Narratives of Survival: Hannah Arendt

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When disaster strikes, Hannah Arendt tells us in her Isak Dinesen essay, stories can save lives. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Creating a story out of the material of experience gives meaning to what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings. (Men in Dark Times, 104). In the end, stories will lead us to a to what Arendt saw as one the redeeming aspects of human life, the privilege of being able to judge. Hannah Arendt in the mid-1920s could be described as a selfassured, popular, attractive, young woman, the glorious product of German Jewish assimilation, a brilliant student of philosophy and of (Christian!) theology. She found the Jewish question boring and saw no impediment in her Jewish birth when she chose to write a dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine. She went to the best universities, met the best minds of her time, studied with the best teachers, who cherished her brilliance and her company, one, Martin Heidegger, famously becoming her lover and the other, Karl Jaspers, becoming a life long friend. So assured was her sense of entitlement to German and

European culture in the years prior to Hitlers rise to power in 1933 that her identity seems to loom larger than life, an heiress of the ages.

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The Weimar Republic, born out of the soldiers revolts and workers councils in Germany after the defeat in World War I, had produced a democratic and exemplary constitution, in which Jews at long last were granted political and civil equality. Most German Jews were, like Hannah Arendt, thoroughly assimilated and thought of themselves as inheritors of European culture. But there were Germans who blamed the Jews for Germanys defeat and fantasized a Jewish conspiracy, which had somehow stolen the victory from them. The war could not possibly have been lost without some evil machinations behind the scenes. Even though the progressive Weimar Republic had made possible an explosion of German Jewish cultural achievements, already toward the end of the 1920s it all came crashing down in hyperinflation, unemployment and old prejudices resurfacing. Soon Nazi thugs were roaming the streets beating up Jews and smashing Jewish shop windows. Hannah Arendt realized early that, in the eyes of the increasingly antisemitic environment, and perhaps also in the eyes of her married lover, she appeared not as a European citizen, and certainly not as an authentic German, but as a pariah and as a Jew. The social, emotional,

and professional catastrophe must have been traumatic to say the least. I would like to argue that powerful feelings inform her writing for the next three decades, from Rahel Varnhagen to Eichmann in Jerusalem. What are those feelings? (of shame, of rage?) We cannot really tell, but we can discern the trail of a struggle. At times it looked as if things may go back to normal. When Arendt finished her dissertation in the summer of 1929, she must still have been planning a German academic career as she was applying for a grant to do work on German Romanticism. But in 1932 her old friend, Anna Weil, met Arendt in the street and heard her say that they needed to prepare for emigration. Weil had voiced disagreement: she had not experienced any antisemitism. Arendt had apparently looked at Weil in amazement, burst out, You are crazy, and stomped off. (Young-Bruehl, 98) When interviewed on German television in 1964, Arendt marked the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 as the decisive moment. But if 1933 was the year of the turnaround, it was not because of Hitler. That year the Nazi regime had begun pressuring ordinary Germans to collaborate and the pressure was having an effect. Antisemitism was spreading widely in the general population and also among the elite. In her 1951 major study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt notes the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count

among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members. (Arendt, Origins, 432) Arendt wrote a letter to Heidegger asking him if the rumors about his antisemitic behavior toward Jewish colleagues and his public support of Hitler were true; he answered evasively. Other Gentile friends on whom she counted for social and emotional support were also beginning to give her a wide berth, and that, she assures the interviewer, rather than Hitlers rise to power, was a bone-chilling experience. That the Nazis were antisemitic and an enemy to Germanys Jews had been completely evident for at least four years to everyone who wasnt feebleminded, Arendt had blurted out, exasperated at the difficulty of communicating thirty years later the complexity of her motivations on the brink of the totalitarian take over, but it was

the disloyalty of friends to put it that bluntly for once friends got in line The problem, the personal problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. In the wave of Gleichschaltung (adjusting to the Nazi party line)which was relatively voluntaryin any case, not yet under the pressure of terrorit was as if an empty space formed around one. I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But not among the others. And I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the ideaof course somewhat exaggerated: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot. (Arendt, Essays of Understanding, 12)

