babich-margarethe von trotta's hannah arendt and karl jaspers

8/13/2019 Babich-Margarethe Von Trotta's Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers

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Arendts Radical Good and the Banality of Evil:

Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von TrottasHannah Arendt

Babette BabichFordham University, New York City

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

Margarethe von Trottas 2013 film Hannah Arendt, starring Barbara Sukowa as Hannah

Arendt is an immense achievement as a film that raises both socio-political as well as,

and this is more difficult still, specifically philosophical questions in the context of

Arendts 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem.2 Indeed, as we shall see, the film

manages to make an important if subtle commentary on Arendts subtitle: A Report on

the Banality of Evil. In the current context, having noted this achievement I must also

emphasize what the film does not do, it omits (in the interest of public absorbability, so

one must assume) all manner of detail but above all the film elides several key names

that should have been included if only because these names served as sources for the

films dialogue (I refer to the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem as

well as the similarly excluded from mention correspondence between Arendt and Karl

Jaspers). Here, too, my assumption is that the reduction of Arendts and Heideggers

friendship to inevitably caricaturish cameos of the flashback variety and I suppose tat

be explained in terms of the challenges of the same relationship.3

The socio-political has been much discussed in the reviews, both laudatory and

damning (where it should be noted that there are too many laudatory accounts that

manage to get in a few damns, a few reservations, of the Hannah Arendt was right

about xbut wrong about yvariety).


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The film itself is a series of tableaus, almost theater-like, and as a result the actors do an

enormous amount of work on the film, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Arendt but also

Axel Milberg who plays her husband Heinrich Blcher as a man with ongoing affairs

softened by the clear affection with which Blcher treats his wife. The actorsachievement has been rightly noted in several reviews and this achievement alone

would make the film worthwhile in itself.

Yet few seem to pay attention to what is for me the largest parallel that between

Germany and Israel in von Trottas syncretistic, that is to say historical film all the

details are compilations, as Roger Berkowitz, director of Bards Hannah Arendt Center,

emphasized as he answered questions post-film before New York City audiences

during several showings in late Spring and early to mid-Summer 2013, compilations

drawn from Arendts writings or correspondence. The parallel between Germany and

Israel looms large for me but goes completely by the board in almost all the responses I

have read to date. For me, von Trottas Israel has marked parallels to the Germany of

the sixties and even to this day. Yet by pointing to a parallel, I hardly mean this as

identification yet I know that for some, even that suggestion will be too much. Here

I can quote the arch tone of Arendts letter to Karl Jaspers where she takes the

opportunity to relate Blchers acerbic comment: If the Jews insist on becoming a

nation like every other nation, why for Gods sake do they insist on becoming like the

Germans?4 and her own immediate comment to Jaspers, there is some truth to

that. Indeed, a more comprehensive reading would set this observation and its

commentary in the further circumstantial context of the long-term debate between

Arendt and Jaspers on whether German Jews were to be accounted as Germans first or

as Jews.5

Daniel Meier-Katkins monograph on Hannah Arendts relationship to Heidegger cites

this remark along with other excerpts from Arendts correspondence with Jaspers and

seeks to paint a subtly differentiated picture of what can only be an extremely sensitive

point, as we are so often permitted only a pro or con on any given view. Thus and in


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general we have little sense of the complicated context in which Arendt could share

views also held by as Maier-Katkin emphasizes and as is often forgotten the New

York philosopher Sidney Hook as well as the physicist Albert Einstein, condemning as

they all did condemn what Arendt in her letter to Jaspers called acts of terrorism byJewish groups.6

Arendts point is the same point made to a different end and with a different sensibility

with regard to the same constitutional framing, as my old friend Jacob Taubes would

write about the significance and the role of Carl Schmitt in his The Political Theology of

Paul, with all the I lived through this matter of fact consciousness (Taubes was always

hoping for an effect) that characterizes one of his most important books that also

happens to be in its substance, a political theological point about political theological

events7 Taubes Schmitt correspondence has just been translated into English,8 but

his The Political Theology of Paulis about an even older letter, and it inspired Agamben.

