"You are the hero of your own story.”

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Evil: The Crime against Humanity by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

In 1963 Hannah Arendt said that she had "been thinking for many years, or, to be specific, for thirty years, about the nature of evil." (see Grafton document in Eichmann file) It had been thirty years since the Reichstag, the German parliament, was burned in Berlin, an event followed immediately by the Nazis' illegal arrests of thousands of communists and others who opposed them. Though innocent of any crime, those arrested were taken to concentration camps or the cellars of the recently organized Gestapo and subjected to what Arendt called "monstrous" treatment. With his political opposition effectively forestalled, Hitler could establish as a matter of policy the Jew-hatred that in his case was obvious to anyone who read Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the diatribe he dictated in prison and published in 1925. Which is to say that with the consolidation of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be a social prejudice and became political: Germany was to be made judenrein, "purified" by first demoting Jews to the status of second class citizens, then by ridding them of their citizenship altogether, deporting them, and, finally, killing them. From that moment on Arendt said she "felt responsible." But responsible for what? She meant that she, unlike many others, could no longer be "simply a bystander" but must in her own voice and person respond to the criminality rampant in her native land. "If one is attacked as a Jew," she said, "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."
The year was 1933. Within a few months Arendt was arrested, briefly detained for her work with a Zionist organization, and, when the opportunity presented itself, left Germany abruptly. After her stay in France and upon arriving in America in 1941, she wrote more than fifty articles for the German-Jewish weekly Der Aufbau addressing the plight and duty of Jews during World War II.¹ Arendt first heard about Auschwitz in 1943, but with Germany's defeat in 1945 incontrovertible evidence of the existence of Nazi "factories" of extermination came to light, and at that time information concerning slave labor installations in the Soviet Gulag also gradually emerged. Struck by the structural similarity of those institutions Arendt turned her attention to the function of concentration camps under totalitarian rule. Her analysis has to be read to be fully appreciated and only a few indications of its power and originality, and fewer of its subtlety, can be given here.

The camps haunted Arendt's writing until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, after she published The Human Condition in 1958, a theoretical study of the three activities of active life (labor, work, and action) and their career in the modern age, and embarked on an analysis of the American, French, and Russian Revolutions, the camps reappeared on the horizon of her thought when she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann (the chief coordinator of the transportation of Jews to the death camps) in Israel in 1961. In one way or another the Nazi camps played a major role in the controversy that followed the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, and, although she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is fair to say that what she called the "overpowering reality" of totalitarian concentration camps lay behind her preoccupation with the problem of evil, a concern that lasted until the end of her life.

Arendt saw Eichmann, on trial for his life, as a "buffoon" whose

inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such . . . [It was] proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapters 3 and 5).

Having encountered such a man, Arendt saw that the banality of evil is potentially far greater in extent--indeed limitless--than the growth of evil from a "root." A root can be uprooted, which is what she meant to do when she spoke of "destroying" totalitarianism, but the evil perpetrated by an Eichmann can spread over the face of the earth like a "fungus" precisely because it has no root. Furthermore, the case of Eichmann led Arendt to see that at least one evildoer was not "corruptible." Having overcome or in his case forgotten any inclination he may have had to halt or hinder the organization and transportation of millions of innocent Jews to their deaths, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the end! Unlike Himmler, his ultimate superior in the chain of command and a chief architect of the "final solution," Eichmann never attempted to "negotiate" with the enemy when it became clear that the Nazi cause was lost. He declared, on the contrary, "that he had lived his whole life . . . according to a Kantian definition of duty," (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 8) and Arendt noted that "to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of [Kant's] categorical imperative," though he had "distorted" it in practice. She admitted, moreover, "that Eichmann's distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant 'for the household use of the little man,'" the identification of one's will with "the source" of law, which for Eichmann was the will of the Führer.
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem is its study of human conscience. The court's refusal to consider seriously the question of Eichmann's conscience resulted in its failure to confront what Arendt called "the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century." The Israeli judges understood conscience traditionally as the voice of God or lumen naturale, speaking or shining in every human soul, telling or illuminating the difference between right and wrong, and this simply did not apply in the case of Eichmann. Eichmann had a conscience, and it seems to have "functioned in the expected way" for a few weeks after he became engaged in the transport of Jews, and then, when he heard no voice saying Thou shalt not kill but on the contrary every voice saying Thou shalt kill, "it began to function the other way around." (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 6) And this was by no means true only for Eichmann. Arendt was convinced by testimony presented at the trial that a general "moral collapse" had been experienced throughout Europe, from which even respected members of the Jewish leadership were not exempt.⁵ (seeEichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 7)
And so the controversy raged. Arendt may have exaggerated the extent to which the attacks against her were prompted by a "conspiracy" of the Jewish establishment and leveled against a book that was "never written." (see "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship") Certainly not everyone who disagreed with her, sometimes vehemently, was malevolent or ill-informed (see letter from Hans Jonas to H.A. marked "etwa Januar 1964"). Much that was said was indeed preposterous, for example, that she attempted to exonerate Eichmann when she had done exactly the opposite; or that she was morally insensitive in asking why Jews had not fought back, a question raised by the prosecutor but never by Arendt, who understood that the processes of dehumanization precluded rebellion. Yet many were deeply disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated--he wanted to rise in rank not by murdering anyone but by "conscientiously" doing his job. "Intent to do wrong" was not, in Arendt's opinion, proved against him. He was not "morally insane" for in his own "muddled" way he distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests showed that he was not a "monster" but frighteningly normal.
Eichmann was not stupid; he knew but did not think what he was doing, not in the past and not in Jerusalem. He contradicted himself constantly, but he did not lie; his conscience did not bother him; and he did not suffer from remorse: "He knew that what he had once called his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as if it were nothing but another language rule" (see "Thinking and Moral Considerations"). Therefore it was important to Arendt that the justice of the death sentence delivered by the court be seen by all, and for that reason she offered her own judgment, addressing Eichmann in the following terms:

Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations--as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to share the world with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, "Epilogue" -- part one and part two").

The "Epilogue" to Eichmann in Jerusalem deals with the legality of the Jerusalem trial, which for the most part Arendt defended, but she thought it necessary to clarify what the Israeli court's judgment left obscure. Eichmann was guilty of "an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning." Arendt recognized in Eichmann, who struck her as "not even strange" (nicht einmal unheimlich) (see letter from H.A. to Heinrich Bluecher, April 15, 1961), the exemplary criminal capable of committing "the new crime, the crime against humanity." He "supported and carried out" the physical destruction of European Jewry and would have done the same for any group or anyone at all whom a power higher than himself had decreed unfit to live. 

