From Rosa Luxemburg to Hannah Arendt: Socialism, Barbarism and the Extermination Camps

Abstract

The relationship between Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt has occasionally been noted but rarely systematically discussed. In fact, there is a profound sense in which Arendt's continuing preoccupation with the significance of the extermination camps owes much to Luxemburg's earlier expressed concern that barbarism was a real possibility. Luxemburg first raised this in the context of the First World War, which she saw as a catastrophe marking a fundamental break with the past and opening the way to terrible new possibilities. The terms that Luxemburg used to describe this catastrophe apply better to subsequent events that Arendt was to analyse, particularly the extermination camps (“hell” on earth). In explaining how barbarism could occur, Arendt drew extensively on Luxemburg, emphasising the impact of world wars, imperialism and nationalism, though she was of course then to go further in analysing what barbarism meant when it took place.

Notes

NOTES

1. The reaction of some of these intellectuals is analysed by Anson Rabinbach in “‘The Abyss that Opened Up Before Us’: Thinking about Auschwitz and Modernity,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the 20th Century, ed. Moishe Postone and A. Eric Santner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The quotation is from Arendt.

2. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus,” cited in Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment? Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 84.

3. Mary Dietz has argued persuasively that even The Human Condition, Arendt's most general work of political theory, needs to be understood (not only because it was written between the other two works) as “a profound response to the trauma inflicted upon humanity by the Nazi regime.” Mary Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), 459; subsequent references are cited in the text.

5. The emotional aspects are discussed, somewhat sensationally, in Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). The philosophical connections are explored rather more systematically by Dana Villa in Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

6. See, respectively, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); and “Letter from Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1946,” cited in Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 10.

7. Elias argued that Nazism was an extreme product of a decivilising process, a “black ideology full of ideas more appropriate to a pre-industrial age than an industrial world.” Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Oxford: Polity, 1996), 380. Bauman explicitly attacked Elias on this issue for painting a profoundly inaccurate picture of civilisation, at once complacent and self-satisfied. What he calls “the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity” is, in his view, a myth which obscures the vital ways in which central features of this same civilisation contributed to the Holocaust. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 12.

8. This is argued for instance by Mark Salter in Barbarians and Civilisation in International Relations (Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2002). Perhaps symptomatically, Salter focuses exclusively on the history of the West, ignores the Chinese precedent, and traces the term only back as far as the Greeks.

9. A number of biographers have insisted on the centrality of her analysis of imperialism to the rest of her politics. See, for instance, Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), 32; and J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 161.

10. Michael Lowy, “Rosa Luxemburg's Conception of ‘Socialism or Barbarism,’” in On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 96. Norman Geras has contested this interpretation, arguing that Luxemburg never succumbed to any such determinism. Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London: New Left Books, 1976), 29.

11. “The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 269.

12. The Nazis did of course lay claim to what they called authentic German culture, although its products were entirely mediocre and superficial, what Herman Glaser calls “culture as façade” in The Cultural Roots of National Socialism (London: Croom Helm, 1978).

13. See, for instance, Götz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999).

14. See the discussions by both of the extraordinary speech made by Himmler to SS officers in Poznan in 1943, in which he openly and proudly acknowledged the nature of the crime being committed: “the hard decision had to be made that this people should be caused to disappear from the earth.” He took full responsibility for it: “we have taken the responsibility for it on ourselves—the responsibility for an act not just an idea.” Indeed, he made a virtue out of it, entirely subverting every moral code known to humanity: it was “a glorious page in our history,” even if it could never be written. Saul Friedlander, “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation,” in Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); Berel Lang, “The Knowledge of Evil and Good,” in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Arendt significantly also focused on this speech (see note 49).

15. Cited from the Anti-Critique, by Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 34.

16. Cited from the Anti-Critique, by Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, 34.

17. For a clear exposition of Luxemburg's argument, see A. Shelton, “Rosa Luxemburg and the National Question,” East European Quarterly 21.3 (1987).

18. Canovan, A Reinterpretation, 19.

19. See her observations on Hilferding and Lenin in Origins of Totalitarianism, 148. Arendt's preference for and reliance upon Luxemburg's analysis of imperialism rather than that of other Marxists is discussed in Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 78–79. See also Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 134.

20. See Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the ‘Final Solution’ (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

21. Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001), 116.

22. Joan Cocks has argued more generally that Arendt's approach to nationalism was strongly influenced by Luxemburg. Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 58.

23. Arendt implies in places that there are two different kinds of nationalism, one “Western,” the other “tribal.” The example she gives of the former, however, is always French, perhaps a rather unrepresentative kind. See R. Beiner, “Arendt and Nationalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Villa.