Taubes was writing (or more accurately said, Taubes had as good as written) that same

book when I sat in on his seminars in Berlin in the mid-eighties, seminars to which

everyone, die ganze Welt, la toute Berlin, at least among the students, would flock (in a

non-trivial fashion, one might argue that Taubes functioned as a kind of male Hannah

Arendt they certainly shared the same Gershom Sholem who, like Jaspers to be sure,

doesnt make an appearance in von Trottas film, although Scholem certainly haunts the

quotes) and although Taubes met Arendt, they met they got on about as well as Arendt

and Adorno, albeit for different reasons and although both Adorno and Arendt would

both be vigorously denounced for their arrogance.

Von Trotta (this is more of the films signal syncretism) catches some of this where the

falling out between Hannah Arendt and the Hans Jonas who would go on to makemonotonic ethics his calling cardthe same monotone that has in the interim become

the rule for established discussions of the era, especially any discussion associated with

Richard Wolin9who is one of the main occupiers of the postwar conviction that what


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caused Nazism was irrationality.10 Nor can one fault his logic. Has to be. Of course

because if not, what are we scholars doing here and elsewhere?

What indeed.

The parallel von Trotta draws with her film depends upon a point made by several

German authors, none so painfully etched as Winfried Georg Sebalds Zrich Lectures

Luftkrieg und Literature, Air War and Literature, featuring a keenly Nietzschean motto

that stems from a fairly unlikely voice, which may be why we might be able to hear it,

namely Stanislaw Lem: The trick of elimination is every experts defensive reflex.11

Later when I return to von Trottas film, we will see that Arendt herself refers to the

same media and very technical prowess, that is to say just the same perception of

thoroughgoing persecution that her critics have in the past sought to discount as

imaginary: die Meinungsmanipulation in der modernen Welt wird bekanntlich weitgehend

durch die Methoden des image-making bewirkt, d.h. dadurch, da man bestimmte Bilder in

die Welt setzt, die nicht nur nichts mit der Realitt zu tun haben, sondern hufig nur dazu

dienen, bestimmte unangenehme Realitten zu verdecken.12Sebalds lectures and addenda

would be published posthumously in English as part of his On the Natural History of

Destruction. The title isnt Sebalds own. Credit for that goes to Lord Solly Zuckerman

in his description of Sir Arthur Harris, and the Luftkrieg in question corresponds to Sir

Harris very British, anti-German design.

What von Trotta thus illuminates with her film, at least in my viewing, was the point

with which Sebald concludes his own retrospective introduction to his study to the

extent that many authors, themselves well aware of the dangers to their own future

reception, dangers of the sort Arendt herself seemingly did not imagine, were

apparently less concerned with giving voice to what they had experienced but were

instead preoccupied with the self-image they wished to hand down accommodated

as that would have been at one time to one regime, and then again to another. For

Sebald this self-censoring was one of the main reasons for the inability of a whole


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generation of German authors to describe what they had seen and to convey it to our

minds.13

In part the era of Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem is written at a time when it is not

utterly clear to all that this unutterability, as Sebald speaks of it, would be and would

have to be the rule. Jaspers sought to elude it and I think he succeeded at the time, and,

I think, Arendt also succeeded (at least in part) but she did not succeed in the writerly

way that Sebald would have wanted not because Arendt was not a writer but because

what she writes is political philosophy, not literature. Sebalds insight is that we need a

literary, not a theoretical writers voice. And if he himself offered that writers voice, it

also cost him, and here there is yet another parallel with the film. For in addition to the

odd letters Sebald received, there were many more that would testify, so he wrote, to

the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of the

war had never really found verbal expression, and that those affected by the experience

neither shared it with one another nor passed it on to the next generation.14 Thus

