Ханна Арендт - Hannah Arendt - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Those who did go along always justified themselves the same way, as we can see. They always said, “We only stayed on so that things wouldn’t get any worse.” Right? But, well—this justification should be rejected once and for all—it couldn’t have got any worse.

FEST:And the American prosecutor Jackson [i] Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. at the Nuremberg Trials spoke his mind on this in a very apt and characteristic way. Referring to Schacht and Papen, [j] Hjalmar Schacht, an economist, banker, and politician who served in Hitler’s government as president of the Reichsbank and minister of economics; and Franz von Papen, a politician who served as vice-chancellor of Germany under Hitler in 1933 and 1934. he said, “If we ask these people why they went along with it for such a long time, then they say it was because they wanted to prevent anything worse. And if we ask them why everything turned out so badly, they say they had no power.” At this point, everything really falls apart and their apologia becomes a mere excuse.

ARENDT:Yes. They were all functionaries, too.

FEST:Absolutely.

ARENDT:With scruples—they were functionaries with scruples. But their scruples didn’t go far enough to show them clearly that there is a boundary at which human beings cease being just functionaries. And if they’d gone away and said, “For God’s sake, let someone else do the dirty work!”—then they’d suddenly have become human beings again, instead of functionaries, wouldn’t they?

FEST:Yes. But I’d still like to ask once again what possibilities there were to remain guiltless in a totalitarian regime or in totalitarian circumstances. Many people are not heroes, and you can’t expect them to be heroes. […] But they’re not criminals either, they’re sometimes just accessories.

ARENDT:Yes, you know, it’s a terrible thing being an accessory. The crucial aspect here, that people were guilty if they looked on, in other words if they didn’t go along with it themselves or did immediately go along with it and then allowed themselves to be butchered, which was the impulse that drove a great many people… As far as being an accessory is concerned, it was, I think, Jaspers who said the crucial thing. He said, “We are guilty of being alive.” [k] Karl Jaspers, Questions of German Guilt , 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 66. Right? “For we could survive only by keeping our mouths shut.” But you see, between this knowledge and the deed there’s an abyss. Between the man who sees it and goes away and the man who does it. […] So when the person who hasn’t done anything, who has only seen and gone away, says, “We’re all guilty,” he thereby is covering up for the man who actually carried it through—this is what happened in Germany. And so we must not generalize this guilt, since that is only covering up for the guilty. Anyway, I’d like to say a bit more about this, if I may.

FEST:Please do.

ARENDT:We need to realize that in totalitarian circumstances the phenomenon of powerlessness exists, and we need to realize that even in circumstances of absolute powerlessness there are still ways of behaving. In other words, it doesn’t imply that you absolutely have to become a criminal. The phenomenon of powerlessness tips the scales, and this was of course the situation of all these people. They became absolutely powerless. There was no possibility of resisting, since they were all isolated, since they didn’t belong together anywhere, since not even a dozen people could get together, as it were, and trust one another.

FEST:Would you say, Frau Arendt, that as regards this situation we can get by with the old, simple proposition that it’s better to suffer injustice than to commit it?

ARENDT:Look, this proposition comes from Socrates. In our context, in other words, it was formulated before the religious commandments for Christian and western mankind, taken from the Jews, became authoritative. What Socrates always added, or rather Plato did, is that we can’t prove this proposition. For some people, it’s absolutely evident, and you can’t prove to the other people that this is how they should behave. So what is the reason for the belief of those who view it as evident?

But there’s another proposition of Socrates’s, which in my view does provide us with the reason. It’s this: “It is better to be in disunity with the whole world than with oneself, since I am a unity.” For if I am not at unity with myself, a conflict arises that is unbearable. In other words, it’s the idea of contradiction in the moral realm, and it’s still authoritative for the categorical imperative in Kant. This idea presupposes that, in actual fact, I live with myself, and am so to speak two-in-one, so that I then say, “I will not do this or that.” For I do not want to live with somebody who has done this. And then the only way out for me, if I had done this or that, would be suicide, or later, when thought of in Christian categories, changing my ways and showing remorse.

Now living with yourself means, of course, talking to yourself. And this talking-to-yourself is basically thinking—a kind of thinking that isn’t technical, but a kind of which anybody is capable. So the presupposition behind the idea is: I can converse with myself. And so, there may be situations in which I become at disunity with the world to such an extent that I can only fall back on conversing with myself—and perhaps with a friend, too, with the other self, as Aristotle so beautifully put it: autos allos. This, in my view, is what powerlessness is actually like. And the people who walked away without doing anything were the ones who admitted to themselves that they were powerless and clung to this proposition, the proposition that someone who is powerless can still think.

FEST:Let’s get back to Eichmann and the role that bureaucracy played in mass murder. What does it mean for an individual to be embedded in a bureaucratic apparatus? And how far does the awareness of injustice evaporate when you are part of an authority? Is it maybe that the merely partial responsibility given to a person hides the possibilities for any moral insight? Eichmann said, “I sat at my desk and did my work.” And the former Gauleiter of Danzig stated that his official soul had always identified with what he did, but his private soul had always opposed it. [l] Fest is referring here to Albert Forster, the Gauleiter (party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP) of Danzig–West Prussia from 1935–1945. Forster was directly responsible for the mass murder, resettlement, and forced assimilation of tens of thousands of Jews and nonethnic Germans over the course of his administration.

ARENDT:Yes, this is the so-called internal emigration among the murderers—which means the extinction of the whole concept of inner emigration or inner resistance. I mean there’s no such thing. There’s only external resistance, inside there’s at best a Reservatio mentalis , right? Those are the lies of a sham existence, transparent and rather nauseating. The bureaucracy, in other words, administered mass murder, which naturally created a sense of anonymity, as in any bureaucracy. The individual person is extinguished. As soon as the person concerned appears in front of the judge, he becomes a human being again. And this is actually what is so splendid about the legal system, isn’t it? A real transformation takes place. For if the person then says, “But I was just a bureaucrat,” the judge can say, “Hey, listen, that’s not why you’re here. You’re standing here because you’re a human being and because you did certain things.” And there’s something splendid about this transformation.