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Why is it so difficult to love the world? The question is asked in “Denktagebuch”, the journal of political thinker Hannah Arendt. World love: why is it so heavy to love the world?
It is a deeply private issue and, therefore, universally valid, and today it is extremely urgent. Most of us are too aware of the world’s shortcomings, from economic inequality, racial and sexist violence, the climate problem and the viral pandemic to leaders like Donald Trump, to name a few. The question also says something about Arendt’s reality, why she, almost fifty years after her death, can add something to every discussion about love, totalitarian ideologies, and evil.
Hannah Arendt was born 1906 in an assimilated German-Jewish family and studied philosophy for Martin Heidegger. When German anti-Semitism increased after Hitler’s accession in 1933, she began to gather evidence of persecution against German Jews, but was forced to flee to France. There he worked to help Jewish children to Palestine. She was admitted to the hospital in 1940, but managed to reach New York in 1941.
In the United States, he taught at various universities and participated in public debate until his death in 1975. One of his most debated concepts, the banal evil, was coined when he wrote about the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. and the mechanisms of power. And he insisted that thinking about himself was the only reliable protection against repetitions of the 19th century.
In times of trouble, we often turn to poets and thinkers to find some kind of emotional home and comfort. It is no coincidence that the lyrics by George Orwell and Hannah Arendt are sold more than they were long ago. It seems that many people really want to understand the moment, this particular cultural and historical moment that we are in. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why two books on Hannah Arendt have been published in Swedish this year? One of the economist and writer Kenneth Hermele, “Once again you have misinterpreted the banal evil.” The second by ethics professor and author Ann Heberlein. While Kenneth Hermele has written a dramatic text and an essay struggling with Arendt’s vision of evil, Ann Heberlein has chosen to write about Arendt’s life.
Arendt’s basic Ann Heberlein’s importance is evident on her own website, where she motivates all of her writing with a quote from Arendt. “Cultural sites have fallen into identity politics and cultural relativism and in academia, postmodern and scientific gender perspectives dominate. Large publishers issue politically correct pamphlets on intellectual reasoning and on radio and television, they dominate moral education, superficiality, and pure streetcars. (…) My motto and the statement of my program that I have taken from Hannah Arendt: that the truth be told if the world is sinking. “Truly words to match.
In the preface to “Hannah Arendt – On Love and Evil”, Heberlein also writes that Arendt has been her friend through existence and that her life is “a story full of obstacles and victories, evil and love, setbacks and successes. ” Then it promises well. Here is a writer with a strong relationship to portray and an object with a dramatic life. In addition, the object has left a series of provocative texts, texts that still provoke debate, tributes and interpretations and that generate new thoughts, new questions and new Arendt courses in all the universities of the world.
The biography consists of 224 ventilated sides. It is divided into words, introductions, and 26 chapters that represent Arendt’s life in chronological order, with the exception of individual chapters that focus on selected concepts. The introduction addresses the question of why the world is difficult to love. Ann Heberlein can explain it in two sentences: “Hannah connects love with the world, world love, with responsibility, reflection and judgment. It is a love that requires reflection on one’s actions and an understanding of their consequences. “A school textbook for high school students could not have said it better.
Then follows Hannah’s life story (Heberlein always uses only Arendt’s first name). She is born, grows up, loses her father, loses her grandfather, begins to read books, becomes a student, falls in love with her teacher, the philosophical giant Martin Heidegger. Heidegger (who is named Martin in the book) has power over their relationship and it all painfully ends on Arendt’s part. The stock market crash of 1929 occurs. She is getting married. Hitler takes power. The German Parliament House burned down and Hitler is using the event to liquidate democracy. Arendt is attracted to Zionism. Twenty-seven years old, she undertakes an anti-Nazi mission, is arrested but released, and realizes that she and her mother must flee Germany.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Photo: Granger / REX
This is how it progresses Arendt’s life story without text that significantly reflects contrasts or drama. One replaces the other in approximately equal lengths.
The “How It Could Happen” chapter consists of three pages that explain how Germany became a fully Nazi nation. Here, the bitter taste of Versailles is mentioned and it is stated that “anti-Semitism was not born in Germany in 1930, it was much earlier”. Here the dehumanization of victims and soldiers is mentioned, and the short chapter concludes with the conclusion that the Holocaust was made possible due to the indifference of the great masses instead of the perpetrators of evil. In short, the most elementary explanations are repeated without any thought or depth, and the question “how Germany became a Nazi” is perfectly mixed with “how the Holocaust could take place”. It is not only loosely thought, it is a trivialization of enormous dimensions.
Personally, I have never been able to read Hannah Arendt without being a little elated and doomed. She was a contradictory thinker and probably an equally contradictory person. First he worked for Zionism, then he quit. She named the opportunistic and determined Nazi Adolf Eichmann as a symbol of someone who does not think but only conforms to machinery, although she was probably fully aware that he was an ideologically driven enemy of the Jews and accuses in the same way (in the book “The evil banal”) the Jewish councils to participate in the Holocaust.
About Ann Heberlein He fought any intellectual struggle in his lifelong relationship with Hannah Arendt, there is no trace of it in the biography. All obstacles in the paths of thought seem to be removed. This makes the biography here and there take the form of a lecture. A patient reader can probably live with that. It is worse when it becomes a self-help book in maturing processes, as in the forgiveness reasoning.
“Forgiveness is both an emotional and a moral job. It takes time to forgive, and it hurts. A broken relationship, a lost friend, or a loved one means greater pain, and if the broken relationship, the lost friend means more pain than the failure that caused the breakup, then there are many reasons to forgive. “
The final words return to the love of the world argument, amor mundi, and Heberlein summarizes what Arendt can teach us, namely, “loving the world so much that we believe change is possible.” Amen. Therefore, one of the most interesting people of the 19th century, and his contradictory thinking, can be included in the banal biography.
Read more texts by Elisabeth Åsbrink and more DN book reviews
