Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt

"This is a part of a series called ‘Critical Lives.’ It’s an excellent example of an intellectual biography. Hannah Arendt was a super-powered intellectual, and was always, always thinking and writing, and thinking through writing—that’s one of the things she said she did: write to think. And when she wasn’t writing, she was mostly reading or listening to music, or just sometimes hanging out with friends. Arendt didn’t even see herself as a philosopher, but we tend to categorise her as one. I mean, she trained as a philosopher, but also wrote on a wide range of issues, probably most famously On the Origins of Totalitarianism , but also on the Eichmann trial where she famously coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil,’ and got into deep water as a result. This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. She knows every little bit of paper that Hannah Arendt scribbled on. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. “Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace” The main part of the book is only just over 200 pages of a small-format book. It could have been 700 pages. There’s no doubt that Hill knows enough and could have spun this out to make a much longer book. As a result, we have the benefit of a highly intelligent writer, selecting what she feels to be most important to bring out about Arendt. We don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life—how many cigarettes she smoked on this day, and who she bumped into on that—but rather get to understand what really mattered. We still get a flavour of her life and interactions with friends and critics and so on. All of this is seen in sharp focus through Hill’s critical eye. Here we have a very elegant story about Arendt’s life that brings out key moments and the most important themes in her thought. Another thing about biography is that most writers cop out and only quote, say, half a line. What Hill has chosen to do, now and then, is quote five or maybe ten lines from something written by or about Arendt. Quotations from private letters, that sort of thing. You get a better sense of her voice with this. But that’s very hard to pull off. If you do too much of that, it breaks up the flow. But I think it works perfectly here. And it’s nicely illustrated, with photos throughout. The most controversial aspect of Hannah Arendt’s life (apart from her affair with Martin Heidegger when she was his student), was her writing about evil. In 1961 she went to Jerusalem to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official. He was the person responsible for sorting out the deportation of people to death camps. Arendt was particularly interested to see a senior Nazi up close. She’d never seen such a high-ranking Nazi, one who had been responsible for so much evil. She wanted to try to understand that. Famously her reaction was to describe him in terms of ‘the banality of evil.’ This was in a commissioned article for a magazine, originally, but came to be the book Eichmann in Jerusalem . Hill zooms in on that issue in chapter 15. First of all, Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace—that we’re all capable of doing the kinds of things that Eichmann did. But she didn’t mean that. What she was referring to was the banality of his thought, an attitude to the world which didn’t allow him to make any kind of imaginative identification with other people’s experience. What he lacked was what she calls “an expansive imagination.” In Arendt’s words, Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing She is saying that she wants to destroy the legend that evil is some kind of demonic force. This, and some other things she said in that book, resulted in a lot of criticism, particularly from some Jewish critics who felt she was wrong to talk about the complicity of the Jewish councils in overseeing the selection process for deportation. Some also criticised her ironic tone. I learnt from this biography that it wasn’t until 2000 that the Eichmann in Jerusalem was available in Israel; it was first published in 1963, and is generally thought of as a classic book, or at least one worth reading and thinking about. So it’s remarkable that it wasn’t available, either in translation or in English there, until so recently. She really was a very controversial figure. Hill covers this all in about 14 or 15 pages—it’s brilliant, so elegantly done. This is very skilful writing, to get all the ideas into such a short space, so lucidly and without feeling rushed. I’m left with a much better understanding of the coining of that phrase, ‘the banality of evil,’ and what was actually meant by it after reading 12 pages by Hill."