ERRERA: Why do you think we are seeing the emergence of a whole literature that, when it comes to Nazism, for instance, often describes its leaders and their crimes in a novelistic way and tries to humanize them, and thereby indirectly to justify them? Do you think that publications of this kind are purely commercial, or do they have a deeper significance?
ARENDT: I think it has a signification, at least it shows that what happened once can happen again, and this indeed, I believe, is entirely true. You see, tyranny has been discovered very early, and identified very early as an enemy. Still, it has never in any way prevented any tyrant from becoming a tyrant. It has not prevented Nero, and it has not prevented Caligula. And the cases of Nero and Caligula have not prevented an even closer example of what the massive intrusion of criminality can mean for the political process.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975) was a political theorist and scholar. Born in Germany into a family of secular Jews, as a young woman she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. In 1933, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, and subsequently interned in a concentration camp in the south of France, Camp Gurs. She fled to the United States in 1941 with her husband Heinrich Blücher. In the United States, she served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Wesleyan, Princeton, Yale, and the New School for Social Research. She died in New York City at the age of sixty-nine.
ANDREW BROWN is a Cambridge-based translator from French and German, and the author of Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing.
ROGER ERRERA is a former member of the Conseil d’Etat, France’s Supreme Court for administrative law, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of London. He is the author of a number of essays on media law, judicial institutions, immigration and refugee law, and European law. His most recent book is an essay on justice in France, Et ce sera justice…: Le juge dans la cité (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
JOACHIM FEST (1926–2006) was a historian, journalist, and critic. He was the son of strongly anti-Nazi parents who refused to enroll him in the Hitler Youth. He edited the cultural section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1973 to 1993. He is also the author of a major biography of Hitler and other works on the Third Reich, including Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, Speer: The Final Verdict, and Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945.
GÜNTER GAUS (1929–2004) was a journalist, television presenter, and politician. His show, Zur Person (In person), in which he interviewed politicians, scientists, and artists, ran from 1963 to 2003.
DENVER LINDLEY was an editor at Henry Holt, Harcourt Brace, and the Viking Press. His translations include Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph, and André Maurois’s Memoirs: 1885–1967.
URSULA LUDZ is the editor of Letters: 1925–1975 by Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Denktagebuch (together with Ingeborg Nordmann) and Ich will verstehen, a collection of autobiographical statements by Arendt and a complete bibliography of her works. She is also a member of the editorial staff of the Internet journal HannahArendt.net.
ADELBERT REIF is a journalist and the editor of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning: Five Radio Talks, among other books.
JOAN STAMBAUGH is Professor Emeritus at Hunter College, and the translator of a number of books by Martin Heidegger, including Being and Time, Identity and Difference, and The End of Philosophy.
THE LAST INTERVIEW SERIES
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
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978-1-61219-090-7
ebook: 978-1-61219-091-4
“I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent… I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die.”
translated by PASCAL-ANNE BRAULT and MICHAEL NAAS
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978-1-61219-094-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-032-7
“Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.”
translated by SYBIL PEREZ and others
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978-1-61219-095-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-033-4
“I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction… we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way.”
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978-1-61219-206-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-207-9
“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
translated by KIT MAUDE
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978-1-61219-204-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-205-5
“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
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978-1-61219-311-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-312-0
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Melville House Publishing
“What Remains? The Language Remains” © 2013 by The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher. First published in Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich, 1965. Translation by Joan Stambaugh © 1994 by The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.
“Eichmann Was Outrageously Stupid” © 2013 by Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust, for Arendt’s responses only. Joachim Fest’s questions © 2011 by Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich. First published in Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit. Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Ursula Ludz and Thomas Wild, Munich, Piper, 2011, pages 36–60. Translation copyright © 2013 by Andrew Brown.