With the establishment of the state of Israel Jews were finally able "to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people"; they no longer needed "to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man." Arendt had long known that universal human rights are a chimera for those who lack the power to defend them. She knew from her own experience that despite any proclamation of their universality such rights are not "independent of human plurality" and are not possessed by human beings "expelled from the human community." (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Imperialism," chapter 9, "The Perplexities of the Rights of Man") She spoke, therefore, of "a right to have rights," a right "to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions," and it was that right, denied by totalitarianism, that she hoped would be seen by all as the basic principle of human solidarity. The right to have rights, the right of a plurality of people "to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each," was for Arendt the minimum condition of a common human world. That right, the source of the rights of freedom and justice, would be "politically secured" if and only if it were set forth as the principal tenet of international law, a law "above nations," the enforcement of which would be legally binding on all peoples and all nations, transcending any "rules of sovereignty."⁶ (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, first edition, "Concluding Remarks") After having written of a "right to have rights" but before encountering Eichmann Arendt spoke of the "thunder" of the "explosion" of totalitarian crimes that nevertheless leaves us silent when "we dare to ask, not 'What are we fighting against' but 'What are we fighting for?'" (see "Tradition and the Modern Age" in Between Past and Future (originally in "Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought," long manuscript); cf. "The Difficulties of Understanding") She did not answer that question directly, presumably because she wanted her readers to think it through for themselves. It seems safe to say that Arendt herself considered the fundamental right to have rights something worth "fighting for."
The difficulty is that the right to have rights, as well as the rights of man, had never been "philosophically established." Here too the Eichmann trial, in particular the question of conscience, pointed the direction for the most challenging part of Arendt's late work. In a sense she deconstructed the phenomenon of conscience into something like the rules of a changing game or, better, the changing rules of the same game. She was not satisfied with that, however, and wanted to find out what we mean when we talk about moral phenomena insofar as they are not rules, customs, or habits. She found that what had traditionally been considered the voice of conscience was in fact the actualization of consciousness in the activity of thinking. Thus the relation of thoughtlessness to evil became concrete. What is most elusive and difficult to grasp is that Arendt meant literally the activity of thinking and not its results, not things thought, from which at best new rules might be derived which would either dissolve in further thinking or become unthought customs and habits.
What Arendt meant by the actualization of consciousness was not consciousness in the psychological sense but a knowing-with-oneself (con-scientia) that imposes limits when it is experienced. The crucial point is that the activity of thinking provides an intense and ineluctable experience of plurality. While thinking, i.e., while experiencing the silent dialogue of thought, the ego splits in two, disclosing an inner difference within an apparent identity. At lightning speed these "two-in-one," as Arendt called them, converse as long as the activity of thinking lasts. She found that these thinking "partners" have to be on good terms, essentially in agreement, because they cannot go on or resume thinking if they contradict one another. Arendt grounded, existentially, the logical law of non-contradiction in the congeniality of the two-in-one. By the same token it is in the activity of thinking that the explicitly human relationship between a plurality, though it be only of two, is first established. Again, it is not an "idea" but the experience of sheer activity that makes the one not only respect and relish but refuse to abrogate at any cost the right of the other to freely exercise the right to think. Socrates, who never wrote anything, preferred to die rather than live apart from his thinking "partner" and in Arendt's many references to him stands forth as the diametric opposite of Eichmann. Eichmann's contradictions indicated not that he had lost consciousness but that he had no experience of inner plurality, no contact with himself, and that therefore he could be relied upon to do anything, anything at all, that his "conscience" assured him was his duty.⁷
The foregoing amounts to no more than a glance at Arendt's late work. It should at least be added that thinking is only one of three mental activities that concerned her. Willing depends in a different way on inner plurality. It is a restless and inharmonious activity in which the willing ego is split two or more times and pulled in different directions. Willing generates power to affect the future, yet it is only with the cessation of the activity that the individuated self "springs" into action. Judging, on which we do not have Arendt's last word, is politically the most important of these activities. As its own witness it curbs the willing ego by manifesting in the world the justness implicit in the relationship of the two-in-one of thinking. Unlike either thinking or willing judging embraces the plurality of the outer world, of distinct men and women, of persons. The major texts that Arendt wrote following Eichmann in Jerusalem revolutionize the meaning of personal responsibility and the nature of moral judgment. Although with few exceptions they have played a minor role in the abundant secondary literature that has grown up around her work, today there are indications, especially among younger readers and scholars, of a new interest in these texts. In general Arendt's thought has proved stimulating because of the depth, passion, and independence of her mind and because she had the courage to write against the grain of accepted political prejudgments or prejudices. The later works that are here made accessible (see "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," "Basic Moral Propositions," "Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy?" "Thinking and Moral Considerations," "Kant's Political Philosophy," and The Life of the Mind: "Thinking" and "Willing") add a different dimension to the attention that in all likelihood will be paid to Arendt in the future, a philosophic dimension that was there from the beginning, to be sure, but which she began to articulate only at the end of her life and did not live to fulfill. Hannah Arendt's legacy to the generations coming after her is not so much a teaching to be learned as a challenge to be met.

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6. Arendt consistently opposed the idea of sovereignty as a power above law.

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1. While in France she wrote essays on the Jewish Question and the Minority Question, and began a historical study of modern anti-Semitism (see "Judenfrage," "Zur Minderheitenfrage," and "Antisemitismus").

Eichmann in Jerusalem: " I wrote this book in a state of euphoria."

Evil: The Crime against Humanity 
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

When Eichmann was taken captive in Argentina by agents of the Israeli government and brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arendt saw an opportunity, unusual for philosophers, to confront the "realm of human affairs and human deeds . . . directly." (see "Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought") She reported on the trial for The New Yorker magazine and shortly after Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published in 1963, prompted by questions submitted by a journalist, she reflected on why she, "a writer and teacher of political philosophy . . . had . . . undertaken a reporter's job." It was, she said, because the trial offered her the opportunity to encounter "in the flesh" a notorious Nazi criminal, and she was eager to grasp, if possible, his individual guilt, why he had done what he did, which, she added, was "not relevant" to her more theoretical considerations in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the earlier work she had dealt with the "type" of totalitarian criminals, but now she sought to know "Who was Eichmann?" and "What were his deeds, not insofar as his crimes were part and parcel of the Nazi system" but insofar as he was a distinct human being? She had, she said, "the wish to expose myself--not to the deeds which, after all, were well known--but to the evildoer himself." That was "the most powerful motive in my decision to go to Jerusalem."³ (see Grafton document)

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1960s. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust.

Mary McCarthy with Hannah Arendt, Aberdeen, Scotland, ca. 1974. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust.

There are ways in which Eichmann in Jerusalem recalls the last sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but there are also important respects in which it differs. Arendt laid considerable emphasis on these differences in a number of letters. To Mary McCarthy she mentioned three of them. She wrote first that she no longer believed in "holes of oblivion" because "there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible." Secondly, she realized that "Eichmann was much less influenced by ideology" than she would have assumed before attending the trial. What had become clear to her was that "extermination per se" did not depend on ideology. Thirdly, and this was by far the most important difference, the phrase banality of evil "stands in contrast to . . . 'radical evil.'" This last distinction is developed in more detail in a letter to Gershom Scholem (see letter to Scholem, July 24, 1963). There she wrote: "It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme." "Thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated." That there is nothing in evil for thought to latch onto is what Arendt meant by the banality of evil. Not the murderous deeds but the evildoer she faced in Jerusalem and the massiveness of the evil he inflicted on the world are banal in that sense.⁴ The realization that the most extreme evil has no meaning that the human mind can reveal, that it is not only senseless in its own terms but meaningless in any terms, was momentous; to say the least it afforded Arendt relief from a burden she had borne for many years.