It goes without saying that she kept old intellectual friends and later acquired many new ones, but the point she was trying to make, and which Lisa Jane Disch picks up on, is embedded in the metaphor she uses to

characterize this experience. To be surrounded by an empty space, is a striking image of abandonment. And Dish goes on to argue that the emptying of the public space happens when people dont dare speak up in the face of a violation of what is supposed to be a common humanist norm. That may be part of what Arendt is trying to say, but Disch gets closer to the core of Arendts traumatic experience when she writes, in a slightly different context, In Berlin of 1933, Hannah Arendt experienced the shock of being made a pariah. To turn under the gaze of others into a pariah was devastating for Hannah Arendt, whom nothing in the assimilated socialist and liberal milieu she had been raised in, grounded in Enlightenment values and principles, had prepared for that experience. We need not speculate about the nature of the psychological wound inflicted on her, but it is important to note that even before she went into exile in 1933, Hannah Arendt responded to the increasingly hostile environment by saying that when one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man. (Young-Bruehl, 109) It makes no sense to tell your detractor that you are not a Jew but a human being. She had learned from her friend Kurt Blumenfeld that, in the face of the unexpected and unprecedented, i.e. Nazi terror through systematic humiliation and degradation of German Jews, what was needed was to fight back, to get involved in Zionist political activity; in order to keep ones sanity one had to counter the Nazi paranoid delusion of Jewish world

power and Jewish vice with a counter narrative. In order to do that it was necessary to learn to look at assimilation and Jewish diaspora history from a Zionist perspective. In 1933 she was already an active member of the Zionist movement, and remained a member for ten years. That summer she landed in prison while doing research on Nazi antisemitism, a work she had undertaken in order to help prepare her friend Kurt Blumenfelds speech to the upcoming Zionist Congress in Prague. After a few days the Gestapo let her go, possibly because she did not figure in their files as a political activist or, as she thought herself, because she made a good impression on her interrogator. The day that she left the prison she fled Germany and went to Paris where she remained, in exile, for the next eight years. * Lisa Disch notes a professional shift in Arendts life, in fact a thoroughgoing change in orientation during the years 1929 and 1933: Notwithstanding the claims of those who locate her as a descendant of either Heidegger or Kant, I maintain that Hannah Arendt never did take up the position within the tradition of Western philosophy for which she had been educated. She even refused this position when it was handed to her as a gift, as it was in Copenhagen eight months before her death, when the Danish government awarded her the Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization. This was the last and probably most prestigious

awards she received; on of several occasions where the world that had made Hannah Arendt a pariah attempted to call her back by recognizing her place in the very civilization in whose name she might have been annihilated. (Disch, Limits of Philosophy [LP), 17) Before leaving Berlin, she had set out on a project she defined as educating herself on what it meant to be a Jew, now that the Nazis had, as it were, forced her into awareness of her Jewish birth. She researched, edited and nearly finished writing a book based on the letters and diary of a Jewish salonire, Rahel Varnhagen, whose rose to prominence in Berlin in the early years of Romanticism. I wrote it, Arendt said in the Gaus interview, with the idea: I want to understand. (Disch, [18] p. 18) If the urge to find an adequate form for this self-education motivates her writing, and if by projecting herself onto this biography and by recounting the life of an assimilated Jewess who wound up as a conscious pariah Hannah Arendt appears to have accomplished a cathartic, even auto-analytic act, Arendt did not come to the project with an unfurnished mind. (Kristeva, 128) Arendt herself speaks of a great bankruptcy of life, which was not just personal. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Erich Cohn-Bendit and other German exiles, seeking refuge in Paris in the 1930s knew that the bankruptcy included 600.000 German Jews and, as soon became clear, the systematic murder of more than one third of the Jewish people.