Sebald reflects upon Alexander Kluges analysis of the war and of its wake or aftermath

that it never became an experience capable of public decipherment.15

These are complicated points needing another argument, many other aguments, and

rather more time. Here it will do to note that Sebald drew reviews, like von Trottas

film, both laudatory and damning. Some in direct response to the Zrcih lectures as he

discusses these conflicts in his own afterword. But what is significant here and to this

extent it resembles the impact of von Trottas film, especially but not only for New York

audiences, some of these responses are posthumous. And for the most part such

posthumous critiques dramatize a return to the status quo ante. Perhaps the experience

remains incapable of public decipherment, in Kluges words, and perhaps it cannotbe otherwise.

Sebalds concern is not ordinary Germans during the war the how did that, how could

that happen character of a concern with which we are well acquainted. Instead he

quotes the Swedish journalist Stig Degermans 1946 report of nothing so much as a


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landscape of destruction at which no one of the inhabitants considered to look writing

from Hamburg, as Sebald describes the journalists report, that on a train going at

normal speed it took him a quarter of an hour to travel the lunar landscape between

Hasselbrook and Landwehr, and in all that vast wilderness, perhaps the mosthorrifying expanse of ruins in the whole of Europe, he did not see a single living soul16

and what struck him most was that he identified himself as alien, as a foreigner

himself becausehe looked out.17

I myself (and Ive already referred to Taubes) spent time in Germany in what certainly

seemed to me to be millions of years after the war: from 1984 onwards and I always

return. The first few years I would observe and ask those I met for information or news

or really any details at all about the only thing any American we were the victors

ever thought about. And this is the von Trotta parallel for me, to me. For, like the

alienation of the children, the younger generation of Israel, to their parents, those who

had escaped the holocaust in Germany and Poland and France, that Kurt Blumenfeld

recounts to Hannah Arendt at the first caf scene in Israel, in reply to the question that

she carried from her second husband Heinrich Blcher (I only say second husband to

mitigate the films depiction of his affair(s) and her tolerance of the same), that apart

from disinterest the younger generation also had criticisms of a striking kind, charges of

cowardice on top of incomprehension. And it was this wall of incomprehension and

above all the unspoken conclusion, disinterest, a concern with other issues and Israel

certainly had other issues, that reminded me of Germany. For none of my German

friends, all of whom had been born in the fifties after the war (I am myself currently as

old as the year I was born in 56) and they had no stories to tell to answer any of my

questions. They did not, it became clear to me, speak to their parents (none of whom

evidently were or had been Nazis, so I would have had to believe, if I had believed it,

even those who were soldiers and officers), and if they did speak to their parents, of

those that did, there were certainly no open replies. When I spoke to people of a certain

age, those who could have been there, those like my professors, things were no

different. I even asked Taubes, but he had spent the war in Switzerland writing his


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doctoral thesis and what struck me was that he did not feel altogether sanguine about it,

but mocked himself, and recalled Scholems efforts to get him, unsuccessfully, to Israel

and to rue a brilliant colleagues death who had been as courageous as he was brilliant

and who had indeed, as Taubes had not, gone to Israel. Scholems word Verrter alsoincluded a condemnation of Taubes generic and human (in truth) cowardice. Thus

what Sebalds Swedish correspondent Stig Degerman reported of strangers, these my

friends lived through in the heart of their family, small anecdotes of survival, the pain

and bodily damage suffered by escape, the long distances walked on foot to return

home or to flee for better parts in the aftermath of the war, all surrounded by silence.