In a later letter to McCarthy, who had written of the moral exhilaration that reading Eichmann in Jerusalem afforded her, Arendt noted: "you were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted--namely that I wrote this book in a state of euphoria." In a letter to a German correspondent (see letter to Meier Cronemeyer, July 18th, 1963) she said that twenty years after she had learned of the existence of Auschwitz she experienced a cura posterior, i.e., a healing of her inability to think through to its root the evil of totalitarian criminality. In style Eichmann in Jerusalem is unlike anything else in the corpus of Arendt's writings. As the account of a trial of criminal action it is dramatic. In an interview Arendt said: "That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true," adding that "the tone of voice in this case is really the person," i.e., herself, the dramatist. She might have remained silent and not written the book at all, she said, but she could never have written it "differently." The posterior or later cure is important in another sense, for here, in a trial whose only purpose was to mete out justice, the terrible injury inflicted on the Jewish people would, at least in her judgment, at long last be vindicated as a crime against humanity.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: Fifty Years Later: Conference

Conference

Exercising Judgment in Ethics, Politics, and the Law: Hannah Arendt’sEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Fifty Years Later

September 26-28, 2013

Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil continues to be one of the most famous and controversial works of political theory ever written. Arendt completed writing her work on the Eichmann trial while she was a Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for the Humanities), and first published it as a series of articles in The New Yorkerin 1963. It immediately caused a controversy that has not fully subsided to this day; it also opened up a new chapter in the public awareness and understanding of genocide and played a crucial role in the emergence of the academic field of Holocaust Studies.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication and to reexamine Arendt’s claims and the heated debates they provoked, this interdisciplinary conference will feature speakers from the U.S., Israel, and Germany representing the fields of political theory, moral philosophy, intellectual history, law, Holocaust studies, feminist and gender studies, and literary theory. In reviewing Arendt’s attempt to theorize problems of judgment and responsibility and to understand evil, the speakers—all of whom are renowned experts in Arendt’s political philosophy—will situateEichmann in Jerusalem with regard to other aspects of Arendt’s moral and political thought and will reflect on the impact it has had on their own work.

Hannah Arendt was adamant that citizenship in pluralistic, democratic societies required the conscious exercise of one’s powers of judgment and that an abdication from one’s responsibility to judge could have disastrous consequences. Lecturing at Wesleyan in January 1962, she insisted, “If you say to yourself in such matters [of exercising judgment]: Who am I to judge—you have already lost.” Particular attention will be paid to how Arendt judged Eichmann’s behavior and the staging of his trial, how she was judged by her critics, and how her later musings on a Kantian theory of judgment that would supply the foundation for a new moral philosophy can help us understand the larger ethical, political, and juridical issues at stake in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The conference also includes two screenings of Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, Hannah Arendt, a Q&A with the co-screenwriter Pam Katz, a discussion about representing Eichmann in Jerusalem on the screen, and a conversation with former students about Hannah Arendt’s teaching at Wesleyan and the legacy of her biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who taught at Wesleyan for two decades.

The conference is made possible by the generous support of David Rhodes, COL ’68. It is hosted by the Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the College of Letters; Jewish and Israel Studies; German Studies; Government; Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory; and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). 

McCarthy & Arendt: 'The Group of Two' ; Lore Segal reviews 'Between Friends'

 

February 19, 1995

The Group of Two

By LORE SEGAL

 

BETWEEN FRIENDS The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975.Edited by Carol Brightman.

t was at a New York party in 1945 that Mary McCarthy, an American, a Roman Catholic, a novelist and a critic, offended the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jew. Unable, one imagines, to refrain from an opportunity for wit, McCarthy said she felt sorry for Hitler, who wanted even his victims to love him. Arendt asked how such a thing could be said to her, a Hitler victim who had been in a concentration camp.

In her introduction to "Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975," the editor, Carol Brightman, reports that it was Arendt who put an end to the following three years' chill between the two women, admitting to McCarthy that the French camp where she had been interned was not a concentration camp. "We think so much alike," Arendt said to McCarthy, offering an intense friendship that lasted until Arendt's death and is documented in their 26-year correspondence.
Their letters tend to open like everybody else's, with puzzled regret at not having written sooner. Both were extraordinarily active: they thought, wrote and published; they taught, lectured and traveled; they leaped into controversies. Both became famous, and fame can be a burden. In 1963, after publication of her novel "The Group," McCarthy wrote, "Success seems to take so much of your time, you are devoured by it."
In their letters they ranged widely. They gossiped, laughed at their friends and worried about them. They talked politics, exchanged philosophical ideas, celebrated and criticized each other's work. They write "I am really homesick for you," and they long "just to see you and talk." Before they close each remembers to send affectionate messages to the other's husband. In 1949, at the beginning of the correspondence, McCarthy had divorced Edmund Wilson (that "old woman") and married Bowden Broadwater ("just two people playing house like congenial children"). McCarthy communicated her intimate adventures to her friend. She asked for Arendt's discretion when she confided in her about a hapless London affair and about the theologian Paul Tillich's attempt to seduce her on a trans-Atlantic crossing. In 1960 Arendt was privy to McCarthy's discovery of more and more charms and virtues in her new love, the American diplomat James West, who was to be her fourth and final husband. "He has a kind of exquisite tenderness, toward things as well as persons," McCarthy wrote from Warsaw; "the ordinary Poles . . . all love him." She suspected her friends, yes, even dearest Hannah, of "condoning" those two dastardly soon-to-be-exes -- her current husband, Broadwater, and West's wife -- who were not letting themselves be shed quietly. In a characteristic letter -- clear, firm, not unsympathetic -- Arendt explained that she was not about to turn against Broadwater while his life was in ruins and reminded McCarthy that she had once trusted him enough to marry him. It is the only time in their correspondence when McCarthy could not hear what her friend was saying.

