Arendts Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trottas Hannah

Arendt Babette Babich Fordham University, New York City

If I knew what would happened, I would probably still have done it. 1

Margarethe von Trottas 2013 film Hannah Arendt, starring Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt is an immense achievement as a film that raises both socio-political as well as, and this is more difficult still, specifically philosophical questions in the context of Arendts 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. 2 Indeed, as we shall see, the film manages to make an important if subtle commentary on Arendts subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In the current context, having noted this achievement I must also emphasize what the film does not do, it omits (in the interest of public absorbability, so one must assume) all manner of detail but above all the film elides several key names that should have been included if only because these names served as sources for the films dialogue (I refer to the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem as well as the similarly excluded from mention correspondence between Arendt and Karl Jaspers). Here, too, my assumption is that the reduction of Arendts and Heideggers friendship to inevitably caricaturish cameos of the flashback variety and I suppose tat be explained in terms of the challenges of the same relationship. 3 The socio-political has been much discussed in the reviews, both laudatory and damning (where it should be noted that there are too many laudatory accounts that manage to get in a few damns, a few reservations, of the Hannah Arendt was right about x but wrong about y variety).

The film itself is a series of tableaus, almost theater-like, and as a result the actors do an enormous amount of work on the film, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Arendt but also Axel Milberg who plays her husband Heinrich Blcher as a man with ongoing affairs softened by the clear affection with which Blcher treats his wife. The actors achievement has been rightly noted in several reviews and this achievement alone would make the film worthwhile in itself. Yet few seem to pay attention to what is for me the largest parallel that between Germany and Israel in von Trottas syncretistic, that is to say historical film all the details are compilations, as Roger Berkowitz, director of Bards Hannah Arendt Center, emphasized as he answered questions post-film before New York City audiences during several showings in late Spring and early to mid-Summer 2013, compilations drawn from Arendts writings or correspondence. The parallel between Germany and Israel looms large for me but goes completely by the board in almost all the responses I have read to date. For me, von Trottas Israel has marked parallels to the Germany of the sixties and even to this day. Yet by pointing to a parallel, I hardly mean this as identification yet I know that for some, even that suggestion will be too much. Here I can quote the arch tone of Arendts letter to Karl Jaspers where she takes the opportunity to relate Blchers acerbic comment: If the Jews insist on becoming a nation like every other nation, why for Gods sake do they insist on becoming like the Germans? 4 and her own immediate comment to Jaspers, there is some truth to that. Indeed, a more comprehensive reading would set this observation and its commentary in the further circumstantial context of the long-term debate between Arendt and Jaspers on whether German Jews were to be accounted as Germans first or as Jews. 5 Daniel Meier-Katkins monograph on Hannah Arendts relationship to Heidegger cites this remark along with other excerpts from Arendts correspondence with Jaspers and seeks to paint a subtly differentiated picture of what can only be an extremely sensitive point, as we are so often permitted only a pro or con on any given view. Thus and in

general we have little sense of the complicated context in which Arendt could share views also held by as Maier-Katkin emphasizes and as is often forgotten the New York philosopher Sidney Hook as well as the physicist Albert Einstein, condemning as they all did condemn what Arendt in her letter to Jaspers called acts of terrorism by Jewish groups. 6 Arendts point is the same point made to a different end and with a different sensibility with regard to the same constitutional framing, as my old friend Jacob Taubes would write about the significance and the role of Carl Schmitt in his The Political Theology of Paul, with all the I lived through this matter of fact consciousness (Taubes was always hoping for an effect) that characterizes one of his most important books that also happens to be in its substance, a political theological point about political theological events 7 Taubes Schmitt correspondence has just been translated into English, 8 but his The Political Theology of Paul is about an even older letter, and it inspired Agamben. Taubes was writing (or more accurately said, Taubes had as good as written) that same book when I sat in on his seminars in Berlin in the mid-eighties, seminars to which everyone, die ganze Welt, la toute Berlin , at least among the students, would flock (in a non-trivial fashion, one might argue that Taubes functioned as a kind of male Hannah Arendt they certainly shared the same Gershom Sholem who, like Jaspers to be sure, doesnt make an appearance in von Trottas film, although Scholem certainly haunts the quotes) and although Taubes met Arendt, they met they got on about as well as Arendt and Adorno, albeit for different reasons and although both Adorno and Arendt would both be vigorously denounced for their arrogance. Von Trotta (this is more of the films signal syncretism) catches some of this where the falling out between Hannah Arendt and the Hans Jonas who would go on to make monotonic ethics his calling cardthe same monotone that has in the interim become the rule for established discussions of the era, especially any discussion associated with Richard Wolin 9 who is one of the main occupiers of the postwar conviction that what

