Brecht] says: “That he failed did not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man.” That is, neither the one nor the other; this whole category of greatness has no application. “If the ruling classes,” says he, “permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.” And generally speaking, he [Brecht] then says in these rather abrupt remarks: “One may state that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.”
This, of course, is a shocking statement. I think that at the same time it is entirely true. What is really necessary is—if you want to keep your integrity under these circumstances—then you can do it only if you remember your old way of looking at such things and say: No matter what he does, if he killed ten million people, he is still a clown.
ERRERA: When you published your book on the Eichmann trial, it aroused some very violent reactions. Why were there such reactions?
ARENDT: Well, as I said before, this controversy was partly caused by the fact that I attacked the bureaucracy, and if you attack a bureaucracy, you have got to be prepared for the fact that this bureaucracy will defend itself, will attack you, will try to make you impossible and everything which goes with it. That is, more or less, dirty political business. Now, with this I really had no real quarrel. But suppose they had not done it, suppose they had not organized this campaign, then still the opposition to this book would have been strong, because the Jewish people were offended, and now I mean people whom I really respect. And therefore I can understand it. They were offended chiefly by what Brecht referred to, by laughter. My laughter was, at that time, kind of innocent and kind of not reflecting on my laughter. What I saw was a clown.
So, Eichmann, for instance, was bothered never by anything which he had done to the Jews in general. But he was bothered by one little incident: he had slapped the face of the then president of the Jewish community in Vienna during an interrogation. God knows many worse things were happening to many people than to be slapped in the face. But this he has never condoned himself for having done, and he thought this was very wrong, indeed. He had lost his cool, so to speak.
h
This quotation is taken from Brecht’s notes to the play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” in