Von Trotta could thus, although this is not stated as such, draw upon her own

memories and the memories of her parents and her grandparents in order to see the

exactly national tension and difference made by such a generational distinction. Add to

this what is also relevant in is Israel the different origins and contexts, the precise

political definition of an Israeli as this continues to be the contested subject of an

interior conflict that is the legacy of Zionism as it endures today and that has already

reached any number of calamitous peaks without any seeming resolution.18

The Ghost of Jaspers

Karl Jaspers is one of the most important existential phenomenologists if he is

increasingly less named as such. Technically I should speak here of an Existenz-

Phnomenologie, following Jaspers own usage. I am perhaps more alive to this aspect of

Jaspers thought than most as I read him from the perspective of continental philosopy

of science, from the side of Nietzsche, from the side of Heidegger too, sides often left

out by Jaspers best followers. In a certain sense, like any one of such multifarious

virtuosity, Jaspers suffered from his brilliance, like Heidegger I would argue, but also

and indeed like Arendt.

Jaspers also spoke to Sebalds point: reflecting that the postwar environment seemed to

extinguish all self-being and he went on to argue, and this could but not have been


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influential for Arendt, resistance will still be offered by any felicitous meeting of

individuals who band together in fact without oath or pathos. Truth begins with two,

said Nietzsche.19

Jaspers repeats the quote when he writes in The Future of Mankindof the enduring and

still possibility of human community in reason, love, and truth. Nietzsches word

Truth begins when there are two, is borne out by every community of individuals

20

Thus we read Jaspers on the world as we like to take it to be an objective world. This is

the world of science, the world of fact. Trained as a scientist, a physician, as he was,

Jaspers could not pretend to the laymans misapprehension of the objective as if this

were part of the facts, the factual world, part of the facts that Nietzsche will tell us that

there are not nein gerade Tatsachen giebt es nicht, nur Interpretationen. Wir knnen kein

Faktum an sich feststellen: vielleicht ist es ein Unsinn, so etwas zu wollen. Es ist alles

subjektiv sagt ihr: aber schon das ist Auslegung, das Subjekt ist nichts Gegebenes, sondern

etwas Hinzu-Erdichtetes, Dahinter-Gestecktes.21 For Jaspers, the objective world is

never given solely or as such. 22Much rather, as Jaspers goes on to say, and this is

the hermeneutic heart of Jaspers constitutive phenomenology, encountering the world

as I find it I have to gain access to it by my activity. No experience can be made

without some course of conduct. 23At the same time, Jaspers also emphasizes that this

interpretive, interventive precondition does not reduce the world to a fiction: The

objective world is never solely made either.24The point is counter-intuitive (and we do

well to remember that backwash to similar claims induced both Ian Hacking and Bruno

Latour to tone down their claims, in some cases, all the way back to objectivist

retraction).25

The world, the entire world as Jaspers speaks of it, here invoking a concept more

conventionally associated with either Wittgenstein or indeed Heidegger, is for Jaspers,

a boundary concept.26For Jaspers, however, this is not solely an existential notion of

world. Much rather for Jaspers, who remained a Kantian throughout his life, the world


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is a question. The problem is what science leaves out, in order, indeed to be science.

The first point is ineliminable, following no one but Kant (and Nietzsche after him, as

we seem to need Jaspers to remind us that and Still, Nietzsche came after Kant.) 27

Thus we recall that Nietzsche had argued, infamously enough, that the world isinterpretation according to a human schema that we cannot throw off. The

ineliminability of such a constitution is twofold for Jaspers. To begin with, the world in

its entirety cannot become an object. We are in the world and can never face it as a

whole.28 But beyond this, it is also the case that we think, that we are human, that we

are conscious and here Jaspers might have gone beyond Kant to Fichte and Hegel but

he adds his own gloss by speaking almost as Schelling might have done, of our

awareness of our freedom, arguing that thereby we transcend the incomplete worldwe can know.29

The word freedom however is also perfectly Kantian, as Jaspers powerful and

insightful reading of Kants Perpetual Peace demonstrates.30 I argue that Jaspers is

unique in attending to Kants situation and hence to the significance of attending to his

style and above all including Kants irony as well as with reference to Nietzsche, his

humor.31 It goes without saying that most enthusiasts of the Knigsbergian king of

thought, even those who attend to his style, tend to exclude his irony.32

Jaspers, arguably even more than Scholem himself, is the ghost in von Trottas film.