So that when Hannah Arendt wrote the last two chapters of the Rahel Varnhagen book, she did so against the background of a very concrete and personal knowledge about a good part of this tragedy. It is not surprising, then, that the last two chapters of the Varnhagen book read as if they were written entirely from within a Zionist framework. Expressly critical of assimilationthe year is 1938Arendt keeps scolding and upbraiding Rahel for her navet, for her social ambition, for her stubborn refusal to admit, until her death-bed, that her Jewish birth had not been a the greatest shame, of her life but instead a source of pride, something she on no account wished to have missed. Obviously, by the same token, Arendt was also scolding herself, or her younger self, for having entered the bargain of assimilation, noting that for most people it had been possible to assimilate only by assimilating to antisemitism also.(Arendt, RV, 256) During her exile years in Paris, Arendt worked for Jewish and Zionist organizations sending children and young people to what was then still called Palestine. Once in New York, where she arrived in 1941having fled the camp of Gur, crossed the Pyrenns and waited to cross the Atlantic for three agonizing months in Lisbonshe kept writing and writing about various aspects of Jewishness. In January 1943, she published We refugees in The Menorah Journal. The Jew as Pariah: The Hidden Tradition appeared in Jewish Social Studies in April 1944. Articles arguing for a Jewish army, for a federation of Arabs and Jews in Palestine, for

resistance to the right wing elements in the Zionist movement flowed from her pen in a steady stream. The strange thing about her influential study from 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is first its much debated, very innovative, but perhaps not entirely coherent theoretical method, and, secondly, the many insights into the nature of unprecedented, hitherto unimaginable phenomenon that was the modern totalitarian superpower and its culture of fear and terror, which killed six million Jews and started a war which left fifty million dead in Europe. Arendt, incidentally, did not believe we had rid ourselves of the totalitarian temptation and thought that it may very well reappear in the future. If the title of Origins is a something of a misnomer and the tripartite structureAntisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianismis not wholly convincing, the narrative sketchesof Disraeli, of the Dreyfus affair, of Rahel Varnhagen, of the characters in Prousts novel are superb and convey, in depth, and in much fascinating detail, the nature of this new 20th century phenomenon of totalitarian terror and systematic dehumanization. It should in the future be more fully explored. The reason for this is that most Arendt scholars are philosophers or political theorists and few literary scholars have approached her texts qua literature. Arendt is rather unique among Holocaust scholars in focusing attention on how antisemitism is used to add a quasi-religious,

millenarian, dimension to Nazi discourse and propagandaand in doing so in the narrative mode. I would like to suggest that Arendts writing for more than thirty years, from 1929 to 1963, bears witness to an urge to make sense of the catastrophic turn of the German-Jewish symbiosis. First Arendt writes the biography Rahel Varnhagen, then she follows up with a series of sketches, stories and insights, narratives of survival, if you wish, in which she struggles to get her mind around the radical newnessand the radical evilof Nazi antisemitism and its perverted logic, leading to the Holocaust and the murder of European Jews, while at the same time, trying to create, out of the rubble of the assimilationist dream, a new Jewish collective identity and tradition A COUNTERNARRATAIVE How does she do that? From 1929 on, she voices a desire to reclaim the imposed pariah status of the Jew, to use it as what, Judith Butler calls a foothold for power; a satisfying position from which to speak. This search to reclaim the pariah position could be seen as culminating in the publication of Origins in 1951. Or it may very well be that the search did not come to an end until Arendt witnessed the Eichmann trial and reported on it for The New Yorkera job for which she volunteered. Seyla Benhabib discussing the subtitle of the Eichmann book, A Report on the Banality of Evil, quotes Arendt writing to Mary McCarthy, in October 1963, saying that she wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria and ever since I did it, I feelafter twenty

years [since the war]lighthearted about the whole matter. (Benhabib, Eichmann in Jerusalem, [EJ], 65) And , says Benhabib, by lighthearted Arendt did not mean that she was joyful, flippant or carefree; she meant that her heart was lightened by having shed a burden. By voicing in public the shame, rage, and sadness she had carried in private for thirty years, she was finally unloading some of the burden history had placed on her.

