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 These conversations are meant to open up spaces for thought between the authors and the ways they relate to the reference text. The editors pose a number of questions, which the authors may address or reject. It is up to the authors to answer, not to answer, or to introduce their own topics.
Conversations Hannah Fröhlich / Nicola Lauré al-Samarai
Conzepte /
I find your selections from the text interesting, the overlaps and the differences. How did you decide which parts of the Arendt text to select and abridge?
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
“Personal collages” are a delicate matter. Applying one’s own criteria to understand an author’s text inevitably causes shifts in focus. But I had no trouble choosing passages. When I first read Report from Germany, I was struck by a symptomatic, time-transcending motif that runs through it like a golden thread and that was unerringly pinpointed and rendered tangible by Hannah Arendt: the refusal to take responsibility for something that has happened.
I tried to condense what Arendt has termed “flight from reality” until it became inescapable, since this flight from reality is, in fact, still very much a reality.
Hannah Fröhlich /
I have great respect for Hannah Arendt’s work, and found it extremely difficult to make a selection. Making a selection always also means allowing oneself to be so “bold” as to “take something out” and to create focal points by shortening passages and taking things out of context.
I think that especially this text by Arendt should be published in full in a different newspaper each month. Of course, I understand that this is difficult, due to the length alone… So, how did I go about selecting passages from the text? I read Arendt’s text several times—both in English and German—and wrote down what spontaneously came to mind when I read each section. Then I tried to connect my text to Arendt’s by using certain terms or creating subheadings and without having to explicitly describe the connection. I hope I was successful.
Conzepte /
Why do you think that Report from Germany should be published once a month?
Hannah Fröhlich /
That text already contains all of the characteristics of our society after 1945 (with slight variations in their “coloring” in Germany and in Austria): the refusal to acknowledge what happened in the past and the prominence of certain traits related to this, such as industriousness (post-war reconstruction), demeaning and attempting to erase the suffering of victims by claiming equal suffering, the typical post-war disillusionment with politics (“if that’s the way it is, then we’d rather not deal with politics at all”), as well as a general lack of interest.
Everything is already visible, it’s all laid out for us with such incredible clarity, so soon after the end of World War II. In my view, Margarete Mitscherlich’s work The Inability to Mourn, and everything that followed, takes its cue directly from this text.
Conzepte /
Hannah Arendt has been instrumentalized on many occasions. Her thoughts on the “Banality of Evil” (Eichmann in Jerusalem) were used not only by revisionists, but also by leftist and antiracist circles, to relativize and normalize Nazi crimes (“The potential to commit genocide exists within each of us”).
In Austria, the myth that we were “Hitler’s first victim” is still prevalent. The fear or refusal to confront one’s own (family) history is perhaps also a (subconscious) expression of this, even when it is known “that one’s own grandparents enthusiastically participated.” Ignorance about family involvement with the Nazis, anti-Semitism, aversion to psychoanalysis and general anti-intellectualism are thus unfortunately also no rarity in critical circles.
In the epilogue of the German essay collection Zur Zeit, which also includes Report from Germany, editor Marie Luise Knott writes the following: “Those who, like Hannah Arendt (Report from Germany), were already drawing parallels in 1949 between Nazism and Russian state socialism as forms of totalitarianism could not have been leftists.” What are your thoughts on this?
Hannah Fröhlich /
There are many ways the politics of the post-war era are reflected in Austrian society, even today. In the private sphere, this is expressed in varied and contradictory ways. I think that Report from Germany is not the only piece by Hannah Arendt where she was far ahead of her time. Very early on, in her report on the Eichmann trial and the easily and often misunderstood question concerning the “Banality of Evil,” she addressed the core of what makes the Shoah inconceivable, thus also touching on something that everyone who seriously engages with the Shoah has to experience: the fact that understanding the Shoah has boundaries. And I think that both pieces, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Report from Germany, still provide endless topics of discussion.
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
Regarding Report from Germany, the numerous instances of flight from reality identified by Hannah Arendt early on are not only based on a blunt desire for historical relativism. They also convey a corresponding will to see it enforced at all costs. The frightening thing is the way this will has, over the last few decades, become the cornerstone of a mental architecture.
In the early 1980s, Saul Friedländer already diagnosed a “new discourse of Nazism,” which is mirrored by the various ways Arendt’s work has been taken advantage of. Not coincidentally, the adamant drawing of parallels between Nazism and State Socialism during German Unification merged into an exculpatory political construct that—despite or perhaps precisely due to the different ideological imprints left on East and West Germans—was able to become so broadly established since the 1990s.
