Hannah Arendt, a German Jew turned American political theorist, published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, but like any decent piece of literature or journalism, seeds of truth know no time boundaries. Truth is timeless. While anyone may pull out Arendt’s explicit seeds of truth via her discussion—revelation—of the banality of evil, or the normalcy and acceptance of atrocities whenever entire groups of people cease to think critically for themselves, latently Arendt reveals the complicated process of being an unlikely dissenter. Whether you agree with her political theory or not, it’s within Arendt’s history as a source that she demonstrates the difficulties of going against the intellectual grain, even when speaking as a minority voice among minority voices.
The cultural difficulty with much of Arendt’s works is that they openly accused the Jewish people of facilitating their own downfall in Nazi Germany.
Hold up, Grace. The Jews were responsible for their own extermination? Isn’t Arendt engaging in victim blaming? She herself is a Jew; how can she claim such a thing?!
Well, voice inside my head, which I’m conveniently projecting onto (into?) this article, you’ve identified the key piece of Arendt’s complex identity: She was a German Jew who blamed Jews for helping aid the success of the Holocaust. It is tempting to criticize Arendt for victim blaming, and even self-hating victim-blaming, however, Arendt criticized the Jewish communities not for what was done onto them, but for what they did and what they did not do.
Long before the Final Solution, meaning extermination of the Jewish people, Jewish community leaders negotiated with Nazi governmental agencies and members, like Adolf Eichmann, in order to flee Germany. Arendt argues that compliance by the Jewish communities occurred at the beginning, starting a predictable trend of compliance that reached all the way up to the Jewish people digging their own graves in concentration camps. Arendt writes,
The idea, as explained by Heydrich in a conference with Goring on the morning of the Kristallnacht, was simple and ingenious enough: “Through the Jewish community, we extracted a certain amount of money from the rich Jews who wanted to emigrate. By paying this amount, and an additional sum in foreign currency, they made it possible for poor Jews to leave. The problem was not to make the rich Jews leave, but to get rid of the Jewish mob.” (25)
Convincing the Jews that they should leave Germany was not difficult, since many Jewish representatives the Germans first negotiated with were recently liberated from concentration camps. Under Nazi direction, Jewish representatives traveled aboard in order to solicit funds from “ the great Jewish organizations” for Vorzeigegelds, the amount of money needed in order to be received by another country. Jewish communities sold these funds to emigrants at a considerable profit margin in order to fund both rich and poor Jewish emigration. Arendt’s point clearly begins to take form at the beginning of her book: Jewish leadership was aware of its own instrumentality in possible solutions to the “Jewish Problem”, and leadership permitted this instrumentality so that they may maintain short-term survival by sacrificing long-term survival. A failure to consider how each short-term allowance would escalate made the existence of a large-scale atrocity—the Holocaust—possible.
The point of sketching Arendt’s argument is not to argue in favor or against her. The controversy that arises from her logic is obvious, though. Many people were angered by her analysis and accused Arendt of turning her back to her people. Critics often cited Arendt’s harsh critique of Jewish involvements as clear prejudices against Eastern European Jews, dismissing her claims entirely since, critics argue, they were too corrupted by prejudice to evaluate.
Dismissal of Arendt’s argument reeks of an ad hominem attack, though. Arendt utilizes a historical basis in order to reach her conclusions. Studying under Karl Jaspers, after all, it is not entirely unlikely that she would hold the Jewish people guilty of Jasper’s conception of metaphysical guilt, at least, when they do not attempt to fight against every injustice they encounter, no matter whether they would be harmed or not for fighting. Arendt offers a legitimate argument, so why be dismissive of it?
Perhaps the answer lies in the way society answers those who speak out against majority opinion. Arendt was challenging the popular opinion that the Jew was a victim—end of discussion, nothing complex to analyze in the statement. Political philosophers and theorists have long remarked about the overwhelming silencing power of the majority opinion, but rarely have they addressed what happens with the minority opinion when it is greatly influenced by the political plane from which a speaker speaks from, meaning in what environment a speaker is speaking in and who they are addressing.
Hannah Arendt was a German Jew. Who better to address what happened to the Jewish people and the German people as a whole than someone who is a part of both identities? Society is advanced not to question someone or a group who claims a victim status. Arendt is a part of that victimized group, though. Assuming what Arendt argued was true, she should have been the best person to remark on the reality of guilt assignments from World War II. She was chastised because of her words, though. One might believe that the response her words provoked were because they were not true, but I think the public backlash to Arendt is independent of the veracity of her statements. Arendt was chastised because of the fact that she was dissenting, not because her dissent was wrong. Right or wrong, Arendt would have been criticized.
Arendt’s situation demonstrates that in order to best comment on the dealings of a group, it is best to belong to that group. Membership alone does not guarantee the embracement of a new opinion, though. Majority opinions exist in all groups, as well as transcend groups. Even though society benefits from the existence of dissenting opinions, the majority opinion will always attempt to reign, killing off undesirable opinions as they are proposed. As time goes on and the immediacy of historical atrocities decreases, Arendt’s scholarship is considered in more objective lights. Perhaps, post-WW2 academia did an injustice to her—perhaps they did not. Arendt proved that sensitive speaking positions are not enough to garner scholastic consideration, but that doesn’t mean we should cease going against the grain whenever embracement of our ideas is extremely unlikely.