 

Arendt thought of herself as reticent. In 1970, after her Berlin-born husband, Heinrich Blucher, died of a heart attack, she wrote, "I don't think I told you that for 10 long years I had been constantly afraid that just such a sudden death would happen." McCarthy replied that she had known of Arendt's fear. It was Arendt who was unaware of having communicated her continual fright, which she said "frequently bordered on real panic."
What sort of friendship was it between these two women with such different pasts and temperaments?
It's not that they "think so much alike," but that they did what Hannah Arendt called "this thinking-business" for and with each other. There are letters that read like little essays by Montaigne. Of Truth: Arendt said it was not "the end of a thought-process" but "the condition for the possibility of thinking." Of Equality: McCarthy wrote that it was a worm "eating away . . . the 'class distinctions' between the sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly." "Let us talk about the equality business; most interesting," replied Arendt, adding that "constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity."
"Taste," Arendt wrote on another occasion, "is a principle of 'organization,' " of "who in the world belongs together" and how "we recognize each other." Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy recognized and belonged with each other. Both responded to the political moment; they were on the same side. We read their letters, and like the stage manager in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," we revisit events whose outcomes we suffered years ago. McCarthy was early and urgent in wanting to do something about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The next situation they could do nothing about was the 1952 Presidential election. McCarthy didn't know what to think of Adlai Stevenson, but wrote: "My breath is bated to see what he would do in office. . . . The wit is not very good, but the sarcasms are alive." She thought Richard Nixon's success as a Vice-Presidential candidate "would mean that mass society is a reality, which nobody here . . . really has ever believed except in talk." In 1960 McCarthy quipped that Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was "not a human being but a figure in a serial comic strip . . . an outline drawing." The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 "is going to be one of those litmus-paper issues or goat-and-sheep dividers, like the Moscow Trials and Pasternak and your 'Eichmann.' " In 1965 Arendt summarized a scenario she had read about "a neat little nightmare" of China declaring war on the United States and then overwhelming us by surrendering. And then Vietnam: though "hamstrung" by her husband's Foreign Service career, McCarthy again felt she must do something, and in 1968 she visited Hanoi.

 

They worried about their friends: when Robert Lowell had another breakdown, McCarthy wrote, "Cal is in poor shape again; it must be the most monotonous fate for him." When the poet W. H. Auden died in 1973, Arendt sadly remembered refusing "to take care of him when he came and asked for shelter." He had come, a month after Heinrich's death, wanting her to marry him.
Husbands, lovers, friends, acquaintanceships -- their salon spread across the Western world. There are philosophers: Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Isaiah Berlin; French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Nathalie Sarraute; in Italy, the writers Alberto Moravia and Ignazio Silone and the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Arendt disliked Vladimir Nabokov: "He thinks of himself in terms of 'more intelligent than,' " a vulgarity she said she was allergic to because "I know it so well, know so many people cursed with it." Arendt and McCarthy had the same taste in vulgarity. The very laws of probability conspired to keep them from contact with regular people, which was just as well for the regular people. As a guest at the Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation's Italian retreat, Hannah Arendt found herself amid "scholars, or rather professors, from all countries . . . with their wives, some of them are plain nuts, others play the piano or type busily the non-masterworks of their husbands."
The friends read and admired each other's work. "The sensation of being honored doesn't diminish with familiarity," McCarthy wrote in answer to a fan letter from Arendt. They honored each other with criticism. McCarthy pointed out some "barbarisms" in Arendt's English usage and chided Arendt's translators, "whose language, far from achieving precision, creates a blur."
In her letters to Arendt, McCarthy might acknowledge certain weaknesses in herself as novelist, but against the critical world the two friends manned the trenches together for each other. Arendt on a negativereview of McCarthy's novel "Birds of America": "The old malice. . . . Also of course sheer stupidity." McCarthy on editorial politics: a negative review of Arendt's "Human Condition" "was certainly commissioned, the way you commission a murder from a gangster."

 

Their good friend Elizabeth Hardwick's anonymous spoof of "The Group," published in The New York Review of Books as "The Gang," and Norman Mailer's pan of the same novel have become literary footnotes. But the simultaneous furor over Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" -- particularly its subtitle, "A Report on the Banality of Evil," and the issue of Jewish cooperation with the Nazis -- is likely to revive with the publication of these letters. We Jews continue to feel the Holocaust as a wound; therefore we prescribe the manner in which it can be handled. At that party in 1945, Mary McCarthy handled it badly and Arendt cried out. In 1963 Arendt attended the Eichmann trial, and followed the facts, as she saw them, where they led her. The book raised a cry of pain that never quite subsided.
In his response in Partisan Review, Lionel Abel wanted to differentiate between Arendt's "esthetic" and his own (superior) "moral" judgment. But isn't moral judgment, too, a matter of "taste," that is to say of the "principle of organization" by which we understand innocence and evil? The litmus test divides those who need their victims to be driven-snow white from those who see them in every shade. There are those to whom evil is more terrible when it is absolute, an idea, inhuman, and those of us who fear that it is human indeed, ubiquitous, available at all times for the totalitarian idea. Sympathetic Mary McCarthy, with only one Jewish grandmother, rushed in, said everything all wrong, and apologized to her friend for making more trouble.

 

Jane Austen understood such friendship between women: "There was not a creature in the world to whom she spoke with such unreserve . . . with such conviction of being listened to and understood, of being always interesting and always intelligible." And "the very sight of Mrs. Weston, her smile, her touch, her voice was grateful to Emma."
Hannah Arendt, German-born, a Jew, a Hitler victim, also understood it, and summed it up for the American Catholic, Mary McCarthy: "Your cards and letters -- so dear and then also so immensely sensible, just the day-to-day continuity of life and friendship."
Lore Segal's first novel, "Other People's Houses," and her most recent, "Her First American," have been reissued in paperback.

From Radio Islam: Hannah Arendt on Zionism

Hannah Arendt on Zionism

In her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem", Dr. Hannah Arendt, who is neither left-wing nor pro-Palestinian, and who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, touched on some of the questions involved, although she did not really hit the sore spots and did not directly accuse the Zionist movement of collaboration with Nazism.

Zionist Emigration and Gestapo Expulsion

Hannah Arendt wrote: 

During its first few years, Hitler's rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as 'the decisive defeat of assimilationism'. Hence, the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that 'dissimilation', combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a 'mutually fair solution'. At the time, many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed "Reichsvereiningung" were held by Zionists (whereas the authentic Jewish "Reichsvereiningung" had been composed of both Zionists and non-Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were the 'decent' Jews since they too thought in 'national terms'. To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as 'mere propaganda'. There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine - a 'Ha'avara', or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods 'made in Germany'.
"Of Greater importance for Eichmann were the emissaries from Palestine, who would approach the Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist the help for the illegal immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S: were helpful. They negotiated with Eichmann in Vienna, and they reported that he was 'polite', 'not the shouting type', and that he even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. ('On one occasion, he expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews' and on another 'a special train was made available and Nazi officials accompanied' a group of emigrants, ostensibly headed for Zionist training farms in Yugoslavia, to see them safely across the border). According to the story told by Jon and David Kimche, with 'the full and generous cooperation of all the chief actors' (The Secret Roads: The 'Illegal' Migration of a People, 1938-1948, London, 1954), these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations: 'That was not their job'. They wanted to select 'suitable material', and their chief enemy, prior to the extermination program, was not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries, Germany or Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland: that enemy was definitely Britain, not Germany. Indeed, they were in a position to deal with the Nazi authorities on a footing amounting to equality, which native Jews were not, since they enjoyed the protection of the mandatory power; they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual interests and were certainly the first to be given permission 'to pick young Jewish pioneers' from among the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, they were unaware of the sinister implications of this deal, which still lay in the future; but they too somehow believed that if it was a question of selecting Jews for survival, the Jews should do the selecting themselves. It was this fundamental error in judgement that eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies - the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities".
(pp. 59-61)