Conzepte /
Besuch in Deutschland appeared in the US-American magazine Commentary with the title Report from Germany in 1950. The German translation was only published in 1986. What do you think of the translation, how would you contextualize it within the time it came out, and do you think that a more current retranslation or rereading of Arendt’s text is necessary?
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
Given the requirement to transport and make legible what an author communicates on the subtext-level, translation definitely is a tricky endeavor. The German version of Arendt’s Report illustrates this in rather special ways. If—and this example cannot be read without a hint of irony—a Jewish author writes a text entitled Report from Germany and that same text is published in German 36 years later as Besuch in Deutschland (Visit to Germany) I feel the urge to ask at least one question: What is the intention behind converting a “report,” which demands a certain matter-of-factness, into a seemingly unfraught “visit”? Such (evasive) maneuvers occur at several points in the translation. Repeatedly, the way specific words are chosen and the way particular things are said or not said introduce a subtext that is not present in the original. Thus, the German language itself signifies a certain politics of memory and serves as an indicator for those moments of flight that Hannah Arendt has located in her report.
It is certainly well worth thinking about a new German version of the text, although in this case “translation” itself needs to be understood as a linguistic historical record, the single layers of which are to be laid open to make them readable and negotiable.
Conzepte /
Von Wien (From Vienna) appears to be a humorous-essayistic back-and-forth travel guide (between Vienna and Tel Aviv), for those keen on leaving (or who have already left) as well as for those keen on self-reflection. Kein Besuch in Deutschland (No visit to Germany) appears to be a mix of Vulcan and an ironic academic idiom, consolidated and fused into words. How would you describe your style? What audience did you have in mind?
Hannah Fröhlich /
That’s a difficult question. When I began working on my text, we didn’t know where it would be published. We did have some ideas and preferences, but it was all still open. And I had no desire to limit my thoughts out of consideration for those who would possibly be my audience. For this reason, I chose to think of all the people I really wanted to address with my writing—so my audience was, if you will, my Jewish and non-Jewish friends in Vienna as well as in Israel and elsewhere in the world.
I wanted to elaborate on several different facets of being here and being there, to call a few things by their name, but also not succumb to the temptation of idealizing the new. That would have been a mistake. Because I am certainly not one of those people who like to advise others to do what I do: it’s kind of crazy to leave a good job, a functioning circle of friends, one’s own language and surroundings to begin a new life, without knowing what it will be like. You have to be ready to deal with insecurity, language barriers and uncertainties. It’s not easy! And ideology alone, no matter which one, is not enough to take such a step. Only a small handful of the friends and people I know who moved to Israel for mainly ideological reasons actually stayed. There was a great deal of disappointment in realizing that you have to make a living and that nice and unpleasant people and situations can be found both here and there, and for those who had Zionism drummed into them from an early age, this was often traumatic.
Working on the text was also a way for me to take my experiences in a new country and reflect, summarize and mould them into a form. And it was all inspired by Arendt’s masterful text. What a luxury!
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
Against the background of Arendt’s thoughts I wanted to grapple as freely as possible with a virulent everydayness shared by many people over here: how to live in the racist combat zone of visibility and invisibility. This is brought into focus through a non-white “outsider,” who is a relative and therefore involved, but who, at the same time, is not familiar with the local setting and therefore literally observes it from an “unaccustomed” perspective.
I guess, sometimes offbeat humor is the only way to confront the absurd dominant patterns of perception as well as the historical monstrosities underlying these patterns and the ways they are enacted. To draw on the knowledgeable and razor-sharp humor of my real-life cousin was truly a blessing.
Conzepte /
Do you think it makes sense to relate Nazi history to a colonial past and to compare their effects?
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
Critical analysis of historical relations and interconnections should generally be considered important, and that also applies to looking at colonialism and Nazism in a common context. It is both shortsighted and irresponsible to examine 20th-century European (i.e. also German or Austrian) history detached from colonialism and its repercussions. But I think working against such a complex background would certainly raise other issues, broaden perspectives, and open up new ways of addressing Nazism in a non-relativizing manner. Most interestingly, the existence of such links (with a few exceptions) is usually denied, which says a great deal about our present historical moment. Given the current academic establishment, the media and other fields of public discourse, I don’t even want to imagine how such issues might be discussed at the present time. Luckily, “at the present time” is also a relative term.
