As Hannah Arendt
and her husband Heinrich Blücher waited in Montauban, France in the summer of
1940 to receive emergency exit papers they did not give into anxiety or
despair. They found bicycles and explored the beautiful French countryside
during the day and delighted in the detective novels of Georges Simenon at
night. In the words of Helen Wolff: ‘Hannah, in her high-spirited way, made of
this anguishing experience a kind of gift of time.’ It was ‘a hiatus within a
life of work and duties’.
Which
is not how one might be inclined to act when their life is in peril. What
enabled Arendt to make a gift of time during such an anguishing experience?
It
wasn’t hope.
Arendt
was never given to hopeful thinking. As early as 1929, she saw what was
happening in Germany, and lost friendships because of it. She despised what she
called ‘opportunistic politics’, which ‘leaves behind it a chaos of
contradictory interests and apparently hopeless conflicts’. And she turned away
from any notion of messianism that might offer redemption in the future.
After
the war, in a letter to the American philosopher Glenn Gray, she wrote that the
only book she recommends to all her students is Hope Against Hope by
Nadezhda Mandelstam. Written by the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam,
the devastating memoir details life under Stalin’s regime and the struggle to
stay alive. (In Russian, nadezhda means hope.) Arendt called
it ‘one of the real documents’ of the 20th century.
Many
discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine, and speak to a desire for
catharsis. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult
not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph
over evil and deliver a happy ending. For some, discussions of hope are attached
to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope
is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Some people uphold hope as a
form of liberal faith in progress, while for others still hope expresses faith
in God and life after death.
Arendt
breaks with these narratives. Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope
is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times. She rejects
notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is
not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. She does not even
believe in the soul, as she writes in one love letter to her husband. The
political theorist George Kateb once remarked that her work is ‘offensive to a
democratic soul’. When she was awarded an honorary degree at Smith College in
Massachusetts in 1966, the president said: ‘Your writings challenge the mind,
disturb the conscience, and depress the spirit of your readers; yet out of your
wisdom and firm belief in mankind’s inner strength comes a sure hope.’ I
imagine Arendt might have responded: ‘“Sure hope” for what exactly?’
Arendt
never offers a systematic account of hope, but she returns to hope throughout
her work. She begins her essay ‘What Is
Freedom?’ by declaring: ‘To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a
hopeless enterprise.’ In her essay ‘On
Humanity in Dark Times’, she writes: ‘In hope, the soul overleaps reality, as
in fear it shrinks back from it.’ And her book The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) begins with a discussion of hope:
‘Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such
events than balanced judgment and measured insight.’
Arendt’s
most devastating account of hope appears in her essay ‘The Destruction of Six
Million’ (1964) published by Jewish World. Arendt was asked to
answer two questions. The first was why the world remained silent as Hitler
slaughtered the Jewish people, and whether or not Nazism had its roots in
European humanism. The second was about the sources of helplessness among the
Jewish people.
To
the first question, Arendt responded that ‘the world did not keep silent; but
apart from not keeping silent, the world did nothing.’ People had the audacity
to express feelings of horror, shock and indignation, while doing nothing. This
was not a failure of European humanism, she argued, which was unprepared for
the emergence of totalitarianism, but of European liberalism, socialism not
excluded.
Listening
to Beethoven and translating German into classical Greek was not what caused
the intelligentsia to go along with the Nazification of social, cultural,
academic and political institutions. It was an ‘unwillingness to face
realities’ and it was a desire ‘to escape into some fool’s paradise of firmly
held ideological convictions when confronted with facts’.
The
Nazis had used hope to implicate concentration-camp inmates by making them
behave like murderers.
To
the second question, Arendt wrote that: ‘The Jewish masses inside Nazi-occupied
Europe were objectively helpless.’ She turns to the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski’s This
Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen (1946) to discuss the ways in
which hope had been used to destroy the very humanity of people. Borowski was
only a teenager when Hitler invaded Poland and he was later captured by the
Nazis and then sent to Auschwitz and Dachau. Reflecting back on his
imprisonment in Auschwitz, he wrote:
Never before in
the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it
done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were
never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas
chambers.
Borowski
killed himself shortly after writing these lines.
It
was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was
hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of
them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.