The Jewish Councils

On collaboration by the Judenrat officials, Dr. Arendt wrote: 

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work *The Destruction of the European Jews* I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, 'the sale of the armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable'. In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power - 'The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower', as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder - like captains 'whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo'; like saviors who 'with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand'. The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to 'blind fate', 'truly holy principles' were needed 'as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the unknown person and with this decides his life or death'. And whom did these 'holy principles' single out for salvation? Those 'who had worked all their lives for the 'zibur' (community)' - i.e. the functionaries - and the 'most prominent Jews', as Kastner says in his report.
"No one bothered to swear the Jewish officials to secrecy; they were voluntary 'bearers of secrets', either in order to assure quiet and prevent panic, as in Dr. Kastner's case, or out of 'humane' considerations, such as that 'living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be the harder', as in the case of Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin. During the Eichmann trial, one witness pointed out the unfortunate consequences of this kind of 'humanity' - people volunteered for deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried to tell them the truth as being 'not sane'. We know the physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi period very well: they ranged all the way from Chaim Rumkowski, eldest of the Jews in Lodz, called Chaim I, who issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his portrait, and who rode around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage; through Leo Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who believed Jewish policemen would be 'more gentle and helpful' and would 'make the ordeal easier' (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them); to, finally, a Jew who committed suicide - like Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who was not a rabbi but an unbeliever, a Polish-speaking Jewish engineer, but who must still have remembered the rabbinical saying: 'Let them kill you, but don't cross the line'." (pp. 117-119)

Dr. Arendt's conclusion was that without this collaboration, many lives could have been saved: 

But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people". (p.125).

The Zionist Response to Arendt

Initially, Dr. Arendt's book received a sympathetic reaction from the Israeli press, but almost immediately the Zionist propaganda machine was turned on full blast to attack it because the 'concept about Jewish participation in the Nazi holocaust ...may plague Jews for years to come' (Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah, Grove Press, New York, 1978). 

On 11 March 1963 the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League issued a 'summary' recommended to 'book reviewers and others when the volume appears' which accused Hannah Arendt of saying, among other things: 

That Europe's Jewish organisations in the main, played a 'disastrous role' by cooperating with the Nazi extermination machine. As a result the Jews, themselves, bear a large share of the blame" (emphasis added) (ibid.) 

As Hannah Arendt commented in the New York Review of Books, 20 January 1966: 

In other words, as everybody soon knew and repeated, my 'thesis' was that the Jews had murdered themselves 

 

This line was repeated by almost every reviewer of Arendt's book, as though, in Mary McCarthy's telling phrase, they came out of a 'mimeographing machine', which in fact they did. 

Eichmann's prosecutor Gideon Hausner, even announced in the New York Daily News (20 May, 1963): 

The author would have you believe that Eichmann really wasn't a Nazi, that the Gestapo aided Jews, that Eichmann actually was unaware of Hitler's evil plans...

This sort of response is fairly typical of the Zionist reaction when questions about Nazi collaboration are raised. Although the first attacks on Hannah Arendt's book described it as an 'otherwise masterly report' and said that 'Dr. Arendt is a recognized scholar' and 'a person of eminent respectability', by the end of the campaign they had to prove that the 'evil book' was written by an 'evil person'. 

Whole books were written by various 'experts' to refute her (see, for example Jacob Robinson's And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt's Narrative', Macmillan, New York, 1965. This is a vitriolic page-by-page attempted rebuttal but is, however, a disjointed apologia as far as the facts are concerned). 

In 'The Jew as a Pariah', she describes the campaign against her: 

No one will doubt the effectiveness of modern image-making and no one acquainted with Jewish organisations and their countless channels of communication outside their immediate range will underestimate their possibilities in influencing public opinion. For greater than their direct power of control is the voluntary outside help upon which they can draw from Jews who, though they may not be at all interested in Jewish affairs, will flock home, as it were, out of age-old fears (no longer justified, let us hope, but still very much alive) when their people or its leaders are criticized. What I had done according to their lights was the crime of crimes. I had told 'the truth in a hostile environment,' as an Israeli official told me, and what the A.D.C. and all the other organizations did was to hoist the danger signal..." (p.275).

The campaign backfires

According to Dr. Arendt, the campaign 'was of course a farce, but it was effective': 

Or was it? After all, the denunciation of book and author, with which they achieved great, though by no means total, success, was not their goal. It was only the means with which to prevent the discussion of an issue 'which may plague Jews for years to come'. And as far as this goal was concerned, they achieved the precise opposite. If they had left well enough alone, this issue, which I had touched upon only marginally, would not have been trumpeted all over the world. In their efforts to prevent people from reading what I had written, or, in case such misfortune had already happened, to provide the necessary reading glasses, they blew it up out of all proportion, not only with reference to my book but with reference to what had actually happened. They forgot that they were mass organisations, using all the means of mass communication, so that every issue they touched at all, pro or contra, was liable to attract the attention of masses whom they then no longer could control. So what happened after a while in these meaningless and mindless debates was that people began to think that all the nonsense the image-makers had made me say was the actual historical truth. Thus, with the unerring precision with which a bicyclist on his first ride will collide with the obstacle he is most afraid of, Mr. Robinson's formidable supporters have put their whole power at the service of propagating what they were most anxious to avoid. So that now, as a result of their folly, literally everybody feels the need for a 'major work' on Jewish conduct in the face of catastrophe (ibid.)

 

"Think without bannisters" - 'Hannah Arendt' Director Margarethe von Trotta explains

Margarethe von Trotta

The light that comes from a person’s works enters directly into the world and remains after the
person dies. Whether it is large or small, transitory or enduring, depends upon the world and its
ways. Posterity will judge.
The light that comes from a person’s life—spoken words, gestures, friendships—survives only in
memories. If it is to enter into the world, it must find a new form. A story must be made from many
memories and stories.
—Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of the biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World



The light that Hannah Arendt’s work brought into the world still shines. And because her work is invoked
by an ever-increasing number of people, it becomes brighter every day. In a time when most felt obligated
to adhere to a specific ideology, Arendt was a shining example of someone who remained true to her
unique perspective on the world.

In 1983 I wanted to make a film about Rosa Luxemburg, because I was convinced that she was the most
important woman and thinker of the last century. I was eager to comprehend the woman behind this
fighter and revolutionary. But now, as we begin the 21st century, Arendt is an even more important figure.
Her foresight and wisdom are only just beginning to be fully understood and addressed. When she first
formulated the concept of the “banality of evil”—a term she coined in her report on the Eichmann trial—
she was sharply criticized and attacked as if she were an enemy of the Jewish people. Today, this
concept has become an essential component of any discussion that seeks to judge the crimes of the
Nazis.

