From colonialism to National Socialism to postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism1

1. I would like to thank Lora Wildenthal, Jeffrey Schneider, and Ross Bowling for their helpful critique and their skilful editorial assistance.

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Notes

1. I would like to thank Lora Wildenthal, Jeffrey Schneider, and Ross Bowling for their helpful critique and their skilful editorial assistance.

2. See S Quack, ‘Drei Strassen in Berlin’, in Marion Kaplan and Beate Meyer (eds), Jüdische Welten. Juden in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005, pp 413–439, for the story leading up to the naming of the streets around the memorial. In Berlin, the naming of streets is commissioned by the local community (Bezirk), which in this case was Berlin-Mitte. Originally, the Bezirk Berlin-Mitte suggested naming the area in front of the Reichstag after Hannah Arendt, but did not find the necessary support. The current state thus represents only the second preference once the decision was made to build the memorial in 1998/1999.

3. Transcribed in ‘Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus, Oktober 1964’, in H Arendt, Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, München: Piper, 1996, pp 44–70, here p 59, my translation.

4. W Laqueur, ‘The Arendt Cult. Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator’, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, S Aschheim (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, pp 47–64.

5. To my knowledge the only author alluding to Arendt's Origins as in some way a postcolonial writing is G Prakash, ‘Who is Afraid of Postcoloniality? Social Text 49, 1996, pp 187–203, but he does not explore this topic.

6. Arendt's use of the terms colonialism and imperialism as well as the even more amalgamated notion of ‘colonial imperialism’ (Kolonialimperialismus) is inconsistent. She uses imperialism both as a theoretical category and as a historical period in the sense of the ‘age of imperialism’ between 1880 and 1914. In the following I will use the term ‘imperialism’ to refer to the section in Arendt's book, while I will stick to the notion of ‘colonialism’ when I discuss the historical events at stake.

7. A recent exception is S Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996, pp 62–101, who analyses the Origins from the perspective of political and ontological philosophy; for a highly critical approach to Arendt's interpretations of colonialism see N C Moruzzi, Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp 61–124.

8. H Arendt, ‘Concerning Minorities’, Contemporary Jewish Record 7, 1944, pp 353–368; ‘Race-Thinking before Racism’, The Review of Politics 6, 1944, pp 36–73; ‘Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism’, The Review of Politics 7, 1945, pp 441–463; ‘Parties, Movements, and Classes’, Partisan Review 12, 1945, pp 504–513; ‘The Stateless People’, Contemporary Jewish Record 8, 1945, pp 137–153; ‘Expansion and the Philosophy of Power’, Sewanee Review 54, 1946, pp 601–616; ‘Imperialism: Road to Suicide’, Commentary 1, 1945/1946, pp 27–35; ‘Privileged Jews’, Jewish Social Studies 8, 1946, pp 3–30; ‘Über den Imperialismus’, Die Wandlung 1 1945/1946, pp 650–666; ‘The Concentration Camps’, Partisan Review 15, 1948, pp 743–763; ‘Konzentrationsläger’, Die Wandlung 3, 1948, pp 309–330; ‘Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht’, Die Wandlung 4, 1948, pp 754–770; ‘The Rights of Man: What Are They?’, Modern Review 3, 1949, pp 24–37; ‘The Imperialist Character’, The Review of Politics 12, 1950, pp 303–320; ‘Der imperialistische Charakter: Eine psychologisch-soziologische Studie’, Der Monat 2, 1949/1950, pp 509–522; ‘The Mob and the Elite’, Partisan Review 17, 1950, pp 808–819.

9. By contrast, anti-Semitism, the subject of Part One of Origins, remained a constant theme in Arendt's work. It was already key to her early study Rahel Varnhagen, completed in manuscript in 1933 though not published as a book until 1958.

10. As an example, recently several scholars discussed the concept of totalitarianism in depth in a special issue of Social Research on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Origins. These scholars made little reference to the two other topics of the book, see Social Research 69(2), 2002; In the following I shall avoid a discussion of the problem surrounding the Soviet Union since Arendt herself is inconsistent about whether to place the Soviet Union under the umbrella of totalitarianism. Clearly, her main concern was to provide a genealogy of National Socialist rule.

11. H Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition with added prefaces, San Diego and London: Harcourt Inc., 1994 [1951]; H Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, unabbreviated edition, München: Piper, 1986 [1955]. Notably, except for the forewords, Arendt wrote both the English and the German versions herself. Thus the German edition which came out in 1955 is not a mere translation, but a rewritten version of the English edition and should be considered a publication in its own right. Nevertheless, I will be citing from the English revised edition, when the text is more or less identical to the German edition. In all other cases I will rely on the German edition and give an English translation.

12. See U S Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999, p 6, for his overview on post-World War II writing on colonialism in English.