And in life, he was the philosopher-father to whom Heidegger, who already regarded

Jaspers himself in this way, recommended or transferred Hannah Arendt.33 But what

is striking is the connection forged with Jaspers, for it was Jaspers and not Blumenfield,

as depicted in the film, who served as Arendts intellectual and in German that is to say

spiritualfather (though the back turned on her at the films end would have been that ofScholem, verbally speaking, the Scholem whom Arendt did not call Gershom but

indeed Gerhardt).

Maybe the film can do little more than show traces of these ghosts. Perhaps that is the

heart of film, even one of theatrically composed sets or montages --- Riverside Drive,


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the New School, upstate New York, Bard College, Jerusalem, Marburg, but also the

Black Forest of Heideggers Messkirch and Freiburg.

And if even the academic loci are hard to film, thinking is even more elusive.

And how can a film really show the minds of thinkers like Heidegger, like Jaspers, like

Arendt? Arendt seems easy enough, concerned as she is with the world, the same love

of the world that other scholars have celebrated in books of their own, concerned as

Arendt is with the Human Condition but also as politically focused as she was. And

yet this does not quite prove to be so and we are still left with the need to read for

ourselves and to think.

And Jaspers although he does not appear, haunts the films presentation of Arendtsconflicts with Heidegger, in her own memory as the film uses flashbacks to the past,

distant and recent, to illustrate these conflicts for the viewer, as he is also present in her

engagement with Hans Jonas who had powerful problems with his own memories.

And both Arendt and Jaspers were conflicted by the same appeal that drew34 them to

Heidegger. In this sense, and unlike Arendt for her part (and I believe and I have

argued that the friendship survived between them because of her efforts, as so many

relationships between men and women survive not because of what the men do, but

because of what the women are able to shoulder alone, and following the star of love, of

loyalty, and affection.

I am hardly saying that Jaspers friendship with Heidegger was not genuine friendship,

where Arendts was (and then we dismiss it by naming it a love affair) but rather a

friendship routed in the fashion that a changing world but also that the fortunes of

intellectual life can rout a friendship in any age. For both Heidegger and Jaspers were

philosophers with a claim (especially on Jaspers part) to world philosophy and

(especially on Heideggers part), to a philosophy that recasts the terms of the same, and

the consequence of this conflict would rout any friendship with or without war. To the

extent that their friendship could survive at all it might be said that this had to do with


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Jaspers extraordinary intellectual openness, his scientific, that is to say: his

philosophical probity.

But we learn here where Jaspers friendship with Heidegger ultimately frayed in the

face of Heideggers limitations, in addition to competition leading for Jaspers to

disappointment. Elsewhere, I have argued that it was Arendts gift for friendship it

can go missing in the film that when Hannah Arendt says that she does not love

peoples and nations but friends: as she wrote to Sholem (this is not mentioned, it is too

complicated, I suppose, in the context of the film) ich liebe immer nur meine

Freunde,35

But here and again, the meaning of friend for a thinker like Arendt, this reader of

Augustine who was, arguably above all, a student of Aristotle (as a student of

Heidegger would have had to be) but also an attentive reader of Nietzschethis gift for

friendship and that is always, once again Aristotle, all about loyalty and about duration

a friendship that comes to an end is not a friendship as Aristotle emphasizes (for his

son, according to one account) in his Nicomachean Ethics. Or to be more exact, Aristotle

observes that a friendship that lasts a lifetime is the friendship of the good, and for

Arendt that friendship included both Heidegger and Jaspers.

I have argued that Arendts particular gift for friendship allowed her friendships to last,

to be good friends, as Aristotle measures friendships in time as opposed to those that

are contingent on advantage, those that come to an end when the pleasure of love or

humor fades. It would be Arendts goodness and her loyalty, as a person, tothe person

of the friend that made all the difference, if Aristotle would not less us forget that these

qualities must be in some sense present in the other, in Jaspers but also in Heidegger.