caused Nazism was irrationality. 10 Nor can one fault his logic. Has to be. Of course because if not, what are we scholars doing here and elsewhere? What indeed. The parallel von Trotta draws with her film depends upon a point made by several German authors, none so painfully etched as Winfried Georg Sebalds Zrich Lectures Luftkrieg und Literature, Air War and Literature, featuring a keenly Nietzschean motto that stems from a fairly unlikely voice, which may be why we might be able to hear it, namely Stanislaw Lem: The trick of elimination is every experts defensive reflex.11 Later when I return to von Trottas film, we will see that Arendt herself refers to the same media and very technical prowess, that is to say just the same perception of thoroughgoing persecution that her critics have in the past sought to discount as imaginary: die Meinungsmanipulation in der modernen Welt wird bekanntlich weitgehend durch die Methoden des image-making bewirkt, d.h. dadurch, da man bestimmte Bilder in die Welt setzt, die nicht nur nichts mit der Realitt zu tun haben, sondern hufig nur dazu dienen, bestimmte unangenehme Realitten zu verdecken. 12 Sebalds lectures and addenda would be published posthumously in English as part of his On the Natural History of Destruction. The title isnt Sebalds own. Credit for that goes to Lord Solly Zuckerman in his description of Sir Arthur Harris, and the Luftkrieg in question corresponds to Sir Harris very British, anti-German design. What von Trotta thus illuminates with her film, at least in my viewing, was the point with which Sebald concludes his own retrospective introduction to his study to the extent that many authors, themselves well aware of the dangers to their own future reception, dangers of the sort Arendt herself seemingly did not imagine, were apparently less concerned with giving voice to what they had experienced but were instead preoccupied with the self-image they wished to hand down accommodated as that would have been at one time to one regime, and then again to another. For Sebald this self-censoring was one of the main reasons for the inability of a whole

generation of German authors to describe what they had seen and to convey it to our minds. 13 In part the era of Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem is written at a time when it is not utterly clear to all that this unutterability, as Sebald speaks of it, would be and would have to be the rule. Jaspers sought to elude it and I think he succeeded at the time, and, I think, Arendt also succeeded (at least in part) but she did not succeed in the writerly way that Sebald would have wanted not because Arendt was not a writer but because what she writes is political philosophy, not literature. Sebalds insight is that we need a literary, not a theoretical writers voice. And if he himself offered that writers voice, it also cost him, and here there is yet another parallel with the film. For in addition to the odd letters Sebald received, there were many more that would testify, so he wrote, to the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of the war had never really found verbal expression, and that those affected by the experience neither shared it with one another nor passed it on to the next generation. 14 Thus Sebald reflects upon Alexander Kluges analysis of the war and of its wake or aftermath that it never became an experience capable of public decipherment. 15 These are complicated points needing another argument, many other aguments, and rather more time. Here it will do to note that Sebald drew reviews, like von Trottas film, both laudatory and damning. Some in direct response to the Zrcih lectures as he discusses these conflicts in his own afterword. But what is significant here and to this extent it resembles the impact of von Trottas film, especially but not only for New York audiences, some of these responses are posthumous. And for the most part such posthumous critiques dramatize a return to the status quo ante. Perhaps the experience remains incapable of public decipherment, in Kluges words, and perhaps it cannot be otherwise. Sebalds concern is not ordinary Germans during the war the how did that, how could that happen character of a concern with which we are well acquainted. Instead he quotes the Swedish journalist Stig Degermans 1946 report of nothing so much as a