24. Arendt's criticisms of the left's inadequate internationalism are quite Luxemburgist, seeing it as too confined to an inter-European solidarity, restricting opposition to imperialism, and generally lacking political seriousness. See, Origins, 40–41.

25. Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (New York: SUNY, 1994), 292.

26. As Canovan has noted, “her investigation of Marxism turned out to lead in so many directions and to raise so many complex issues that her original companion piece to The Origins of Totalitarianism was never accomplished” (A Reinterpretation, 64). Canovan has elsewhere insisted on the conservative dimension to Arendt's thought. See Margaret Canovan, “Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Hansen (Hannah Arendt) takes a very different line, stressing the links between Arendt and the left.

27. Wal Suchting argues that “her interpretation of Marx is completely erroneous,” in “Marx and Hannah Arendt's Human Condition,” Ethics 73.1 (1962): 47.

28. Particularly in thinking about his critiques of alienation and reification which can be taken as the opposite of what Arendt suggests, as credible attempts to rethink a proper, human relationship between them of a kind that she herself elsewhere advocated. See Jennifer Ring, “On Needing Both Marx and Arendt: Alienation and the Flight from Inwardness,” Political Theory 17.3 (1989). Bikhu Parekh goes as far as to argue that Arendt's own critique of modern society is “Marxist in inspiration” in crucial ways. Bikhu Parekh, “Hannah Arendt's Critique of Marx,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 90.

29. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 26–27.

30. See, in particular, “What Is National Socialism?” where Trotsky talks of the ways in which “Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics … capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.” In Leon Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 413.

31. Arendt's emphasis on movement and restlessness suggests that the concept of a totalitarian state is something of a contradiction in terms. As Canovan points out, “any ordinary state, however authoritarian it may be, is at least a structure with a definite shape and definite limits. Totalitarianism, by contrast, is not so much a structure as a movement in perpetual motion” (A Reinterpretation, 58).

32. This point is well made by Dana Villa, “Totalitarianism, Modernity and the Tradition,” in Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 126–27.

33. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartakusbund Want?” in Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings, ed. R. Looker (London: Cape, 1972), 278.

34. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Waters, 391.

35. Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crises of the Republic (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 181.

36. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” 391.

37. Luxemburg defines revolution as a process in which “civic virtues … [are] acquired only through their own activity” (“What Does the Spartakusbund Want?” 277–28). Arendt describes revolution as “the foundation of freedom,” as the “moment in which a new public space for freedom is constituted and organised” [On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 249, 29].

38. There is a good discussion of Luxemburg's republicanism in Martine Leibovici, “Révolution et Démocratie: Rosa Luxemburg,” Revue Francaise de Science Politique 41 (1991). On Arendt, see J. F. Sutton, “Hannah Arendt's Argument for Council Democracy,” in Critical Essays, ed. Hinchman and Hinchman.

39. Arendt, On Revolution, 249. Significantly, despite her ambivalent attitude towards Marxism, she openly acknowledged the role of the European working class in these developments. See The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 215–16.

40. Walter Laqueuer criticises them together in much these terms in “The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator,” in Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Aschheim, 57.

41. Cited in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 100. Bernstein has himself also argued elsewhere that Arendt's enthusiasm for revolutions was for the way in which they helped us remember “what is essentially a permanent human possibility” (“Judging: The Actor and the Spectator,” in The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 231.

42. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). As Bat Ami Bar-On has noted, Arendt's essay on Luxemburg was “clearly written with an eye on Germany's Nazi past.” Bat-Ami Bar-On, “Women in Dark Times: Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and Me,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. May and Kohn, 289.

43. Arendt, Origins, 439.

44. Hannah Arendt, “Social Science and the Concentration Camps,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 236.

45. Hannah Arendt, “Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Kohn, 405.

46. “Letter to Jaspers, 1946,” cited in Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 200), 61.

47. Arendt, “Reply to Voegelin,” 404.

48. On mortality rates in the Gulag, which were noticeably less deadly than the Nazi ones, see, for instance, Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2004). Overy points to significant similarities (in the victims’ loss of identity, in the camp geography, in many of the rituals, in the culture of deliberate cruelty). But he also shows that there were marked differences. The camps had different purposes, were developed differently, and had different structures. His conclusion is emphatic: “camp does not equal camp” (595).

49. Cited in Sandra Hinchman, “Common Sense and Barbarism in the Theory of Hannah Arendt,” Polity 17.2 (1984): 318.

50. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1965), 105.

51. These different interpretations are discussed at length in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question.

52. She refers here to the Last Judgement, “the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace,” entirely missing from the extermination camps.

53. Arendt, “Reply to Voegelin,” 405.

54. “Letter to Jaspers, 1946,” cited in Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 61.