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

But there’s another thing: there are also legitimate feelings. And there’s no question about it: I have wounded some people. And you know, it’s somehow more unpleasant for me when I hurt people than when I get in the way of organizations and their interests, right? I take this seriously, I might say, but the other thing is more a matter of principle. Well, I have hurt these legitimate interests—essentially through my style, and I can’t say much about that. You see, it’s my view that the legitimate feeling here is sorrow. The only one! Not self-congratulation! And very few people understand this. There’s nothing I can do about it. In fact, in my opinion people shouldn’t adopt an emotional tone to talk about these things, since that’s a way of playing them down. But all of that… I also think that you must be able to laugh, since that’s a form of sovereignty. And I feel that all these criticisms of my irony are very unpleasant, indeed, from the point of view of taste. But these are all personal matters. I’m obviously quite unpleasant in the eyes of a great many people. I can’t do anything about that. What am I supposed to do? They just don’t like me. The style in which people express themselves—well, that’s something they themselves aren’t aware of.

FEST:One last question, Frau Arendt. There were a great number of people who advised against publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem in Germany. They used phrases like “a negative impact on public awareness.” How exactly could such a negative impact come about?

ARENDT:Well, the Jewish organizations quite obviously have an odd anxiety: they think that people might misuse my arguments. “That’s it,” they think, the anti-Semites are going to say “the Jews themselves were to blame.” They say that anyway. But if you read my book, there’s nothing that anti-Semites can use in it. And many people think the German people aren’t mature yet. Well, if the German people aren’t mature yet, then we’ll probably have to wait until the Last Judgment.

REIF:In your study On Violence [*] On Violence was first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1970. A few years later, it was included in the collection Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), where this interview first appeared in English. at several points you take up the question of the revolutionary student movement in the Western countries. In the end, though, one thing remains unclear: Do you consider the student protest movement in general a historically positive process?

ARENDT:I don’t know what you mean by “positive.” I assume you mean, am I for it or against it. Well, I welcome some of the goals of the movement, especially in America, where I am better acquainted with them than elsewhere; towards others I take a neutral attitude, and some I consider dangerous nonsense—as, for example, politicizing and “refunctioning” (what the Germans call umfunktionieren ) the universities, that is, perverting their function, and other things of that sort. But not the right of participation. Within certain limits I thoroughly approve of that. But I don’t want to go into that question for the moment.

If I disregard all the national differences, which of course are very great, and only take into account that this is a global movement—something that has never existed before in this form—and if I consider what (apart from goals, opinions, doctrines) really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations, then the first thing that strikes me is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts. This, of course, is expressed very differently in different countries according to their various political situations and historical traditions, which in turn means according to their very different political talents. But I would like to take that up later.

Let us look briefly at the beginnings of this movement. It arose in the United States quite unexpectedly in the fifties, at the time of the so-called silent generation, the apathetic, undemonstrative generation. The immediate cause was the civil rights movement in the South, and the first to join it were students from Harvard, who then attracted students from other famous eastern universities. They went to the South, organized brilliantly, and for a time had a quite extraordinary success, so long, that is, as it was simply a question of changing the climate of opinion—which they definitely succeeded in doing in a short time—and doing away with certain laws and ordinances in the Southern states; in short, so long as it was a question of purely legal and political matters. Then they collided with the enormous social needs of the city ghettos in the North—and there they came to grief, there they could accomplish nothing.

It was only later, after they had actually accomplished what could be accomplished through purely political action, that the business with the universities began. It started in Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement and continued with the antiwar movement, and again the results have been quite extraordinary. From these beginnings and especially from these successes springs everything that has since spread around the world.

In America this new assurance that one can change things one doesn’t like is conspicuous especially in small matters. A typical instance was a comparatively harmless confrontation some years ago. When students learned that the service employees of their university were not receiving standard wages, they struck—with success. Basically it was an act of solidarity with “their” university against the policy of the administration. Or, to take another instance, in 1970 university students demanded time off in order to be able to take part in the election campaign, and a number of the larger universities granted them this free time. This is a political activity outside the university which is made possible by the university in recognition of the fact that students are citizens as well. I consider both instances definitely positive. There are, however, other things I consider far less positive, and we will get to them later.

The basic question is: What really did happen? As I see it, for the first time in a very long while a spontaneous political movement arose which not only did not simply carry on propaganda, but acted, and, moreover, acted almost exclusively from moral motives. Together with this moral factor, quite rare in what is usually considered a mere power or interest play, another experience new for our time entered the game of politics: It turned out that acting is fun. This generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness,” which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way constitutes a part of complete “happiness.”

In all these matters I would rate the student movement as very positive. Its further development is another question. How long the so-called positive factors will hold good, whether they are not already in the process of being dissolved, eaten away by fanaticism, ideologies, and a destructiveness that often borders on the criminal on one side, by boredom on the other, no one knows. The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time. Just consider how short the true classical period in Greece was, and that we are in effect still nourished by it today.