landscape of destruction at which no one of the inhabitants considered to look writing from Hamburg, as Sebald describes the journalists report, that on a train going at normal speed it took him a quarter of an hour to travel the lunar landscape between Hasselbrook and Landwehr, and in all that vast wilderness, perhaps the most horrifying expanse of ruins in the whole of Europe, he did not see a single living soul16 and what struck him most was that he identified himself as alien, as a foreigner himself because he looked out. 17 I myself (and Ive already referred to Taubes) spent time in Germany in what certainly seemed to me to be millions of years after the war: from 1984 onwards and I always return. The first few years I would observe and ask those I met for information or news or really any details at all about the only thing any American we were the victors ever thought about. And this is the von Trotta parallel for me, to me. For, like the alienation of the children, the younger generation of Israel, to their parents, those who had escaped the holocaust in Germany and Poland and France, that Kurt Blumenfeld recounts to Hannah Arendt at the first caf scene in Israel, in reply to the question that she carried from her second husband Heinrich Blcher (I only say second husband to mitigate the films depiction of his affair(s) and her tolerance of the same), that apart from disinterest the younger generation also had criticisms of a striking kind, charges of cowardice on top of incomprehension. And it was this wall of incomprehension and above all the unspoken conclusion, disinterest, a concern with other issues and Israel certainly had other issues, that reminded me of Germany. For none of my German friends, all of whom had been born in the fifties after the war (I am myself currently as old as the year I was born in 56) and they had no stories to tell to answer any of my questions. They did not, it became clear to me, speak to their parents (none of whom evidently were or had been Nazis, so I would have had to believe, if I had believed it, even those who were soldiers and officers), and if they did speak to their parents, of those that did, there were certainly no open replies. When I spoke to people of a certain age, those who could have been there, those like my professors, things were no different. I even asked Taubes, but he had spent the war in Switzerland writing his

doctoral thesis and what struck me was that he did not feel altogether sanguine about it, but mocked himself, and recalled Scholems efforts to get him, unsuccessfully, to Israel and to rue a brilliant colleagues death who had been as courageous as he was brilliant and who had indeed, as Taubes had not, gone to Israel. Scholems word Verrter also included a condemnation of Taubes generic and human (in truth) cowardice. Thus what Sebalds Swedish correspondent Stig Degerman reported of strangers, these my friends lived through in the heart of their family, small anecdotes of survival, the pain and bodily damage suffered by escape, the long distances walked on foot to return home or to flee for better parts in the aftermath of the war, all surrounded by silence. Von Trotta could thus, although this is not stated as such, draw upon her own memories and the memories of her parents and her grandparents in order to see the exactly national tension and difference made by such a generational distinction. Add to this what is also relevant in is Israel the different origins and contexts, the precise political definition of an Israeli as this continues to be the contested subject of an interior conflict that is the legacy of Zionism as it endures today and that has already reached any number of calamitous peaks without any seeming resolution. 18

The Ghost of Jaspers Karl Jaspers is one of the most important existential phenomenologists if he is increasingly less named as such. Technically I should speak here of an ExistenzPhnomenologie, following Jaspers own usage. I am perhaps more alive to this aspect of Jaspers thought than most as I read him from the perspective of continental philosopy of science, from the side of Nietzsche, from the side of Heidegger too, sides often left out by Jaspers best followers. In a certain sense, like any one of such multifarious virtuosity, Jaspers suffered from his brilliance, like Heidegger I would argue, but also and indeed like Arendt. Jaspers also spoke to Sebalds point: reflecting that the postwar environment seemed to extinguish all self-being and he went on to argue, and this could but not have been

influential for Arendt, resistance will still be offered by any felicitous meeting of individuals who band together in fact without oath or pathos. Truth begins with two, said Nietzsche. 19 Jaspers repeats the quote when he writes in The Future of Mankind of the enduring and still possibility of human community in reason, love, and truth. Nietzsches word Truth begins when there are two, is borne out by every community of individuals 20 Thus we read Jaspers on the world as we like to take it to be an objective world. This is the world of science, the world of fact. Trained as a scientist, a physician, as he was, Jaspers could not pretend to the laymans misapprehension of the objective as if this were part of the facts, the factual world, part of the facts that Nietzsche will tell us that there are not nein gerade Tatsachen giebt es nicht, nur Interpretationen. Wir knnen kein Faktum an sich feststellen: vielleicht ist es ein Unsinn, so etwas zu wollen. Es ist alles subjektiv sagt ihr: aber schon das ist Auslegung, das Subjekt ist nichts Gegebenes, sondern etwas Hinzu-Erdichtetes, Dahinter-Gestecktes. 21 For Jaspers, the objective world is never given solely or as such.
22