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Seyla Benhabib has observed that the personal story of Rahel Varnhagen, of her circle of friends, the failure of her salon, the political naivet of her generation of Jews are like a negative utopia of Arendts concept of political community in her subsequent works. Nonetheless, this cluttered and at times awkward youthful text retains themes, issues, and preoccupations that are much closer to the nerve of Arendts existential concerns than some of her subsequent formulations. (Benhabib, EJ, 13)

Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), the daughter of a Berlin jeweler, gathered in the garret of the large house the family owned on Jgerstrasse in Berlin, from 1790 to 1806, the most brilliant crowd of her time: including, the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, prince LouisFerdinand of Prussia, Ludwig and Friedrich Tieck, Goethe and more. She was, in the words of Julia Kristeva, not really rich, not beautiful, not

particularly graceful but she benefited from the philosemitism of Fredric II of Prussia. In Amos Elons account, the popularity of Rahels salon, as well as that of other Jewish salonires, was more of a spontaneous occurrence, new ideas breaking up the stuffy atmosphere of beer halls and all male gatherings. Aristocrats, writers, philosophers, and members of the rising bourgeoisie met on neutral ground, as it were, in the salons held by Jewish women. These gatherings did not constitute social acceptance of Jews or women. Rather the Jewish salon appeared as a free space outside the conventions of the society. None of the Gentile visitors to Rahels salon are known to have invited her back. Her first fianc, the aristocratic von Finkenstein, managed to keep the engagement secret from his family for several years and when the family was informed he was unable to resist their opposition to the msaliance; the other men who fell in love with Rahel do not seem to have entertained the possibility of marrying her. When the mood, with the Napoleonic wars in 1806, turned patriotic, these illustrious visitors abandoned Rahels salon and she became quite isolated. While Rahel mourned the loss of the glorious moment What happened to the time when we were all together! It sank in 1806. Sank like a ship, carrying the most beautiful gifts, the most beautiful pleasures of life. Arendts comment, by contrast, is rather cutting: Berlin society left the Jewish salons with unmatched rapidity. (Arendt, R.V., 167)

Benhabib notices that In telling Rahels story, Hannah Arendt was bearing testimony to a political and spiritual transformation that she was herself undergoing. There is a mirror effect in the narrative. The one narrated about becomes the mirror in which the narrator also portrays herself. (Benhabib, Pariah and Her Shadow, 11) One could also say that Arendt espouses without qualms a wider consciousness than that of poor Raheland by implication also wiser understanding of Arendts own, younger, more blue eyed self. By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, Arendt sought to understand how her subjects conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness illuminated the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. (Stephen J. Whitfield, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/index.htlm)

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The book can of course be read in many ways: as Hannah Arendts auto-biography, as a political pamphlet, or as deconstruction of the ideology of German-Jewish symbiosis. Although, Arendt clearly wants the reader to empathize with both Rahels ambitions and her tragic predicament, she has nothing but scorn for her assumption that by receiving these illustrious guests in her home, she would shed her Jewishness and acquire a prestigious position as a married woman in the Christian world.