13. Published London: Secker & Warburg, 1951.

14. Here the much shorter English version significantly departs from the German edition: ‘Nur wenige Meinungen waren plausibel genug, um in dem harten Konkurrenzkampf der freien Meinungen, der durch das ganze neunzehnte Jahrhundert tobte, bestehen zu können, und nur zwei erwiesen sich als stark genug, um wirkliche Ideologien hervorzubringen—oder richtiger in sie zu degenerieren. Die eine ist die zur Ideologie erstarrte marxistische Lehre vom Klassenkampf als dem eigentlichen Motor der Geschichte, und die andere ist die von Darwin angeregte und mit dem marxistischen Klassenkampf in mancher Beziehung verwandte Lehre von einem von der Natur vorgegebenen Rassenkampf, aus dem sich der Geschichtsprozeß, vor allem der Auf- und Abstiegsprozeß der Völker, ableiten lässt. Nur diesen beiden Doktrinen gelang es, im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert sich als offizielle, staatlich geschützte Zwangsdoktrinen durchzusetzen.’ (Only a few opinions were plausible enough to withstand the fierce competition of free opinions which raged throughout the nineteenth century. And only two proved strong enough to produce real ideologies—or rather, to degenerate into ideologies. One ideology is a congealed marxist doctrine of class struggle as the actual engine of history; the other—inspired by Darwin and somehow related to the marxist ideology of class struggle—the doctrine of a race struggle inherent in Nature. In the latter case, history is determined by the rise and fall of different peoples. In the twentieth century, only these two doctrines were succesful in turning into official, state-protected forced doctrines.) Arendt, Elemente, p. 268f.

15. Benhabib, Modernism, p 71.

16. Here again the German version is much more explicit than the English: ‘Den Rassebegriff haben weder die Nazis noch die Deutschen entdeckt, er ist nur nie vorher mit solcher gründlichen Konsequenz in die Wirklichkeit umgesetzt worden.’ (Neither the Nazis nor the Germans discovered the notion of race, but never before had it been converted into reality with such thorough consequences.) Arendt, Elemente, p 267.

17. For a collection of her misjudgements, errors, and eccentricities in Origins see e.g. M Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

18. See note 9.

19. E Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. Leben, Werk und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1991, pp 285–301.

20. Arendt, Origins, p XXI.

21. Arendt, Origins, p XVI.

22. Arendt, Origins, p XXI.

23. To Arendt, the mob are the declassed people of society coming from all classes. Alluding to the ‘National Socialist revolution’, she states that ‘The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprise all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will for the “great leader.” For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.’ Arendt, Origins, p 107; in the German edition she adds that ‘the mob is the caricature of the people’, Arendt, Elemente, p 187.

24. Only in the German edition did Arendt put forward the latter thought: ‘Die Existenz einer solchen Kategorie von Menschen birgt für die zivilisierte Welt eine zweifache Gefahr. Ihre Unbezogenheit zur Welt, ihre Weltlosigkeit ist wie eine Aufforderung zum Mord, insofern der Tod von Menschen, die außerhalb aller weltlichen Bezüge rechtlicher, sozialer und politischer Art stehen, ohne jede Konsequenz für die Überlebenden bleibt. Wenn man sie mordet, ist es als sein niemandem ein Unrecht oder auch nur ein Leid geschehen.’ (The existence of such a category of individuals bears a twofold danger to the civilised world. Their unrelatedness with the world, their worldlessness, is like an invitation for murder, insofar as the death of humans who stand outside worldly references in the legal, social, and politic sphere has no bearing on those who survive. If they get killed it is as if nobody experiences a sense of injustice or even harm.) Arendt, Elemente, p 470.

25. Arendt, Origins, p 160f.; the German edition is more explicit: ‘Der Rassismus ist überall ein dem Nationalismus entgegengesetzer und ihn wie jede Form des Patriotismus untergrabender Faktor.’ (Everywhere racism is opposed to nationalism and racism subverts nationalism as well as every other form of patriotism.) Arendt, Elemente, p 271.

26. Arendt, Origins, p. 160f.

27. ‘Here [in South Africa], for the first time Jews were driven into the midst of a race society and almost automatically singled out by the Boers from all other “white” people for special hatred, not only as the representatives of the whole enterprise, but as a different “race,” the embodiment of a devilish principle introduced into the normal world of “blacks” and “whites.”’ Arendt, Origins, p 202.

28. See e.g. A Stoler and F Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

29. E.g. J Zimmerer, ‘Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust. Towards an Archeology of Genocide’, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, D A Moses (ed.), New York: Bergham, 2004, pp 49–76; J Zimmerer, ‘Holocaust und Kolonialismus. Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des genozidalen Gedankens’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51, 2003, pp 1098–1119.

30. H Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1914, Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1968.

31. Arendt, Origins, p 186.

32. For a recent conceptualisation of German politics in Eastern Europe as colonial see P Ther, ‘Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte. Polen, slawophile Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire’, in S Conrad and J Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland und die Welt 1871–1914, pp 129–148.

33. H Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6, 1959, pp 45–56. German translation: ‘Ketzerische Ansichten über die Negerfrage und equality’, in H Arendt, Zur Zeit. Politische Essays, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp 95–117.

34. See details in P Grosse, ‘What Has German Colonialism to do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework’, in E Ames, M Klotz, and L Wildenthal (eds), Germany's Colonial Pasts, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

35. E.g. S Conrad, ‘Doppelte Marginalisierung. Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 2002, pp 145–169; J Osterhammel, ‘Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Erweiterung oder Alternative?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, 2001, pp 367–393; A Wirz, ‘Für eine transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, 2001, pp 489–498; M Werner and B Zimmermann, ‘Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, 2002, pp 607–636.

36. G Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Interestingly, Foucault seems to have drawn on Arendt, not in his writing, but in his teaching, since he used exactly the same sources in his analysis of how racial categories emerged that Arendt employed in her sub-chapter on ‘Race Thinking Before Racism’. Foucault also comes to quite similar conclusions: see M Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, M Bertani and A Fontana (eds), New York: Picador, 2003, pp 141–187.