Much rather, as Jaspers goes on to say, and this is

the hermeneutic heart of Jaspers constitutive phenomenology, encountering the world as I find it I have to gain access to it by my activity. No experience can be made without some course of conduct. 23 At the same time, Jaspers also emphasizes that this interpretive, interventive precondition does not reduce the world to a fiction: The objective world is never solely made either.24 The point is counter-intuitive (and we do well to remember that backwash to similar claims induced both Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour to tone down their claims, in some cases, all the way back to objectivist retraction). 25 The world, the entire world as Jaspers speaks of it, here invoking a concept more conventionally associated with either Wittgenstein or indeed Heidegger, is for Jaspers, a boundary concept. 26 For Jaspers, however, this is not solely an existential notion of world. Much rather for Jaspers, who remained a Kantian throughout his life, the world

is a question. The problem is what science leaves out, in order, indeed to be science. The first point is ineliminable, following no one but Kant (and Nietzsche after him, as we seem to need Jaspers to remind us that and Still, Nietzsche came after Kant.)27 Thus we recall that Nietzsche had argued, infamously enough, that the world is interpretation according to a human schema that we cannot throw off. The ineliminability of such a constitution is twofold for Jaspers. To begin with, the world in its entirety cannot become an object. We are in the world and can never face it as a whole. 28 But beyond this, it is also the case that we think, that we are human, that we are conscious and here Jaspers might have gone beyond Kant to Fichte and Hegel but he adds his own gloss by speaking almost as Schelling might have done, of our awareness of our freedom, arguing that thereby we transcend the incomplete world we can know. 29 The word freedom however is also perfectly Kantian, as Jaspers powerful and insightful reading of Kants Perpetual Peace demonstrates. 30 I argue that Jaspers is unique in attending to Kants situation and hence to the significance of attending to his style and above all including Kants irony as well as with reference to Nietzsche, his humor. 31 It goes without saying that most enthusiasts of the Knigsbergian king of thought, even those who attend to his style, tend to exclude his irony. 32 Jaspers, arguably even more than Scholem himself, is the ghost in von Trottas film. And in life, he was the philosopher-father to whom Heidegger, who already regarded Jaspers himself in this way, recommended or transferred Hannah Arendt. 33 But what is striking is the connection forged with Jaspers, for it was Jaspers and not Blumenfield, as depicted in the film, who served as Arendts intellectual and in German that is to say spiritual father (though the back turned on her at the films end would have been that of Scholem, verbally speaking, the Scholem whom Arendt did not call Gershom but indeed Gerhardt). Maybe the film can do little more than show traces of these ghosts. Perhaps that is the heart of film, even one of theatrically composed sets or montages --- Riverside Drive,

the New School, upstate New York, Bard College, Jerusalem, Marburg, but also the Black Forest of Heideggers Messkirch and Freiburg. And if even the academic loci are hard to film, thinking is even more elusive. And how can a film really show the minds of thinkers like Heidegger, like Jaspers, like Arendt? Arendt seems easy enough, concerned as she is with the world, the same love of the world that other scholars have celebrated in books of their own, concerned as Arendt is with the Human Condition but also as politically focused as she was. And yet this does not quite prove to be so and we are still left with the need to read for ourselves and to think. And Jaspers although he does not appear, haunts the films presentation of Arendts conflicts with Heidegger, in her own memory as the film uses flashbacks to the past, distant and recent, to illustrate these conflicts for the viewer, as he is also present in her engagement with Hans Jonas who had powerful problems with his own memories. And both Arendt and Jaspers were conflicted by the same appeal that drew 34 them to Heidegger. In this sense, and unlike Arendt for her part (and I believe and I have argued that the friendship survived between them because of her efforts, as so many relationships between men and women survive not because of what the men do, but because of what the women are able to shoulder alone, and following the star of love, of loyalty, and affection. I am hardly saying that Jaspers friendship with Heidegger was not genuine friendship, where Arendts was (and then we dismiss it by naming it a love affair) but rather a friendship routed in the fashion that a changing world but also that the fortunes of intellectual life can rout a friendship in any age. For both Heidegger and Jaspers were philosophers with a claim (especially on Jaspers part) to world philosophy and (especially on Heideggers part), to a philosophy that recasts the terms of the same, and the consequence of this conflict would rout any friendship with or without war. To the extent that their friendship could survive at all it might be said that this had to do with

