Hannah Arendt and the etiology of the desk killer: The holocaust as portent

1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Milchman ◽  
Alan Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Dávid Kaposi

This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Using rhetorical analysis, it considers the respective arguments concerning Jewish responsibility, the incompatible political-moral frameworks offered to underpin such judgments, and the extreme identities the correspondents construct for each other. In doing so, it identifies the ultimate significance of the exchange with the total breakdown of discourse it symbolically resulted in—in other words, with the consensus pertaining to the Holocaust leading to a complete incommensurability of the respective political-moral positions. Such a state of affairs is finally accounted for, paradoxically, in terms of the far-reaching agreement between Arendt and Scholem, reaching beyond politics and even identity: the total inescapability of Jewishness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Michał Paździora

The article is divided into two parts. In the first part, I present the main assumptions of foundationalism and, using selected examples from general reflection on law, reconstruct related strategies of justifying claims. Then, I discuss the anti-foundationalist method of justifying the universalism of human rights. Referring to the arguments of Hannah Arendt and Alessandro Ferrara, I give the example of the Holocaust as the so-called point of no return, whose exemplary validity justifies the idea of human rights without the need to refer to substantive human dignity. In the second part of the article, I use the anti-foundationalist argument to build a conception of anti-authoritarian legal education. The proposed concept of education based on a collaborative, democratic, nonhierarchical, and pluralistic discussion of historical examples should complement traditional legal education.


Author(s):  
Timothy P. Jackson

Here I rebut three fundamental challenges to the idea that Jewish moral monotheism was a primary cause of German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The first challenge is the claim that the National Socialist persecution of the Jews was based solely on race, and not on religion. The second challenge is the more sweeping claim that there was nothing objective about the Jews or Judaism—neither race nor religion—that motivated Nazi oppression and murder; these were simply irrational. The third challenge is what I call, echoing Hannah Arendt, “the banality of evil” claim. According to this perspective, most Nazis, including many who were very highly placed (e.g., Eichmann), were without evil intention or malice of forethought toward the Jews and were motivated primarily by mundane concerns, such as power or promotion or simple prudence. I take all three of these positions to underestimate human malice and, by implication, human (and divine) benevolence.


2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211986877
Author(s):  
Adam Brown

The influence of Primo Levi’s writing on the ‘grey zone’ has only sharpened over the last decade, not only in terms of its broader application to human rights contexts beyond the Holocaust, but also through a greater focus on the question of how to understand the behaviour of so-called ‘privileged’ prisoners in the Nazi camps and ghettos. History has shown a court of law to be an inadequate setting for negotiating the complexities of the ethical dilemmas forced on victims in extremis, and substantial problems of judgement and representation have plagued efforts to understand these liminal figures elsewhere. This article examines the tensions within Levi’s writings and maps these onto attempts to represent the ‘grey zone’ in Holocaust films. Engaging in particular with Margarethe von Trotta’s critically acclaimed feature film Hannah Arendt (2012) and Tor Ben-Mayor’s lesser known documentary Kapo (1999), I highlight how these distinct approaches to depicting ‘privileged’ Jews expose the fraught nature of portraying victim complicity on screen.


Perichoresis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-81
Author(s):  
David T. Lohrey

Abstract Following the lead of Hannah Arendt and others, I want to argue that the imperial mystique seen in the British Empire found its way into Germany’s expansionist ambitions. I am concerned with the emotional costs of oppression, or what I call soul death. I focus on three key writers of the 20th century: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee, placing their writings in the context of war trauma and the barbarities associated with 20th century totalitarianism. My argument seeks to elucidate the relationship between postcoloniality and the wars that shaped that century. These narratives of distress will be juxtaposed with novels by Imre Kertész and Arnošt Lustig whose writings of the Holocaust and the war atmosphere on the Eastern Front illuminate scenes of trauma and personal anguish. Here my study draws on the work of recent psychologists whose term soul murder is made much of. These writers’ works can be more fully understood to reveal patterns of personal destruction that are part of living under imperialism. They bring to the forefront behaviours that expose the debasement and hardening witnessed in the early decades of the century.


2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Elhanan Yakira
Keyword(s):  

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