If, as I would argue further, it is Aristotles definition of thought and of the essence of

the human as thinking and as political animal rather than Heideggers thinking on

thinking that best illuminates the claim that runs throughout the film. But Aristotle

haunts Heidegger so this a subtle point. The problem is the (still) scandalous claim that

rather than being the monstrous embodiment of evil, Eichmann, a functionary, even


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worse, a German functionary, Eichmann did not think, as Arendt said and as Heidegger

would likewise say (as modern science does not think), we are left fumbling with the

same frustration that faced so many of the films audiences in New York.

For von Trottas Hannah Arendt seems to claim that the signal problem with Eichmann

for Arendt was the same problem that Heidegger seemingly diagnoses repeatedly in his

book What is Called Thinking. We do not think. Science doesnt think. The problem as

Heidegger puts it is that we are still not thinking.

Not thinking?

What on earth was that supposed to mean with respect to a man like Eichmann?

And to explain it commentators in the New York Times and other newspapers and

magazines, like TheNew Yorker, which gets as much billing in the film as Jonas or any

other player, would either denounce the formula and so have done with it, or refer to

Heidegger and then have done with it. As if referring to Heidegger and to the

intriguingly lurid professor-student encounter, wanting to learn to think, as the young

Arendt conveys this wish to the similarly youthful Heidegger, and to hear what is and

can only be an enormously seductive reply: Thinking is a lonely business. The

comment echoes Nietzsches reflections on the republic of thinkers in his essay

Schopenhauer as Educator.36And the paradox is that thinking cant be taught one to

another; thinking cannot be practiced one with another. But with Nietzsche echoing in

Heidegger here, we are returned to Aristotelian friendship now suspiciously late 18 th

(Schopenhauer) and late 19thcentury in its articulation. Thinking is thus less Aristotles

converse of the soul with itself but an event that speaks across mountain tops, as it

were, this is Schopenhauers spirit-converse as it strikes Nietzsche. But here we find

ourselves with Aristotle again because only one who is related to one in spirit can hope

to understand one precisely because a friend is the same spirit housed in another bodily

form.


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Thinking for Aristotle defines the human being, who is a political animal but above all a

thinking animal. And what fails Eichmann is his nature, the human condition, as

Arendt would say, which he manages, administrates, pursues obsessively, mindlessly.

It is in this consummate sense that he does not think. Not as Aristotle defines thinkingas this is always about more than a practical project or end but always thinking about

thinking.

I would like to end with a parallel recollecting my initial question regarding the

possibility of resistance. Arendt concludes her introduction to Jaspers, The Future of

Germanyby reflecting on the problem of political accuracy many of Jaspers warnings

and predictions have since been vindicated, as Jaspers, in his Man in the Modern Age,

also warned of what became Germanys darkest years. For Arendt, the question is not

the question of truth in the end but the question of impotence.

Jaspers forebodings of an imminent catastrophe in both cases, Arendt argues, were

denounced by all respectable critics.37 Arendt draws our attention to the absolutely

public character of Jaspers intellectual contribution, asking us to reflect upon the

ultimate, as it turned out in both cases, irrelevanceof this public support. For in both

cases Jaspers was read by a minority that, though perhaps strong enough numerically

to make itself heard, was in fact impotent able and willing to face the all-too obvious

realities but powerless to change them.38 Our own current situation may not be

otherwise.