From Arendts perspective in 1930, this was a preposterous notion. For of course, philosemitic rhetoric did hold out to Jews, in the name of the Enlightenment equality, civil rights, and rehabilitation after having been treated for centuries as a despised people. But in return, the Jews were expected to shed the particularity of their Jewishness, which the majority perceived as negative and defined as parochialism, as a tendency to band together and as a lack of conviviality. There was nothing to loose but some archaic, tribal and primitive patterns of behavior. By allowing themselves to be integrated into Gentile culture one by one, they would gain access to universal brotherhood, to humanity as such. Hannah Arendt notes that nothing was said about social integration; it was generously and navely assumed that if all other impediments were removed and people were able to think rationally, there would be no obstacles to Jewish integration into all strata of German society. Instead, the very opposite happened, that after a few years of tolerance and enthusiasm for the enlightened way, the fashion of attending Jewish salon ended and a wall appeared, which to Rahel was invisible, as it indeed remained to other Germans up until the Hitler period; a wall of intricate psychological and social taboos and impediments, of unspoken thou-shalt-nots and imaginary lines in the sand; lines that materialize when they happen to be crossed. It was an invisible wall, a set of social codes, which assimilating German Jews

mostly would choose to ignore or repress. It is symptomatic that Gershom Scholems assimilated father, who threw his son out of the house upon hearing of his intention to study Judaism and the Talmud, had a social circle made up almost entirely of Jews. One way of putting it is to say that Rahels function in the text is to be a model whose actions make invisible walls, visible; thereby proving the existence of social walls. In some circumstances the existence of walls can only b be demonstrated by the existence of broken heads, Arendt commented wrily. (Arendt, R.V., 254) Indeed, one could say that the story of Rahel Varnhagen works as a model on a larger scale, allowing Enlightenment values to be checked against social reality; as if the Rahel life story was an experiment with which to measure the results of the struggle for political and civic rights for European Jews in the last three centuries. Judging by the Rahel experiment, then, Jews had been deceived by the Enlightenment discourse , by people like Dohm, Mirabeau, Abb Grgoire, and even by Mendelssohn, one of their own, lured by philosemitic promises out of their two-thousand-year-badgers-hole. Indeed, as Karl Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt, when she asked him to read Rahel Varnhagen before publication in 1956, the book proves that it is impossible for German Jews to live in Germany. (see Barnouw, 60, passim) Although that was a difficult notion for a decent man and a German to accept, it was to Hannah Arendt precisely the point. Life was

indeed impossible for German Jews in 1933; within a decade most German Jews had either emigrated or perished. In Hannah Arendts view, once the first enthusiasm and the feel good of Enlightenment sentiments had worn off, assimilation proved to have been impossible. Not only her own generation, but already Rahel Varnhagen and other German Jews, from the time of Moses Mendelssohn on, had been politically nave. She is rather hard on herself and on them and does not take into account that, in the period of emancipation, there was precious little awareness among German and French Jews, that Clermont de Tonnerres caveat at the Jewish emancipation debate in LAssembl Nationale: everything to the Jews as individuals, nothing to the Jews as a nation, caught the Jews in a double bind. Only if Jews were ready to give up their existence as a collective body, i.e. their autonomous institutions, which they had kept from ancient times and throughout the middle ages, would they be granted civic rights. The contract seemed promising when it was offered and officially signed in at Le Grand Sanhedrin meeting in Paris in 1806. But as to this very day, only a sovereign nation has the ability to defend human rights and enforce the law, every Jew giving up his place in the collective body of his own people in exchange for supposedly natural rights as an individual member of the majority puts himself at risk. The problem of the status and the rights of minorities has been the preoccupation of Western governments since Woodrow Wilson

formulated the principle of self-determination at the Paris Conference after World War I. And the problem is perhaps more acute in a country like Germany than in France; more intractable where the nation is represented as organic than contractual. Yet the difficulty for the outsider to assimilate into an imagined community, which entertains the myth of its own organic unity ,remains nevertheless even in France. The tragic fact throughout the 20th century was that in a Europe of homogenizing nation states, it was impossible to solve the Jewish question on an individual basis, yet emancipation required that the Jews assimilate qua individuals not as a people or as an ethnic/religious group. This was also the Zionists argument against assimilation: in the face of rising antisemitism from 1870 on. Assimilated Jews in Europe, no matter how integrated or wealthy, increasingly were perceived by the majority culture qua Jews. Even a Rothschild could suddenly feel himself transformed, in Arendts * Most of Hannah Arendts academic or theoretical texts are widely known. We refugees one of the less known texts from 1943, tells the story of Hannah Arendts flight from the enemy. The narrative of how she managed to survive comes to us, for once, in less abstract terms, told in her own voice. We hear what it felt like in daily life to be a refugee and a stateless person. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life we lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expressions of feelings...once we