Conzepte /
What new thoughts, ideas or utopias do you see? One association: in Nicola’s text, the utopian potential lies in the question of who is expecting a visit from whom, as well as in the decision not to return, which conjures up images of a bleak and desolate sci-fi landscape with a few blond, blue-eyed people (who may be writing postcards to each other about the disastrous situation), but that is a negative utopia. From what Hannah has said, the utopian potential lies in writing about Israel and what it means to be Jewish in Israel—and if I imagine that here in Austria, it is a utopia. What would such a potential look like if it were developed here?
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai /
Notions of utopia are extremely off-putting to me, probably due to my state-socialist upbringing. At best, I can see how negative utopias could serve as a dramaturgic tool, but unfortunately such visions—including apocalyptic horror scenarios—have already been appropriated by blond, blue-eyed flat-earthers. Within this context, “horror” is, of course, a matter of perspective. When Thilo Sarrazin’s racist screed came out last year, I was almost envious of the ingenious title Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany does away with itself). The abolition of Germany—what a vision!
However, within this context it would certainly be more poignant to speak of a “visionary reality,” since the backward ideals of Germanness, whiteness, origin, a dominant national culture or basic German values can no longer claim any common validity. The blood-and-soil thing is effectively passé; a new map of Germany has been emerging for a long time now. Surely there is bound to be a travel guide someday that does not smooth over the fissures and ruptures, the rough and inaccessible parts of our hi/stories, but instead highlights them as sights worth seeing. If this enables us to traverse “distant connections, connected distances,” to cite poet May Ayim, then we have hopefully arrived at being-here.
Hannah Fröhlich /
I like this question, because it is a reminder that Israel itself originated from a utopia: “If you will, it is no fairy tale,” Theodor Herzl said long before the Shoah. From my perspective, although the conditions that gave rise to the idea of a Jewish state have taken on various different “colorings” over time, the core has remained the same. Anti-Semitism in all of its forms is all around us, everywhere. At the same time—and this may sound contradictory—we can still be happy or unhappy anywhere. Because, for the most part, what makes us happy or unhappy, in our part of the world, is not based on what happens to us, i.e. on the outside, but what happens within us. If we are unable to separate inner processes—feelings, fantasies, expectations, ideals—from external events (in Freudian terms: analyzing experience), to recognize the difference and to understand (oneself), then changing our place of residence, job or partner will not change the unhappiness we feel either. And this process of sorting things out, of gaining clarity, and accepting the inner changes that take place (during this process) is significantly more difficult and daunting than leaving familiar surroundings and starting over somewhere else. Because this process means being confronted with our lives and the things that have shaped and influenced us, with the grief for what we missed and what was missing, as well as with our inherent “violence,” and taking on a profound inner responsibility for our own well-being, despite and with all of the things that make us unhappy. In other words, going through such a process also means no longer being able to say: it’s the others’ (the Jews’, the foreigners’, …) fault. Which brings us full circle, back to Hannah Arendt’s text.
My utopia would not be so much about creating something like Israel within Austria, but creating conditions—which include traditional leftist issues, such as eradicating repressive political systems, hunger and poverty, lack of rights—so that every person has the opportunity to undergo and experience this process of sorting things out and gaining clarity. In other words: that every person has the opportunity to learn, in the Freudian psychoanalytical sense, how to be happy regardless of where they are. I think, based loosely on Adorno, that only then will a world be possible where everyone can be different, without fear.
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The conversation with Hannah Fröhlich and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai on their texts about Hannah Arendt’s essay Report from Germany / Besuch in Deutschland (1950 / 1986) took place via e-mail and has been shortened in the editing process. Jo Schmeiser asked the questions.
Translation from the German by Erika Doucette & Sam Osborn, copyediting by Nicholas Grindell
Literature
Arendt, Hannah: “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. Report from Germany,” in: Commentary Magazine, New York 1950
Arendt, Hannah: “Besuch in Deutschland. Die Nachwirkungen des Nazi Regimes,” translated from the English by Eike Geisel, in: Marie Luise Knott (ed.), Zur Zeit. Politische Essays, Hamburg 1986 / 1999
Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York 1963
Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen, Munich 1964 / 1986
Ayim, May: “entfernte verbindungen,” in: blues in schwarz weiss. gedichte, Berlin 1995
Ayim, May: Blues in black and white: a collection of essays, poetry and conversations, translated from the German by Anne Adams, Trenton / NJ 2003
Friedländer, Saul: Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus, Munich / Vienna 1984
Friedländer, Saul: Reflections of Nazism : an essay on Kitsch and death, New York 1984
Mitscherlich, Alexander und Mitscherlich, Margarete: Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, Munich 1967 / 1977
Mitscherlich, Alexander and Mitscherlich, Margarete: The inability to mourn: Principles of collective behavior, New York 1975 |
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