Here I am not merely speaking though I am certainly speaking about US aggression as

we have seen this played out in war after war, ongoing to this day, and on our own soil,

and against our own people (the surveillance is relevant, but I point to the

extraordinary violence that was used to break every Occupy Wall Street in every town,

beginning with New Yorks Wall Street, images and reports of violence as quickly

transmitted to consciousness on the internet, medium as that is of non-consciousness,

and as vanished from memory of Berkeley, Oakland, Boston, etc. For there is more,

there is what we do in the works that we do, in what Arendt said had to count, this is


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the lasting influence of action for Arendt. And if Arendt did not (though Adorno did) I

speak of animals and what we do to them, the animals we eat on a scale that empties

everything that has ever been said against Heideggers manufacture of corpses

phrase in his Bremen lectures, because the animal husbandry industry, because thefarming industry, the fishing industry, the leather and fur industry, the glue industry,

even the university level industry of animal research and vivisection (which is what the

future of biotech, cloning, nanotech and stem cell research are all about), even the dairy

industry, think of the orphaned and murdered calves, is about nothing in the end more

literally literal than the manufacture of corpses.

And not only that, and note as this is the end of this paper, that this is the unpleasant

part. The part we are not interested in hearing about. This cuts too close to home, this is

dinner after all, and we are what we eat. And all of us are complicit in the holocaust of

animals used in science and more stupidly still in pharmaceutical trials, because

nothing stops drugs with horrifying side-effects from being released to the public: the

last and best stage of such trials being of course the patients themselves.

These points, incarnadine as they are, cannot pale and yet they do. Because we have a

science and a technology so singularly uninventive over the course of the last one

hundred years that we cannot find any other way to run our machines, than internal

combustion engines, of one kind or another. Our energy needs continue, as Heidegger

put it to lead us to regard nature as a gigantic gasoline station be it for oil, gas,

uranium and other minerals and so on. To my mind his expression here, dating from

the sixties, should be as outdated as his urging to Arendt not to sully her girlish mind

with philosophy only that Heideggers remark to her, given her age, could not but

inspire her. Yet we still regard nature in this way and we plunder forests to the extentthat in recent years, immediate memory. To quote the BBC:

Rainforests worldwide are currently being cleared at a rate of 1.5 acres per

second, according to the international environmental organisation Greenpeace.


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If deforestation continues at this speed, all of the worlds rainforests could be

wiped out entirely in less than 100 years.39

Are we simply impotent in fact and effect, as Arendt sadly reflected?

What if we were able to hear what Jaspers has to say to us as he writes to Arendt? Can

we accede at any point to what Jaspers held out as the hope of reason, love, and truth.

Nietzsches word Truth begins when there are two, is borne out by every

community of individuals 40

If Nietzsche is right, if Jaspers is right, if Arendt is right, we need more than the lonely

business of thought as Heidegger spoke of the thinker in the singular, to think about

thinking. As the ancients knew, thinking can only be done in a community of other

human beings who together form a community, a world.

This is, to give the last word to Margarethe von Trottas extraordinary film, as it can

indeed seem as if the entire work of the film was necessary just to set up, just to lead up

to the final scene and Barbara Sukowas final voice over, as Hannah Arendt, author of

the Banality of Evil, muses upon evil, pronouncing its essential superficiality:

Das Bse ist immer nur extrem, aber niemals radikal, es hat keine Tiefe,auch keine Dmonie. Es kann die ganze Welt verwsten, gerade weil eswie ein Pilz an der Oberflche weiterwuchert. Tief aber und radikal istimmer nur das Gute.

Evil is always only extreme but never radical, it has no depth, and alsono demonicism. It can lay the whole world to waste, precisely because itconstantly spreads like a fungus on the surface. Deep however and radicalis ever only good.41

Endnotes

1Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 511.

2Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Amos Elon, trans. (New York:Viking, 1963).