And once again, I was interested in finding the woman behind this great and independent thinker. She
was born in Germany and died in New York. What brought her there?
As a Jew, she certainly hadn’t left Germany voluntarily and for this reason, her story raises a question I
have asked in many of my other films: how does a person behave in the face of historical and social
events that he or she cannot influence or change? Like many other Jews, Arendt could have been a
victim of National Socialism. But she was quick to recognize the danger and fled from Germany to Paris.
When France was invaded, she left from Marseilles and made her way through Spain and Portugal, and
finally to New York. As she fled, she thought bitterly of the many friends who had chosen to remain
behind and support the Nazis. She was deeply disappointed to see how quickly they adapted to the “new
era,” and described this phenomenon in an interview as: “Zu Hitler fiel ihnen was ein.” This means that in
order to justify their decision, “they made up ideas about Hitler.”

Exile was her “second awakening.” The first transformation in her life came when she studied philosophy
with Martin Heidegger. At that time, she was certain that her life’s vocation would be in the pursuit of pure
thought. But after her forced exile, she had no choice but to engage with the events of the real world. By
1960, when she finally felt settled in America, she was ready to take on one of the most tragic chapters of
the 20th century. She would look directly into the face of the man whose name evoked the murder of
millions of Jews: Adolf Eichmann.



Our film concentrates on the four turbulent years when the lives of Arendt and Eichmann crossed. This
focus offered the opportunity to tell a story that would lead to a profound understanding of both the
historical and highly emotional impact of this explosive confrontation. When the uncompromising and
unconventional thinker faced the submissive and dutiful bureaucrat, both Arendt and the discourse on the
Holocaust changed forever. In Eichmann, she saw a man whose fatal mixture of obedience and an
inability to think for himself (“Gedankenlosigkeit”) was what enabled him to transport millions of people to
the gas chambers.

Portraying Arendt almost exclusively during the period which begins with Eichmann’s capture and ends
shortly after the publication of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, made it
possible to not only investigate her groundbreaking work, but also to reveal her character and personality.
We get to know her as a woman, as a lover—and most important to her character—as a friend. There are
only few flashbacks that take us back to the 1920s and then the 1950s—showing the youthful Hannah’s
passionate love affair with Martin Heidegger, as well as their reunion years after the war ended. She
never managed to let go of her connection to Heidegger, despite the fact that he joined the National
Socialist Party in 1933. These flashbacks are important to understanding Arendt’s past, but the film is
primarily concerned with her life and relationships in New York: with her husband Heinrich Blücher (who
she had met in exile in Paris); with her German and American friends, especially the author Mary
McCarthy; and with her oldest friend, the Jewish-German philosopher Hans Jonas.
This is a film that shows Arendt as a person caught between her thoughts and her emotions—one who
often has to disentangle her intellect from her feelings. We see her as a passionate thinker and professor;
as a woman capable of lifelong friendship—she was hailed as a woman who was a “genius at
friendship”—but also as a fighter who courageously defended her ideas and never shied away from any
confrontation. But her goal was always to understand. Her signature declaration, “I want to understand,” is
the phrase that best describes her.



And it is precisely in her quest to understand people and the world that made me feel overwhelmingly
drawn to her. Like Arendt, I never want to judge, but only to understand. In this film, for example, I want to
understand what Arendt thought about totalitarianism and the moral collapse in the last century; about
self-determination and freedom of choice; and finally, what she managed to illuminate about evil and
about love. And I hope that the audience will come to comprehend, just as I did, why it is important to
remember this great thinker.

The key to understanding her life is in Arendt’s wish to sustain what she called amor mundi, or the “love of
the world.” Although her forced exile caused her to experience both vulnerability and dire alienation, she
continued to believe in the power of the individual to withstand the cruel force of history. Her refusal to be
overwhelmed by despair and helplessness makes her, in my eyes, an extraordinary woman whose “light
still shines today”. A woman who can love and be loved. And a woman who can, as she put it, “think
without banisters.” That is to be an independent thinker.
In order to offer an authentic vision of Arendt as a human being, we ultimately had to move beyond the
mountain of written and archival audiovisual sources. Therefore, after a long period of traditional research,
we conducted extensive interviews with contemporaries who had been a part of Hannah Arendt’s life and
work for many years.

—Margarethe von Trotta

The Company They Kept by Vivian Gornick

The following essay is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of Mary McCarthy’s novel, “The Oasis,” which will be published by Melville House on June 18th.

When my friends and I were in our twenties in the 1950s, we read two writers—Colette and Mary McCarthy—as others read the Bible: to learn better who we were and how, given the constraint of our condition, we were to live. Their novels and stories, collectively speaking, constituted our Book of Wisdom.

The condition, of course, was that we were young women, and that Marriage and Motherhood was the territory upon which our battle with Life was expected to be pitched. As we were intellectually ambitious girls, English majors whose relation to literature was intensely personal, it was to fiction that we looked for ways to circumvent the conventions we were expected to live out. This was a tricky business, as literature itself was divided on the issue. If we read Henry James or George Eliot, and imagined ourselves Isabel Archer or Dorothea Brooke, it meant that while an intelligent girl could put up a good fight, she was ineluctably headed for pedestrian tragedy at the hands of some deceptively worthy man (if we read Thomas Hardy, the tragedy was not so pedestrian). It was only in the work of Colette and McCarthy—neither on the syllabus of any lit course I ever took—that we saw two gloriously shocking spins put on the narrative that we’d grown up believing was our destiny.

In neither of these writers did marriage or motherhood figure at all. For Colette, Love with a capital L, as she referred to erotic obsession, was the ultimate experience for a woman. To know Passion was the thing, even—or perhaps especially—if it meant the loss of bourgeois respectability; and if, at the end, when youth and beauty were gone, and one was left humiliated by the inability to arouse desire, so be it. One had lived. On this score not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood the stakes as well as Colette. Her work sounded depths of understanding that were like nothing we had ever encountered. She alone could make high art out of the dilemma of a woman “in the grip,” elevate Love to the same metaphoric heights that another novelist could reach through the contemplation of God or War.


