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

Roger Errera’s questions have been translated from French for this publication. Arendt occasionally replied in a mixture of German, French, and English—her responses in French have been left, with translations in brackets where deemed necessary. Though the other interviews in this collection were edited before their original publication, and Arendt’s general practice was to go over anything she wrote in English with a friend or editor to fix her mistakes, this interview has been only lightly edited to correct some grammatical mistakes and eliminate repetitions. Arendt’s unique style of English and the conversational tone of the interview have been respected.

What follows is the text of my filmed interview with Hannah Arendt, which took place in New York in October 1973. My own interest in Arendt’s work began in 1965. I had reviewed the French translations of Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution , and The Origins of Totalitarianism , and I published French translations of Antisemitism and Crises of the Republic in the Diaspora series at Calmann-Lévy in 1972 and 1973. I had also met Arendt several times, first at her apartment in New York in the winter of 1967, then in Cologne in 1972, and near Ascona in Switzerland, when she stayed in Tegna.

The initiative for the film came from a good friend, the late Pierre Schaeffer, then head of the Research Service of ORTF (French public radio and television). He asked me whether I would be interested. My answer was yes, while Arendt’s was, first, a categorical no. She later accepted. The fact that we had met earlier no doubt helped.

In October 1973, we went to New York. I had spent the summer in Greece reading her books again and preparing the interview. I sent her a short list of topics, which was accepted. We agreed on the procedure: two hours of interviewing every day, over several days, in a rental place, a TV studio or at the office of her publisher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). She strongly refused to be filmed at home.

The moment was not exactly a calm one, politically speaking. In the Middle East, the October War had just taken place. In the United States, the Watergate affair had begun. It would lead to the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974, under the threat of impeachment. If I remember well, we learned, in the course of our talks, of the dismissal of Archibald Cox, then special prosecutor, and the resignation of Elliot Richardson, then attorney general.

There is more than an echo of these events in the interview. During it, Hannah Arendt was extremely courteous and attentive, fully controlled, at times consulting a few notes (for quotations). It seems to me that she said exactly what she meant to say, correcting herself immediately whenever necessary. No anecdotes, no small talk. With a permanent grace she accepted what was for her neither a familiar nor a relaxing exercise.

Many themes were discussed by us: Europe and the United States; the pending constitutional crisis in Washington; the legacy of the sixties and early seventies in the American polity; the uniqueness of totalitarianism in the twenieth century; Israel, the Diaspora, and the Jewish condition. We could have spent hours, even days on each of them. It was a rare privilege for me to see and listen to her thinking aloud.

For several months after the filming, I worked with J.-C. Lubtchansky to assemble the parts of the film and make a whole out of them for the fifty-minute program. The film was broadcast in the spring of 1974.

A year later, I met Hannah Arendt again in New York, in the fall of 1975, shortly before she died on December 4. When, that same day, I learned of her death, I spent the whole night writing an obituary for her which appeared in Le Monde the next day—as a postface to our interrupted dialogue.

ARENDT:I may need a glass of water, if I could have that.

ERRERA:You arrived in this country in 1941. You’d come from Europe, and you’ve been living here for thirty-two years. When you arrived from Europe, what was your main impression?

ARENDT: Ma impression dominante , well, mon impression dominante … Well. See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time understanding this simple fact, which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is, this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the same… There are no natives here. The natives were the Indians. Everyone else is a citizen and these citizens are united only by one thing, and that’s a lot: that is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution. The constitution—that is a scrap of paper, according to French as well as German common opinion, and you can change it. No, here it is a sacred document, it is the constant remembrance of one sacred act, and that is the act of foundation. And the foundation is to make a union out of wholly disparate ethnic minorities and regions, and still (a) have a union and (b) not assimilate or level down these differences. And all this is very difficult to understand for a foreigner. It’s what a foreigner never understands. We can say this is a government by law and not by men. To what extent that is true, and needs to be true for the well-being of the country… I almost said, the nation—but for the well-being of the country, for the United States of America, for the republic, really…

ERRERA:Over the last ten years, America has experienced a wave of political violence marked by the assassination of the president and his brother, by the Vietnam War, by the Watergate affair. Why can America overcome crises that in Europe have led to changes of government, or even to very serious domestic unrest?

ARENDT:Now let me try it a little differently. I think the turning point in this whole business was indeed the assassination of the president. No matter how you explain it and no matter what you know or don’t know about it, it was quite clear that now, really for the first time in a very long time in American history, a direct crime had interfered with the political process. And this somehow has changed the political process. You know, other assassinations followed, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, et cetera. Finally, the attack on Wallace, which belongs in the same category. [*] The reference is to the May 15, 1972, assassination attempt on Alabama Governor George Wallace, who was at the time one of the front-runners in the Democratic presidential primary race.

ARENDT:I think that Watergate has revealed perhaps one of the deepest constitutional crises this country has ever known. And if I say constitutional crisis, this is of course much more important than if I said “une crise constitutionelle” en France. For the Constitution… I don’t know how many constitutions you have had since the French Revolution. As far as I remember, by the time of World War I, you had had fourteen. And how many you then had… I don’t want to tackle it, every one of you can do it better than I. But anyhow, here there is one Constitution, and this Constitution has now lasted for not quite two hundred years. Here, it’s a different story. Here, it’s the whole fabric of government which actually is at stake.

And this constitutional crisis consists—for the first time in the United States—in a head-on clash between the legislative and the executive. Now there the Constitution itself is somehow at fault, and I would like to talk about that for a moment. The Founding Fathers never believed that tyranny could arise out of the executive office, because they did not see this office in any different light but as the executor of what the legislation had decreed—in various forms; I leave it at that. We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive. But what did the Founding Fathers—if we take the spirit of the Constitution—what did they think? They thought they were freed from majority rule, and therefore it is a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of the minorities, because they believed that in a healthy body politic there must be a plurality of opinions. That what the French call “ l’union sacrée ” is precisely what one should not have, because this would already be a kind of tyranny or the consequence of a tyranny, and the tyranny could very well be… The tyrant could very well be a majority. Hence, the whole government is construed in such a way that even after the victory of the majority, there is always the opposition, and the opposition is necessary because the opposition represents the legitimate opinions of either one minority or of minorities.