Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Charlotte Delbo

Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust

Hypatia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Charlotte Delbo

Hannah Arendt's and Charlotte Delbo's writings about the Holocaust trouble our preconceptions about those who do evil and those who suffer evil. Their jarring terms “banal evil” and “useless knowledge” point to limitations and temptations facing scholars of evil. While Arendt helps us to resist the temptation to mythologize evil, Delbo helps us to resist the temptation to domesticate suffering.

scholarly journals The Breakdown of Discourse: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity and the Scholem-Arendt Exchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Dávid Kaposi
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Moral Frameworks ◽  
State Of Affairs

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.

scholarly journals Antyautorytarna edukacja prawnicza

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Michał Paździora
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Point Of No Return

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.

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):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Holocaust

scholarly journals Verbal images of evil and (in)humanity during and after the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Charlotte Delbo ◽  
Bear Witness

In this paper, I explore images of evil and (in)humanity in the works of Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo – verbal images that they encountered within Auschwitz and those that they created afterwards to try to bear witness to what happened there. Verbal images played a crucial role for Levi and Delbo in their efforts both to maintain a sense of their own humanity during their time in the concentration camp and to depict the extent to which inmates’ humanity was diminished and degraded by the Nazis. Thus, verbal images helped them both to maintain a sense of their own humanity and to depict the effort to destroy it. This dual role of verbal images found in their testimonies suggests that there is an intimate relationship between evil, images, and (in)humanity during and after the Holocaust – one that we would do well to consider. 

Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-66
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Third ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Take All

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.

Beyond a Court of Law: Holocaust Film and the Tensions in Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211986877
Author(s):  
Adam Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Holocaust Films ◽  
Nazi Camps

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.

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