Jaspers extraordinary intellectual openness, his scientific, that is to say: his philosophical probity. But we learn here where Jaspers friendship with Heidegger ultimately frayed in the face of Heideggers limitations, in addition to competition leading for Jaspers to disappointment. Elsewhere, I have argued that it was Arendts gift for friendship it can go missing in the film that when Hannah Arendt says that she does not love peoples and nations but friends: as she wrote to Sholem (this is not mentioned, it is too complicated, I suppose, in the context of the film) ich liebe immer nur meine Freunde, 35 But here and again, the meaning of friend for a thinker like Arendt, this reader of Augustine who was, arguably above all, a student of Aristotle (as a student of Heidegger would have had to be) but also an attentive reader of Nietzschethis gift for friendship and that is always, once again Aristotle, all about loyalty and about duration a friendship that comes to an end is not a friendship as Aristotle emphasizes (for his son, according to one account) in his Nicomachean Ethics. Or to be more exact, Aristotle observes that a friendship that lasts a lifetime is the friendship of the good, and for Arendt that friendship included both Heidegger and Jaspers. I have argued that Arendts particular gift for friendship allowed her friendships to last, to be good friends, as Aristotle measures friendships in time as opposed to those that are contingent on advantage, those that come to an end when the pleasure of love or humor fades. It would be Arendts goodness and her loyalty, as a person, to the person of the friend that made all the difference, if Aristotle would not less us forget that these qualities must be in some sense present in the other, in Jaspers but also in Heidegger. If, as I would argue further, it is Aristotles definition of thought and of the essence of the human as thinking and as political animal rather than Heideggers thinking on thinking that best illuminates the claim that runs throughout the film. But Aristotle haunts Heidegger so this a subtle point. The problem is the (still) scandalous claim that rather than being the monstrous embodiment of evil, Eichmann, a functionary, even

worse, a German functionary, Eichmann did not think, as Arendt said and as Heidegger would likewise say (as modern science does not think), we are left fumbling with the same frustration that faced so many of the films audiences in New York. For von Trottas Hannah Arendt seems to claim that the signal problem with Eichmann for Arendt was the same problem that Heidegger seemingly diagnoses repeatedly in his book What is Called Thinking. We do not think. Science doesnt think. The problem as Heidegger puts it is that we are still not thinking. Not thinking? What on earth was that supposed to mean with respect to a man like Eichmann? And to explain it commentators in the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines, like The New Yorker, which gets as much billing in the film as Jonas or any other player, would either denounce the formula and so have done with it, or refer to Heidegger and then have done with it. As if referring to Heidegger and to the intriguingly lurid professor-student encounter, wanting to learn to think, as the young Arendt conveys this wish to the similarly youthful Heidegger, and to hear what is and can only be an enormously seductive reply: Thinking is a lonely business. The comment echoes Nietzsches reflections on the republic of thinkers in his essay Schopenhauer as Educator. 36 And the paradox is that thinking cant be taught one to another; thinking cannot be practiced one with another. But with Nietzsche echoing in Heidegger here, we are returned to Aristotelian friendship now suspiciously late 18th (Schopenhauer) and late 19th century in its articulation. Thinking is thus less Aristotles converse of the soul with itself but an event that speaks across mountain tops, as it were, this is Schopenhauers spirit-converse as it strikes Nietzsche. But here we find ourselves with Aristotle again because only one who is related to one in spirit can hope to understand one precisely because a friend is the same spirit housed in another bodily form.