were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride in the subway without being told we were undesirable... we already are so damnably careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth certificates were filled out and why Hitler didnt like us.... (Arendt, WR, 56-60)

Hannah Arendt believed that human beings needed to be inserted in a circle of friends and elements that connect them to the world. She thought such insertion was essential for the formation of a persons identity, for ones sense of purpose in life, and ultimately, for sanity and survival. Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. (Arendt, WR, 62) German Jewish refugees, like herself, were at risk just as the unemployed had been in Germany during the Depression; they were being made to feel superfluous as human beings, by the Nazi persecution machine but also by the collaborationist government of wartime France. It was a terrible time to be the disturbing stranger at the margins of other peoples lives. There was a need to fight back. There was a need for affirming an alternative Jewish tradition for those German and European Jews, who like herself, had survived but whose sense of what they stood for, their life narrative, had collapsed. For this purpose she borrowed the notion of conscious pariahs from the dreyfusard and 19th century Zionist, Bernard Lazare, whose book, Jobs Dungheap, was the first she published when she started working in 1948 for Schocken in her new home city, New York.

Pariah is a loaded term. It betrays, depending on how one wants to interpret it, either the strength of Arendts feelings of injury in the early 1940s or something of a tin ear to the emotional impact of words, perhaps both. It is, however, increasingly being appropriated by Arendts readers and followers in academia as a neutral, descriptive term, which I find rather problematic. For Arendt the label, conscious pariah could be transformed into a weapon and a badge of honor. The attitude of those few, whom, following Bernard Lazare, one may call conscious pariahs, would be people who were taking a position which gave them the means to counter the Enlightenment eurocentric discourse with a different narrative, thereby undermining and relativizing it. Hannah Arendt proposes here the use of the term conscious pariah in the same way as Judith Butler proposes to counter other injurious speech with subversive resignification: the insubordinate use of a derogatory term or authoritative convention to defuse its power to injure and to expose prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions by which they proceed (Butler, ES, 157, 158) Oddly enough, Hannah Arendts conscientious and devoted biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, avoids to stress the pain of exile, shame and rage underlying such terms as pariah conscious or otherwise. She chooses as title for the biography Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World. Clearly combining love and world on the front cover of a book, which purports to analyze Hannah Arendts life and work, suggests

an affirmative and positive attitude. In the process what gets lost is the sense that the affirmation was arrived at great emotional cost, but above all that what Hannah Arendt does affirm is meant to be subversive. In a well-known letter to Gershom Scholem, written during the Eichmann controversy, she affirms the fact of her Jewish birth. Elsewhere, and not only in The Jew as Pariah, A Hidden Tradition, she affirms and embraces above all the position of the conscious pariah. Yet, not just to affirm but to embrace a pariah identity to the point of speaking and acting politically and aesthetically from a conscious pariah position, something a little more is required. And that something, Hannah Arendt finds it in Franz Kafkas stories, above all in K. the main character in Kafkas last novel, The Castle. Kafkas K. takes Enlightenment values literally. He is an emblematic figure, who consciously assumes the position of critical outsider in a world, which reneges on its Enlightenment promise to treat all human beings with the respect due to them on the basis of them being human beings, and on that quality alone. The Castle is the one novel in which ...the hero is plainly a Jew; et even there what characterizes him as such is that he is involved in situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life....