In
many of her early essays from the 1930s and ’40s, Arendt takes aim at the
ethical implications of what can happen when one cleaves to hope during moments
of crisis. She was especially critical of how the Nazis had used hope to
implicate concentration-camp inmates in their crimes by making them behave like
murderers towards one another. In her biweekly column ‘This Means You!’ written
for Aufbau, a weekly newspaper for German Jewish immigrants founded
in New York in 1934, Arendt argues that fear and hope are ‘the two archenemies
of Jewish politics’. In an editorial titled ‘Days of Change’, she gives an
account of the battle for the Warsaw ghetto, discussing how hope had been used
against the Jewish people:
It began on July
22, 1942. It was on that day that the chairman of the ‘Jewish Council’,
the engineer [Adam] Czerniaków, committed suicide because the Gestapo had
demanded that he supply six to ten thousand people a day for deportation. There
were a half million Jews in the ghetto, and the Gestapo was afraid of armed or
passive resistance. Nothing of the sort happened. Twenty to forty thousand Jews
volunteered for deportation, ignoring flyers distributed by the Polish
underground movement warning against it.
The population
was ‘caught between fear and feverish hope’. Some hoped that ‘evacuation’ meant
only resettlement, others that such measures would not affect them. Some feared
that resistance would mean certain death; others feared that resistance would
be followed by a mass execution of the ghetto; and since Jewish opinion in
general was against resistance and preferred illusions, the few who wanted to
fight shied away from assuming that responsibility. The Germans made meticulous
use of both hope and fear.
Caught
between fear and ‘feverish hope’, the inmates in the ghetto were paralysed. The
truth of ‘resettlement’ and the world’s silence led to a kind of fatalism. Only
when they gave up hope and let go of fear, Arendt argues, did they realise that
‘armed resistance was the only moral and political way out’.
For
Arendt, the emergence of totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century meant
that one could no longer count on common sense or human decency, moral norms or
ethical imperatives. The law mandated mass murder and could not be looked to
for guidance on how to act.
The
tradition of Western political thought broke, and Plato’s axiom – that it is
better to suffer harm than to do harm – was reversed. The most basic human
experiences, such as love, loss, desire, fear, hope and loneliness, were
instrumentalised by fascist propaganda to sway the masses. But Arendt could not
be swayed. And in the darkest hour of her life, as she contemplated suicide in
an internment camp, she decided she loved life too much to give it up. She did
not hope for rescue or redemption. She understood herself to be caught in
between the ‘no-longer’ and the ‘not-yet’, in between past and future.
Before
Arendt was forced to abandon her academic career and flee Nazi Germany in 1933,
she published her dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine. Written
before the war at the University of Heidelberg under the direction of the
existential philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers, Arendt offers a secular
reading of Augustine’s conceptions of love.
In
Augustine’s concept of caritas, or neighbourly love, Arendt
found a way of being toward the world and the root of political action and
human freedom where love of the world has the power to create new beginnings.
Arendt’s secular reading of Augustine reconciles his understanding of a
Christian hope for life after death with her own understanding of worldliness.
Whereas Augustine sought immortality in the afterlife, Arendt argues that there
is only immortality in a person’s political actions on this earth. All that
remains after we die are the stories others will tell about what we have done
In
the mid-1950s and early ’60s in New York, as Arendt was preparing that
manuscript for English publication, she edited the text and inserted the
language of natality, in conversation with the idea of new beginnings.
Coining natality as a concept, Arendt found the principle of
new beginnings, the root of political action, and the possibility of freedom.
An
uncommon word, and certainly more feminine and clunkier-sounding than hope,
natality possesses the ability to save humanity. Whereas hope is a passive
desire for some future outcome, the faculty of action is ontologically rooted
in the fact of natality. Breaking with the tradition of Western political
thought, which centred death and mortality from Plato’s Republic through
to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Arendt turns towards new
beginnings, not to make any metaphysical argument about the nature of being,
but in order to save the principle of humanity itself. Natality is the condition
for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new
beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous
and it is unpredictable. Natality means we always have the ability to break
with the current situation and begin something new. But what that is cannot be
said.
Faith
and hope are not articles of belief for Arendt, but action.
Hope
might not be able to save us when the chips are down, but natality can. And in
this way, Arendt did not give up faith in the world of human affairs, she tried
to find a concept in modernity that could sustain it. In The Human
Condition (1958), she writes:
The miracle that
saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is
ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is
ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new
beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the
full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope,
those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity
ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not
too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s
box.