Thinking for Aristotle defines the human being, who is a political animal but above all a thinking animal. And what fails Eichmann is his nature, the human condition, as Arendt would say, which he manages, administrates, pursues obsessively, mindlessly. It is in this consummate sense that he does not think. Not as Aristotle defines thinking as this is always about more than a practical project or end but always thinking about thinking. I would like to end with a parallel recollecting my initial question regarding the possibility of resistance. Arendt concludes her introduction to Jaspers, The Future of Germany by reflecting on the problem of political accuracy many of Jaspers warnings and predictions have since been vindicated, as Jaspers, in his Man in the Modern Age, also warned of what became Germanys darkest years. For Arendt, the question is not the question of truth in the end but the question of impotence. Jaspers forebodings of an imminent catastrophe in both cases, Arendt argues, were denounced by all respectable critics. 37 Arendt draws our attention to the absolutely public character of Jaspers intellectual contribution, asking us to reflect upon the ultimate, as it turned out in both cases, irrelevance of this public support. For in both cases Jaspers was read by a minority that, though perhaps strong enough numerically to make itself heard, was in fact impotent able and willing to face the all-too obvious realities but powerless to change them. 38 Our own current situation may not be otherwise. Here I am not merely speaking though I am certainly speaking about US aggression as we have seen this played out in war after war, ongoing to this day, and on our own soil, and against our own people (the surveillance is relevant, but I point to the extraordinary violence that was used to break every Occupy Wall Street in every town, beginning with New Yorks Wall Street, images and reports of violence as quickly transmitted to consciousness on the internet, medium as that is of non-consciousness, and as vanished from memory of Berkeley, Oakland, Boston, etc. For there is more, there is what we do in the works that we do, in what Arendt said had to count, this is

the lasting influence of action for Arendt. And if Arendt did not (though Adorno did) I speak of animals and what we do to them, the animals we eat on a scale that empties everything that has ever been said against Heideggers manufacture of corpses phrase in his Bremen lectures, because the animal husbandry industry, because the farming industry, the fishing industry, the leather and fur industry, the glue industry, even the university level industry of animal research and vivisection (which is what the future of biotech, cloning, nanotech and stem cell research are all about), even the dairy industry, think of the orphaned and murdered calves, is about nothing in the end more literally literal than the manufacture of corpses. And not only that, and note as this is the end of this paper, that this is the unpleasant part. The part we are not interested in hearing about. This cuts too close to home, this is dinner after all, and we are what we eat. And all of us are complicit in the holocaust of animals used in science and more stupidly still in pharmaceutical trials, because nothing stops drugs with horrifying side-effects from being released to the public: the last and best stage of such trials being of course the patients themselves. These points, incarnadine as they are, cannot pale and yet they do. Because we have a science and a technology so singularly uninventive over the course of the last one hundred years that we cannot find any other way to run our machines, than internal combustion engines, of one kind or another. Our energy needs continue, as Heidegger put it to lead us to regard nature as a gigantic gasoline station be it for oil, gas, uranium and other minerals and so on. To my mind his expression here, dating from the sixties, should be as outdated as his urging to Arendt not to sully her girlish mind with philosophy only that Heideggers remark to her, given her age, could not but inspire her. Yet we still regard nature in this way and we plunder forests to the extent that in recent years, immediate memory. To quote the BBC: Rainforests worldwide are currently being cleared at a rate of 1.5 acres per second, according to the international environmental organisation Greenpeace.

If deforestation continues at this speed, all of the worlds rainforests could be wiped out entirely in less than 100 years. 39

Are we simply impotent in fact and effect, as Arendt sadly reflected? What if we were able to hear what Jaspers has to say to us as he writes to Arendt? Can we accede at any point to what Jaspers held out as the hope of reason, love, and truth. Nietzsches word Truth begins when there are two, is borne out by every community of individuals 40 If Nietzsche is right, if Jaspers is right, if Arendt is right, we need more than the lonely business of thought as Heidegger spoke of the thinker in the singular, to think about thinking. As the ancients knew, thinking can only be done in a community of other human beings who together form a community, a world. This is, to give the last word to Margarethe von Trottas extraordinary film, as it can indeed seem as if the entire work of the film was necessary just to set up, just to lead up to the final scene and Barbara Sukowas final voice over, as Hannah Arendt, author of the Banality of Evil, muses upon evil, pronouncing its essential superficiality: Das Bse ist immer nur extrem, aber niemals radikal, es hat keine Tiefe, auch keine Dmonie. Es kann die ganze Welt verwsten, gerade weil es wie ein Pilz an der Oberflche weiterwuchert. Tief aber und radikal ist immer nur das Gute. Evil is always only extreme but never radical, it has no depth, and also no demonicism. It can lay the whole world to waste, precisely because it constantly spreads like a fungus on the surface. Deep however and radical is ever only good. 41

Endnotes
1 2

Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 511.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Amos Elon, trans. (New York: Viking, 1963).