K. in his effort to fit in and to become indistinguishable from everybody else is interested only in universals as articulated in Enlightenment, in things which are common to all mankind. His desires are directed only towards those things to which all men have a natural right. (Arendt, JP, 84)

An outrageous demand in the opinion of the villagers. ...He demands no more than that which constitutes every mans right and will be satisfied

with no less. His entire ambition is to have a home, a position, real work to do, to marry and to become a member of the community.... Because, as a stranger, he is not permitted to enjoy this...he alone, he thinks must fight for the minimum, for simple human rights. And just because he seeks nothing more than his minimum human rights, he cannot consent to obtain his demandsas might otherwise have been possiblein the form of an act of favor from the Castle. (Arendt, JP, 85)

The rights bestowed on all human beings in accordance with Enlightenment principles are said to be inalienable and natural and yet, all over Europe refugees, stateless people, immigrants come to the depressing realization that as naked human beings they seem have no rights whatsoever. (Arendt, O, 341-384) Kafkas K. is a man of goodwill, who asks for nothing out of the ordinary, only his rights as a human being and he is being told by the inhabitants of the village that there is no such thing in real life as the rights of the stranger or the rights of the little man, that the world is a wicked place and that he had better get used to it Both in the 1944 Kafka vignette in Jewish Social Studies I have been quoting from, and in the longer revised essay, entitled Franz Kafka: a re-evaluation, which Arendt published in Partisan Review that same year, she insists that only those things are real whose strength is not impaired but confirmed by thinking...thinking is the new weaponit is the only one with which, in Kafkas opinion ,the pariah is endowed at birth in his vital struggle against society. It is interesting that the notion of thinking, not ethics, is singled out by Arendt already in 1944 as the saving humanist quality and that, in 1963, Eichmann, in her eyes, stands accused precisely of being unable to think. That lack is what makes him such a

typical product of a specifically 20th century kind of evil. Also the last book she was writing before passing away in 1973, was devoted to explaining what she meant by thinking and why it was so important. Nevertheless, K. insists on his rights and does not give up the fight and Arendt comments on how much could be accomplished, if only one simple man could achieve to live his own life like a normal human being... The whole struggle remains undecided, and K. dies a perfectly natural death; he gets exhausted. (Arendt, JP pp. 87 and 88) But then again, his is a different death from that of Rahel Varnhagen. And the difference is that in the case of K., the conscious pariah, embodied in Kafkas last novel, The Castle, there is no shame.

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Literature cited!

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Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. (Love in Saint Augustine) Berlin: J.Springer, 1929. ! Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewess, New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1957; revised edition with an introduction by Liliane Weissberg, Baltimore, 1997.! Hannah Arendt, We Refugees from The Menorah Journal, January 1943, pp. 69-77.! Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition from Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2. April 1944, pp. 99-122. !

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism New York, 1951, revised edition with an introduction by Samantha Power, New York, 2004!

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Hannah Arendt, Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963, a review in The New Yorker, 1968, of Parmenia Miguel, Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen.! Hannah Arendt, On humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing an address on accepting the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg in 1959, published in Arendts collection of essays Men in Dark Times, New York, 1969!

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Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Banality of Evil, New York, 1963.! Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Edited and with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman. New York, 1978 (a collection of articles on Jewish issues written between 1942 and 1966, including the above mentioned We Refugees, and The Jew as Pariah. The Hidden Tradition )!

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Hannah Arendt, What Remains? The Language Remains, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, Jerome Kohn ed.,New York, 1994.! Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces, Baltimore, 1990.! SeylaBenhabib, The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendts Biography of Rahel Varnhagen from Political Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 February 1995, 5-24. ! Seyla Benhabib, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Dana Villa, ed., Cambridge UK 2000, p. 65!

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, with David A. Altschuler, Hitlers War against the Jews, New York, 1978!

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Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, Ithaca: 1994.! Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933, New York, 2002.! Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Chicago, 1961! Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Ross Guberman trans.,New York, 2001! Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt For Love of the World, second edition, New Haven, 2004.! !