But Mary McCarthy spoke to another kind of romance alive in us, one closer to the bone: that of seeing ourselves as New Women, independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience. In this scenario, sexual love was flatly instrumental, and this too was exciting, as it illuminated a reality many of us were, unwittingly, beginning to inhabit: that of the unexpected setbacks one encountered on the road to experience. Instead of concentrating on the permutations of ecstasy at a high level as Colette did, McCarthy concentrated on the cost of liberated sex: the startling mixture of curiosity, excitement, and dismay that went with actually taking off your clothes and lying down with a stranger who, before you made love, was tantalizing, and afterward was the catalyst for that which left you with the taste of iron in your mouth.
The thing we prized most in McCarthy was the no-holds-barred honesty with which she nailed the situation. In “The Company She Keeps” (her first novel, published in 1942), she gave us a female protagonist in whom we could see ourselves reflected as we were, right then and there. Who among us, in the 1950s, could not identify with Meg Sargent, bold as brass when she meets the Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt on a train traveling west and then, next morning, is crawling around on his sleeping-car floor, trying desperately to find her second stocking before he wakes up and forces her to face the humiliating complications of casual sex. The scene was so real that readers like me and my friends could only feel redeemed both by its remarkable verisimilitude and then by the scary brilliance of the prose, edged not in sentiment or social realism but in glittering irony.
It was the irony in McCarthy’s writing that carried the day; inherent in it was a mockery from which no one—not even the protagonist—was safe. But most especially the men were not safe. What fools McCarthy made of her men! Not knaves, fools. Just to see them so portrayed, lowered into a bath of scorn, was to feel ourselves raised up. It would be twenty years more before we, the young women who read her in the 1950s, would understand why those early McCarthy stories had spoken so directly to us. That cold, hard stare of hers at romantic relations between men and women was soon to be ours, as one by one we had graduated into a world every bit as sexist as hers had been, and it was only now, in the 1970s, that many of us were able to see McCarthy’s relentless need to hold her characters up to ridicule as a line of defense equal to that of Clarissa Dalloway’s withdrawal from the marital bed.

* * * 
Mary McCarthy was born in 1912 in Seattle, the eldest in a family of four children. When she was six years old her parents died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed nearly fifty million people across the globe. The McCarthy children were taken in by their paternal grandparents and lived for some years in the Midwest under conditions that Mary later insisted, in “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” were Dickensian: brutalizing in mind, body, and spirit.
In her teens, Mary was rescued by her maternal grandparents, returned to Seattle, and thereafter lived in an atmosphere of wealth and kindliness that, nonetheless, did little to mitigate the crude lovelessness of those mean Midwestern years. By the time she entered Vassar she was the fully formed person she would be for the rest of her life: beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked. She married straight out of college in 1933, came to live in New York, soon got divorced, rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, and began her life.
McCarthy and her husband (a man of the theater) had met James T. Farrell, then a well-known novelist on the left, and after her divorce in 1936, it was to Farrell’s Sunday open house that she often made her way. Here she met a wealth of interesting people, made connections among those in publishing, and was soon writing book reviews. Within a year her classy, good-looking, frighteningly clever presence was wanted at literary left-wing parties, where, as her biographer Carol Brightman tells us, she was introduced to “progressive hosts and modernist hostesses” at whose functions voices rose “in lively controversy over the new play, the new strike, the new Moscow trials, the new abstract show at the Modern Museum.”
It was at these parties that she met the men (Philip Rahv and William Phillips chief among them) who, in 1937, decided to revive the defunct magazine Partisan Review, which had once been the literary arm of the Communist Party. These men were anti-Stalinist Marxists in love with modernism, and bent on defying the CP’s primitive understanding of literature as a tool of polemics; they loved Trotsky because he had said that art could best aid the revolution by being true to itself rather than to political correctness, by which was meant the social realism that dominated the fiction of the 1930s.
As McCarthy had been heard to denounce Stalinism at one party or another, she was invited to join the staff of the new Partisan Review. Taken on as a drama critic, she quickly and joyously found her youthfully fierce writing voice—and her career as a take-no-prisoners writer was launched. Of Maxwell Anderson, a popular left-wing playwright of the time, she did not hesitate to write, “Once again he has been inspired by a lofty theme and once again the mediocrity of his talent has reduced it to inconsequentiality.” And when Eugene O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh” was being hailed as a remarkable piece of work, she berated O’Neill for his sentimentality in using a bunch of drunks who (in order to deliver the playwright’s message) became more and more articulate as the play went on, when everyone knew that alcohol meant the dissolution of personality, not its sharpening.
“From the beginning,” Carol Brightman tells us, “Partisan Review was surrounded by the kind of controversy that quickened Mary McCarthy’s pulse.” She loved the people at the magazine not for their own particular selves but because, in McCarthy’s own words, they were “a self-proclaimed elite whose measure was to be taken not by its nearness to money or to established institutions, including Communist institutions, but by its performance as a harbinger of cultural change.” In essence, this meant endless argument, endless theorizing, endless scoring. McCarthy herself held no real position on any of the issues argued. She was never a serious Marxist, or modernist, for that matter—but she was serious about being the provocative child at the back of the room announcing the emperor had no clothes, the one who was always pointing out the inconsistent and the meretricious in whatever argument was being held among all these self-importantly serious, mainly Jewish, intellectuals.
One among them, however, she did love for his very own self: Philip Rahv. The central figure in this influential little hotbed of intellectual superiority, Rahv held a passionately uncompromising view of what constituted the real thing, in literature as in politics. It was the passion behind Rahv’s judgments that elevated him to the position of the most feared, and therefore the most respected, of all—editors and writers alike—who encountered him in the flesh. As Elizabeth Hardwick said of him at his funeral, his outstanding characteristic was “a contempt for … the tendency to inflate local and fleeting cultural accomplishments. This slashing away at low levels of taste and at small achievements passing as masterly … was a crusade some more bending souls might have grown weary of. But he was not ashamed of his extensive ‘negativism’ and instead went on right up to the end scolding … unworthy accommodation” not for the sake of establishing his own authority but for “the honor and integrity of history itself.”


