Coetzee on Mailer and Hitler

Some choice passages from J. M. Coetzee's "Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist" (great title), a review of Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest (NYRB, Feb. 15, 2007):

All in all, the adventures of Adolf Hitler in the realm of ideas provide a cautionary tale against letting an impressionable young person loose to pursue his or her education in a state of total freedom. For seven years Hitler lived in a great European city in a time of ferment from which emerged some of the most exciting, most revolutionary thought of the new century. With an unerring eye he picked out not the best but the worst of the ideas around him. Because he was never a student, with lectures to attend and reading lists to follow and fellow students to argue with and assignments to complete and examinations to sit, the half-baked ideas he made his own were never properly challenged. The people he associated with were as ill-educated, volatile, and undisciplined as himself. No one in his circle had the intellectual command to put his chosen authorities in their place as what they were: disreputable and even comical mountebanks.

Normally a society can tolerate, even look benignly upon, a layer of autodidacts and cranks on the fringes of its intellectual institutions. What is singular about the career of Hitler is that through a confluence of events in which luck played some part, he was able not only to spread his nonsensical philosophy among his German countrymen but to put it into practice across Europe, with consequences known to all.

[...]

It is not too much to say that Mailer's quarrel with Arendt is a running subtext to The Castle in the Forest. But does he do justice to her? In 1946 Arendt had an exchange of letters with Karl Jaspers sparked by his use of the word "criminal" to characterize Nazi policies. Arendt disagreed. In comparison with mere criminal guilt, she wrote to him, the guilt of Hitler and his associates "oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems."

Jaspers defended himself: if one claims that Hitler was more than a criminal, he said, one risks ascribing to him the very "satanic greatness" he aspired to. Arendt took his criticism to heart. When she came to write the Eichmann book, she endeavored to keep alive the paradox that though the actions of Hitler and his associates may defy our understanding, there was no depth of thought behind their conception, no grandeur of intention. Eichmann, a humanly uninteresting man, a bureaucrat through and through, never realized in any philosophically full sense of the word what he was doing; the same might be said, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of the gang.

To take the phrase "the banality of evil" to epitomize Arendt's verdict on the misdeeds of Nazism, as Mailer seems to do, thus misses the complexity of the thinking behind it: what is peculiar to the everyday banality of a bureaucratically administered, industrially organized policy of wholesale extermination is that it is also "word-and-thought-defying," beyond our power to understand or to describe.

[...]

If one takes seriously Mailer's reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents—that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches—then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.

Arendt

It was interesting to see "myself" quoted in Russell Jacoby's "Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation" (in the Dec. 8, 2006, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education). I was not quoted myself, of course, but Jacoby did quote my translation of Arendt's correspondence with Martin Heidegger:

"She was the student, indeed, the lover of Martin Heidegger ... While her liaison with Heidegger has given rise to much high-level gossip — in today's university, Herr Doktor Heidegger's affair with a stunning 18-year-old student would be even more outrageous than his Nazi sympathies — her intellectual loyalties are more the issue. She never conceptually broke with Heidegger and even intended to dedicate The Human Condition to him. She did not, she explained in a letter to him, because things had not 'worked out properly between us.' She wanted him to know, however, that the book 'owes practically everything to you in every respect.'"

Jacoby is very critical of most of Arendt's work, reducing the long-term interest of her writing to just a few works: "Arendt's achievement ultimately rests on Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as some tough-minded essays and thoughtful profiles."

I would add, though, that Arendt's correspondence with Karl Jaspers is an utterly fascinating book, as two philosophers who trust each other completely write to each other frequently between the late forties and Jaspers's death in 1969. Often, their commentaries on historical events of the period shed light on what those events felt like to those who could not see how they were going to turn out. For example, their discussion of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 makes clear (at least to this late-comer, born in 1964) just how frightening those days must have been to live through.