Faith
and hope in human affairs can come only from the fact that each new person born
into the world has the ability to create something new, to act, and so to set
in motion a chain of events, the outcome of which cannot be predicted. In this
way, faith and hope are not articles of belief for Arendt, but action. Action
is ‘the one miracle-working faculty of man’. Here it is tempting to take
natality, one of Arendt’s most discussed concepts, and slide into the language
of hope, but one would be better equipped using ‘to begin’ as a synonym.
Arendt’s
refusal of hope is informed by her study of early Greek political thought,
which reckoned hope alongside fear and evil. In the ‘Melian Dialogue’ (431
BCE), Thucydides writes:
Hope, danger’s
comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not
without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant,
and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true
colours only when they are ruined.
For
Thucydides, hope is a salve, an indulgence, a danger, and a cause of loss. In
Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BCE), which is central to
Arendt’s discussion of hope in The Human Condition, he argues that
it is only hope that was left in Pandora’s box after all the other evils
escaped: ‘Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim
of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.’ Which is to say, one can
glimpse hope only once evil has escaped into the world. (A more generous
reading might be, we can hope to have hope, but only because we are surrounded
by evil.)
Hope
augments our vision, turning us away from the world before us, but natality is
a political disposition and it is the possibility of political action. Arendt
argued that hope overcame man, because it turned people away from what was
unfolding right in front of them. Whereas natality forces one to be present in
the moment. Conceptually, natality can be understood as the flipside of hope:
- Hope is
dehumanising because it turns people away from this world.
- Hope is a
desire for some predetermined future outcome.
- Hope takes
us out of the present moment.
- Hope is
passive.
- Hope exists
alongside evil.
- Natality is
the principle of humanity.
- Natality is
the promise of new beginnings.
- Natality is
present in the Now.
- Natality is
the root of action.
- Natality is
the miracle of birth.
Arendt’s
refusal of hope does not leave one in despair. It’s difficult to imagine a more
uplifting concept than natality. But whereas hope is something we have,
natality is something we do. As a secular article of faith,
natality places the responsibility for action firmly in our hands, it is the
possibility each of us contains, inherent in our birth. Perhaps the best
example of this is found in The Origins of Totalitarianism,
which begins by condemning hope and fear and ends with this passage from
Augustine, which inspired Arendt’s concept of natality:
Beginning, before
it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it
is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est –
‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is
guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
Arendt
is not hopeful that the elements of totalitarianism will fade from our world.
She warns that totalitarian solutions will exist whenever it seems impossible
to alleviate social, political and economic misery. But it is natality that she
leaves us with, it is the possibility of action in hopeless situations. It is
what allowed her to make a gift of time during such an anguishing experience.
From gaining the sympathies of a Gestapo guard through her gift for
storytelling, to having the courage to walk out of an internment camp with
forged papers, to journeying across France alone on foot in search of her
husband, Arendt acted courageously time and again when she was faced with the
opportunity to turn toward reckless hope or despair.
Eventually,
with the help of Varian Fry, Arendt and Blücher were able to secure exit
papers. They rode their bicycles from Montauban to Marseille, and rented a
hotel room to wait for word to come from the US consulate. Then, one morning, a
message was sent up to their room requesting that Blücher report to the front
desk. But Arendt knew the call was a trick, and that the police were not too
far behind.
Playing
innocent, Blücher went downstairs to the lobby, left his key, and walked out of
the front door before anyone could stop him. When the hotel clerk came over to
Arendt asking where her husband was, she staged a loud scene, shouting that he
was already at the prefecture’s office. She told the clerk that he was
responsible for whatever happened to her husband. She waited for some time to
pass then went to meet Blücher at a café where he was safely hiding.
Together
they immediately left Marseille. Between June and December 1941, the US
Department of State tightened its entry policy. And of the 1,137 names submitted,
only 238 people received emergency exit visas. Arendt and Blücher
were fortunate enough to be among them.
Arendt
was 34 years old when she arrived at Ellis Island on the SS Guiné on 22
May 1941. She had $25 in her pocket and didn’t speak English. She had fled
two world wars, been arrested by the Gestapo, and escaped an internment camp.
Her life was just beginning.
Samantha Rose Hill is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics
and Humanities and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social
Research and the University of the Underground. She is the author of Hannah Arendt (2021) and Hannah
Arendt’s Poems (forthcoming 2022), and her work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, Contemporary
Political Theory and Theory & Event. AEON