I discuss this elsewhere, see my review Babich, Daniel Maier-Katin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. NY: Norton, 2010, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Vol. 29, Nr. 4 (Summer 2011): 189-191 as well as in the specific context of Jaspers studies, Babich, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt: On Politics, Science, and Communication, Existence, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2009): 1-19. 4 Daniel Maier-Katkin, cites the correspondence here between Arendt and Jaspers in his Stranger from Abroad, pp. 149150. Cf. Annette Vowinckel, Geschichtsbegriff und Historisches Denken bei Hannah Arendt (Cologne: Bhlau, 2001), esp. pp. 135ff but see too Steven E. Aschheim, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers: friendship, catastrophe and the possibilities of German-Jewish dialogue, in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe. German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996) and see too the useful array of contributions to Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 5 Vowinckel, Geschichtsbegriff und Historisches Denken bei Hannah Arendt, 136. 6 Cited after Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad, 150. 7 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present), trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8 Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (New York: Columbia, 2013). There is a folded letter on the cover of the book. But to be more representative, the book might have added one of Taubes trademark postcards. I have some of these that Taubes sent me, although I discarded most of them as Taubes was more capable than most of offensive content. 9 Representative here would be Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton University Press, 2003) 10 Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 11 From Lems Imaginary Magnitude quoted as epigraph to the first lecture in W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Modern Library, 2004), p. 1. Lems own point continues: were he less ruthless, he would drown in a flood of paper. Lems Imaginary Magnitude, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 23. 12 Hannah Arendt, Gesprch mit Thilo Koch. In: Arendt, Ich will verstehen, Ursula Ludz, Hg. (Munich, 1996), p. 39. 13 Sebald, Foreword, On the Natural History of Destruction, x. 14 Ibid. 15 Sebald, Air War and Literature, p. 4. 16 Ibid., 30 17 Ibid. 18 There are a number of new voices raised here. See for one collection, among many other contributions, Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, eds., Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), see with particular reference to Arendt, Judith Butler, Is Judaism Zionism? Or, Arendt and the Critique of the Nation-State. 19 Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 36. 20 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. 223. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli amd Mazzini Montinari, eds., (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 12, 7 [60]). 22 Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113. 23 Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113. 24 Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113. 25 See for references and discussion, Babich Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science. Jaspers goes on to explain using the example of the lived life of the laboratory, as Carl Peter Hempel but also as MerleauPonty and Heidegger might equally have spoken of it, that In scientific world orientation we see empirical reality in both the given world and the one that remains to be made. But there is no cut-off
3

point. What has been made will henceforth be given and what is given has the unpredictable modifiability of new productive material. Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113. 26 Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 171. 27 Jaspers, Nietzsche, p. 287. 28 Jaspers, The Creation of the World in Philosophy and the World, p. 129. 29 Jaspers, The Creation of the World in Philosophy and the World, p. 130. 30 See Jaspers, Kants Perpetual Peace in Philosophy and the World, pp. 88-124. 31 Ibid, pp. 97ff and pp. 120ff and with reference to Nietzsche, pp. 257ff. 32 On Kants style, duly omitting irony, see Willi Goetschel. Constituting Critique: Kants Writing as Critical Praxis, Eric Schwab, trans. (Durham: Duke UP, 1994). 33 In addition to my own account (cited above), I have recently come across Ludger Lutkehaus insightful contextual reading, Hannah Arendt - Martin Heidegger: eine Liebe in Deutschland, Text+Kritik, Heft 166/167 (2005), originally published in opsculum format as Hannah Arendt - Martin Heidegger: eine Liebe in Deutschland (Marburg : Basilisken-Presse, 1999). 34 Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Note 239 (1961/1964) in: Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 510 35 Letter to Gerschom Scholem. 36 I discuss this Nietzschean reflection on thinking at greater length in Babich, Who do you think you are? On Nietzsches Schopenhauer, Illichs Hugh of St. Victor, and Kleists Kant. Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education (in press). 37 Arendt, Foreward to Jaspers, The Future of Germany, E. B. Ashton, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 38 Ibid. 39 Suemedha Sood, The repercussions of rainforest reduction, BBC Travelwise, 2 November 2012. 40 Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. 223. 41 Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Sholem.