{"id":34217,"date":"2025-07-14T09:33:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T13:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34217"},"modified":"2025-07-14T09:33:42","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T13:33:42","slug":"hannah-arendt-the-problem-wasnt-what-our-enemies-did-but-what-our-friends-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34217","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Arendt: &#8220;The problem wasn&#8217;t what our enemies did, but what our friends did&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Here is a clip that resonates today. It is from Hannah Arendt&#8217;s 1964 interview on German television. The journalist <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/G%C3%BCnter_Gaus\">G\u00fcnter Gaus<\/a> takes her through her life, from her childhood in K\u00f6nigsburg to the controversy about her 1963 Eichmann book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"ARENDT, H. Interview &#039;Zur Person&#039; (1964, ENGLISH SUBTITLE)\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/370EATBtPHs?start=1798&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>At this point in the conversation, Arendt has been describing her work in France in 1933-1941. As an activist, social worker, and educator, she had helped to move Jewish refugee teenagers from France to <em>kibbutzim<\/em> in Palestine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She concludes, \u201cSo that was roughly the activity [<em>T\u00e4tigkeit<\/em>]&#8221;. In her later theoretical writing, Arendt combines that word with other terms to differentiate three major human &#8220;activities&#8221;: labor, thinking, and action. Her work in France was the third kind of activity, \u201c<em>Die T\u00e4tigkeit des Handelns<\/em>\u201d: talking and working with others to change the world. That is how she defines politics, and &#8220;freedom is exclusively located in the political realm&#8221; (<em>The Human Condition<\/em>, p. 31),<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She asks Gauss whether he would like to hear how she turned to this \u201cactivity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He nods, and she says, \u201cYou see, I came from <em>purely<\/em> academic activity [what she would call \u201cthinking\u201d], and in that respect, the year \u201833 made a very lasting impression on me, first positive and second negative. Or I would say, first negative and second positive.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is surprising that there was anything positive about 1933, but I suspect Arendt was thinking of how it had propelled her from thinking into action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She continues, &#8220;Today, one often thinks that the shock of the German Jews in \u201933 came from the fact that Hitler seized power. Now, as far as I and people of my generation are concerned, I can say that this is a curious misunderstanding. It was of course very bad. It was political. It wasn&#8217;t personal. That the Nazis are our enemies, my God, we didn&#8217;t need Hitler&#8217;s seizure of power to know that. It had been completely evident to anyone who wasn&#8217;t an idiot for at least four years that a large part of the German people were behind it. Yes, we knew that too. We couldn&#8217;t have been surprised by it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gauss says, \u201cThe shock in 1933 was that something general and political turned into something personal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Arendt replies, \u201cNo. Well, first, that too. First, the general and political did become a personal fate, if one emigrated. Secondly, you know what conforming is. [She uses Nazi jargon, <em>Gleichschaltung<\/em>, which could perhaps be translated as preemptive capitulation.]. And it meant that friends were conforming. Yes, it was never a personal problem. The problem wasn&#8217;t what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Well, uh, what happened back then in the wave of <em>Gleichschaltung<\/em>&#8211;which was pretty voluntary, anyway, not under the pressure of terror&#8211;above all, in this sudden abandonment, it was as if an empty space had formed around me.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Arendt, this empty space would not only be cruel and disillusioning but would also reveal that she could not act freely when surrounded by the people she had counted as friends. &#8220;Action is entirely dependent on the presence of others&#8221; and requires interaction with them [<em>The Human Condition<\/em>, p. 23].<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She adds:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>Well, I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people, and I could see that among the intellectuals, [conforming] was the rule, so to speak; and among the others, not. And I&#8217;ve never forgotten that story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I always thought back then (I was exaggerating a bit of course): &#8216;I am leaving Germany. Never again! Never again will I touch this intellectual business. I don&#8217;t want to have anything to do with this community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I was, of course, not of the opinion that German Jews or German-Jewish intellectuals would have acted any differently if they had been in a different situation. I didn&#8217;t think so. I was of the opinion that it had to do with this profession. I&#8217;m speaking of that time&#8211;I know more about it now than I did back then.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>I learned about this interview from the new PBS documentary, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/americanmasters\/hannah-arendt-documentary\/36135\/\">Hannah Arendt: Facing History<\/a>, which I generally recommend. See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34083\">Hannah Arendt: I\u2019m Nothing but a Little Dot<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33144\">\u201cComplaint,\u201d by Hannah Arendt<\/a>;  <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33809\">Reading Arendt in Palo Alto<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18695\">Arendt, freedom, Trump<\/a> (from 2017);  <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15349\">Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15385\">notes on Hannah Arendt\u2019s On Revolution<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34023\">what is the basis of a political judgment?<\/a> etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a clip that resonates today. It is from Hannah Arendt&#8217;s 1964 interview on German television. The journalist G\u00fcnter Gaus takes her through her life, from her childhood in K\u00f6nigsburg to the controversy about her 1963 Eichmann book. At this point in the conversation, Arendt has been describing her work in France in 1933-1941. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34217"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34234,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217\/revisions\/34234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}