Like all the others at Partisan Review, Mary was seriously intimidated by Rahv’s intellectual self-confidence; so the only way to even things out was to go to bed with him. Surprisingly, the two fell in love and became a couple, living openly together to the priggish dismay of many of their comrades, who, in reality, were as frightened of sex without marriage as any bourgeois or working-class puritan could be—and were even more frightened of women. Among men like Delmore Schwartz, McCarthy was roundly condemned as the vamp who had Rahv, the poor fool, in her clutches. When, in 1938, she suddenly and without warning married Edmund Wilson, with whom she had secretly been sleeping, the men at Partisan Review felt sneeringly vindicated. Rahv himself was stunned.
Marriage to Edmund Wilson provided Mary McCarthy with an experience of major clarification. For one thing, the Jewish intellectuals had been exotics to her, whereas Wilson, for reasons of class and origin, was her familiar; it came as a surprise that in marrying him, as she said in later years, she felt the relief of “coming home.” Then again, she was now with a man who was essentially literary, not political, and when, at Wilson’s insistence, she tried her hand at fiction, and the first shot out of the box came cool, calculating “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”—the story that would eventually become the startling first chapter in “The Company She Keeps”—she knew that this was where her writing talent best connected. The stories that then began to pour out of her made it icy clear that it was through fiction that she had become, and would remain—irresistibly and irrepressibly—a social satirist of the first order.
It is poignant to see that when McCarthy was writing the kind of satire that involved autobiographical characters like Meg Sargent, or Martha Sinnott in “A Charmed Life,” a strain of sympathetic regret softened her otherwise uncompromising take on characters whom she mainly presented as the sum of their disabilities. It never occurred to her that the models for her characters, those whom she was presenting as pompous or self-deluded, would see themselves any differently—after all, she was only speaking the self-evident truth—and was always taken aback when they either bellowed like wounded bears at seeing themselves skewered in print or simply stopped inviting her to their parties. One who bellowed like a bear was Philip Rahv, who actually thought of bringing suit to prevent the publication in 1949 of “The Oasis.”
The novella tells the story of a group of would-be utopians who, on the eve of the Cold War and just as fear of the Bomb is heating up, gather together to form a cooperative commune that, by its very existence, they think, will lodge a significant protest against the End of the World scenarios that are overtaking the West. The characters were all drawn from McCarthy’s professional and social life: the men at Partisan Review itself, as well as those who filled the vast, loosely knit world of left-wing sympathizers, bohemians, fellow travelers, and hangers-on in which she moved. Thus we have among the Utopians not only intellectual leaders but “an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted good will, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys … , a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers … , a middle-aged poet … , an actor and a radio script-writer,” as well as their various husbands, wives, and children.
The ideological leanings of the group are divided between the realists and the purists, led on the one hand by Will Taub (clearly Philip Rahv) and on the other by Macdougal Macdermott (even more clearly Dwight Macdonald). But whether realists or purists, all take themselves and their enterprise very seriously; above all, they take seriously their own internal divisions. They might not know how to come up with a working definition of social democracy, but they certainly know how to obsess over each other’s theoretical differences. (Informed of the large number of people who are with him, Taub instinctively responds with “Never mind that. Who’s against us?”) Whatever the issue, the Utopian leaders will show “far less constraint in characterizing the [opinions of their opponents] as childish, unrealistic, unhistorical, etc., than in formulating a rhetoric of democratic ideals.” This is the failure of moral imagination in “The Oasis” upon which McCarthy will concentrate her mocking attention.
From the get-go, she taunts the mixed motives and self-deceptions with which the Communards arrive in Utopia. Imagining that what they are about to do will provide an example for the world to emulate, they are in fact, each in his or her own peculiar way, more preoccupied with secret self-regard than with Utopia’s large-minded statement of purpose. In the very first paragraph we are told that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia because

Joe, in real life a diabetic businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to get more out of it than anybody else … He intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists … He would not have been in earnest about the higher life if he had failed to think of it in terms of the speed-up.

Then, for (sadly) comic relief, we have Katy and Preston, who, married a bare two years and ardently of the purist party, are mainly involved in strategizing their marital misery. Whenever they have an argument Katy instantly goes on an emotional jag that Preston despises and has never known how to escape; but now he, “no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself.” Utopia was giving him “a privacy he had sought in vain during [their] two years of marriage.” Katy, in turn, was discovering that “the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded to her grief.”
And yet again, there is Taub’s sidekick, Harold Sidney (William Phillips): “A clever and fair-minded man, receptive to discussion and argument, he disliked giving pain, and this, in conjunction with the doctrine of necessity to which he and his colleagues were wedded, had made him somewhat weak and evasive.… His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent’s position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.”
It is Joe Lockman who is the cause of the first moral difficulty the Utopians find themselves in. “My God,” cries the ever impassioned Macdougal Macdermott, upon learning that Lockman has been admitted to the colony, “aren’t we going to have any standards?… This fellow is a yahoo.” When his wife points out that ostracizing Joe would be “an ugly beginning for a community devoted to brotherhood,” Macdermott instantly changes course (as he will time and again), announcing her absolutely right, that Joe must be admitted to their company. But the argument itself has caused unease. “The incident, in fact, had frightened them a little. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them from themselves.”
Still, there remains a Kantian puzzle. “Was it to follow then that anyone could be admitted to Utopia—a thief, a blackmailer, a murderer? Why not, declared the purists.… Impossible, said the realists.” The point, thankfully, remains untested. “No murderers or thieves applied, only ordinary people of ordinary B-plus morality, people whose crimes, that is, had been confined to an intimate circle, and who had never injured anybody but a close friend, a relation, a wife, a husband, themselves.”
And there we have the brilliant and quite original thesis of “The Oasis”: the people of the ideological left—intellectuals and plebeians alike—imagine themselves moralists of the first order, when they are in fact possessed of only B-plus morality. In the hands of an Edmund Wilson this thesis might have invoked a sense of tragedy; in the hands of Philip Rahv himself, unmitigated scorn; with Mary McCarthy it becomes an instrument of contemplative ridicule—perhaps the unkindest cut of all.
The reason that Rahv went ballistic when he read “The Oasis” was that McCarthy is caricaturing his own deeply held credo when she tells us that Will Taub’s “whole sense of intellectual assurance rested on the fixed belief in the potency of history to settle questions of value.” In practice this meant that he allowed “anyone (this automatically excluded fascists and communists) the liberty of behaving as ineffectually as he wished. But the right of a human being to think that he could resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning was something denied him with all the ferocity of [his] own pent-up nature and disappointed hopes.” And then the coup de grâce: Taub himself had nothing to offer, by way of a concrete proposal, in the matter of how right-minded people were actually to live out their ideals.
The final test for the Utopians, which they fail badly, comes when a strange family starts picking strawberries in their fields and, after speaking reasonably to the poachers and receiving no response, Preston and another colonist, not knowing what else to do, drive them off the land by taking potshots in the air with a gun filled with blanks. Joe Lockman, of all people, is the one to call them on this appalling solution to the problem with which they thought they had been faced: “ ‘You’ve done a terrible thing,’ he said solemnly, going up to the two young men and putting a hand on the shoulder of each. ‘You’ve driven a man and his family off this property with a gun.… I never thought this could happen here.’ ” McCarthy sums up the incident:

A phase of the colony had ended, everyone privately conceded.… The distaste felt by some … was so acute that they questioned the immediate validity of staying on in a colony where such a thing could take place. The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle-class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

The mockery ends in self-mockery as one of the Utopians observes, “Nice people like these are always all right, unless you take them off guard.”
“The Oasis” was first published in England in the British magazine Horizon. Its English readers, who could easily identify the original of all the major players, roared with laughter (as we would have, had the shoe been on the other foot) at this marvelously executed send-up of the American intellectual scene; many American critics, however, pronounced it brilliant but heartless. They were wrong. The book is not heartless. It is not out for blood. True, irony inevitably means some fundamental sympathy is being withheld, but the irony here is not savage. Its deliciously witty sentence structure is rooted in the heartfelt disappointment of a moralist whom the reader feels has really wanted the good (that is, the genuine) in our midst to prevail.
Today, everyone connected with “The Oasis,” including its author, is long dead, and as the world from which it emerged is also long gone, the roman à clef aspect of the novella seems no longer of consequence. What does remain of consequence is the moving sense of familiarity with which we encounter McCarthy’s Utopians who, decked out in their all-too-human shortcomings, are still hungry to make anew a world in which we can all be saved from ourselves.