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3 I discuss this elsewhere, see my review Babich, Daniel Maier-Katin, Stranger from Abroad: HannahArendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. NY: Norton, 2010, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journalof Jewish StudiesVol. 29, Nr. 4 (Summer 2011): 189-191 as well as in the specific context of Jaspers studies,Babich, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt: On Politics, Science, and Communication, Existence, Vol. 4, No.1 (2009): 1-19.4 Daniel Maier-Katkin, cites the correspondence here between Arendt and Jaspers in his Stranger fromAbroad, pp. 149150. Cf. Annette Vowinckel, Geschichtsbegriff und Historisches Denken bei Hannah Arendt(Cologne: Bhlau, 2001), esp. pp. 135ff but see too Steven E. Aschheim, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers:friendship, catastrophe and the possibilities of German-Jewish dialogue, in Aschheim, Culture andCatastrophe. German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: NewYork University Press, 1996) and see too the useful array of contributions to Aschheim, ed., HannahArendt in Jerusalem(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).5Vowinckel, Geschichtsbegriff und Historisches Denken bei Hannah Arendt, 136.6Cited after Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad, 150.7 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present), trans. Dana Hollander(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).8Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections(New York: Columbia, 2013). There is a folded letter

on the cover of the book. But to be more representative, the book might have added one of Taubestrademark postcards. I have some of these that Taubes sent me, although I discarded most of them asTaubes was more capable than most of offensive content.9 Representative here would be Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lwith, HansJonas, and Herbert Marcuse(Princeton University Press, 2003)10Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).11From Lems Imaginary Magnitude quotedas epigraph to the first lecture in W.G. Sebald, On the NaturalHistory of Destruction(New York: Modern Library, 2004), p. 1. Lems own point continues: were he lessruthless, he would drown in a flood of paper. Lems Imaginary Magnitude, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1984), p. 23.12Hannah Arendt, Gesprch mit Thilo Koch. In: Arendt, Ich will verstehen, Ursula Ludz, Hg. (Munich,

1996), p. 39.13Sebald, Foreword, On the Natural History of Destruction, x.14Ibid.15Sebald, Air War and Literature, p. 4.16Ibid., 3017Ibid.18There are a number of new voices raised here. See for one collection, among many other contributions,Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, eds., Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), see with particular reference to Arendt, Judith Butler, Is Judaism Zionism?Or, Arendt and the Critique of the Nation-State.19Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 36.20Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. 223.21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli amd Mazzini Montinari, eds., (Berlin: deGruyter, 1980), Vol. 12, 7 [60]).22Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113.23Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113.24Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113.25See for references and discussion, Babich Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science. Jaspers goes onto explain using the example of the lived life of the laboratory, as Carl Peter Hempel but also as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger might equally have spoken of it, that In scientific world orientation we seeempirical reality in both the given world and the one that remains to be made. But there is no cut-off


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point. What has been made will henceforth be given and what is given has the unpredictablemodifiability of new productive material. Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 113.26Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 171.27Jaspers, Nietzsche, p. 287.28Jaspers, The Creation of the World in Philosophy and the World, p. 129.29Jaspers, The Creation of the World in Philosophy and the World, p. 130.30See Jaspers, Kants Perpetual Peace in Philosophy and the World, pp. 88-124.31Ibid, pp. 97ff and pp. 120ff and with reference to Nietzsche, pp. 257ff.32On Kants style, duly omitting irony, see Willi Goetschel. Constituting Critique: KantsWriting as CriticalPraxis, Eric Schwab, trans. (Durham: Duke UP, 1994).33In addition to my own account (cited above), I have recently come across Ludger Lutkehaus insightfulcontextual reading, Hannah Arendt - Martin Heidegger: eine Liebe in Deutschland, Text+Kritik, Heft166/167 (2005), originally published in opsculum format as Hannah Arendt - Martin Heidegger: eine Liebe inDeutschland(Marburg : Basilisken-Presse, 1999).34Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Note 239 (1961/1964) in: Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 51035Letter to Gerschom Scholem.36I discuss this Nietzschean reflection on thinking at greater length in Babich, Who do you think you

are? On Nietzsches Schopenhauer, Illichs Hugh of St. Victor, and Kleists Kant. Journal for thePhilosophical Study of Education(in press).37 Arendt, Foreward to Jaspers, The Future of Germany, E. B. Ashton, trans. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1967).38Ibid.39Suemedha Sood, The repercussions of rainforest reduction, BBC Travelwise, 2 November 2012.40Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, p. 223.41Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Sholem.

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