By Marie Luise Knott
Granta, £16.99
Forty years after her death in America, where she had fled from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941, the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt is someone about whom opinion remains deeply divided, especially among her fellow Jews.
Heralded by many as the voice for our times by carving out a space beyond ideology where issues of the day can be thought about unencumbered by outmoded conceptions, for others Hannah Arendt is the epitome of a self-hating Jew - a deracinated Manhattan intellectual who trivialised the Holocaust by dismissing Adolf Eichmann as exemplifying merely "the banality of evil", as well as by accusing its Jewish victims of complicity in it through insufficient resistance to their executioners.
The Berlin-based literary critic and translator Marie Luise Knott is firmly among Arendt's admirers, having written two studies of her work as well as editing several collections of her writings, including her increasingly fractious correspondence with Gershom Scholem following publication of her controversial account of the Eichmann trial.
In the present, slim volume, Knott seeks to explain what she sees in Arendt's work, announcing in its preface: 'All four chapters of this book - on laughter, translation, forgiveness, and dramatisation… mark out escape routes from the dead ends of existing traditional conceptions of the world and the human being… Arendt rejects instruments of comprehension that have proved dull or irrelevant… She… unlearns them… Such acts of unlearning, born of shock and distress, are intellectual awakenings."
For some, Arendt will always be the world's worst court reporter
The spontaneous laughter to which Arendt became reduced at Eichmann's trial by the banality of his testimony freed her, and readers are told it can also free them, from the burden of forever having to carry with them knowledge of the enormity of the Holocaust.
By translating into their native idiom the unfamiliar language, culture and defining myths of their new domicile, émigrés can learn, as it is claimed Arendt did, how to integrate without sacrificing their own identity, as well as to provide their hosts with new insights about themselves.
Learning how to forgive those complicit in some major crime against humanity, post-war Germans in Arendt's case, by unlearning some previous habit of thought can, Knott tells us, enable those, like Arendt, whose people had been victims of one, to achieve reconciliation and friendship with former oppressors.
Finally, through using copious quotations from past thinkers in writing about such recent matters as the Holocaust, Arendt is said to have unlearned several prevailing academic conventions of the time which had rigidified scholarly thought. Knott writes: "Arendt's… quotations… rob the present of the 'mindless peace' of simplistic, one-dimensional certainties and unthinking complacency… She makes her texts into a stage on which readers, too, are encouraged to free themselves from the power of prevailing opinion…"
Knott's book ably shows why Arendt has appealed to so many. To others, however, she will always be the world's worst court reporter whose judgment about the Holocaust and her fellow Jews was impaired by her life-long infatuation with her former philosophy teacher and one-time secret lover, the unapologetic, one-time Nazi. Martin Heidegger whose post-war reputation Arendt did so much to restore.
David Conway is a Visiting Professorial Research Fellow at the social policy institute, Civitas.