Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

THE LAST INTERVIEW ^{INTERVIEW BY ROGER ERRERA UN CERTAIN REGARD, ORTF TV, FRANCE OCTOBER 1973 TRANSLATED BY ANDREW BROWN}

In October 1973, Hannah Arendt was interviewed by Roger Errera for the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). Recorded over several days, the interviews were later worked into a fifty-minute television feature directed by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky for the series Un certain regard, and first broadcast on July 6, 1974.

For the film, Arendt’s answers were translated into French and dubbed, with Arendt’s original voice behind it. By using this soundtrack and various transcripts and translations of the interviews, Arendt scholar Ursula Ludz reconstructed Arendt’s original answers and assembled an authoritative manuscript of the interview as it was televised. Stars indicate places where there was a cut in the film and where different sessions of the interviews have been pieced together.

Roger Errera’s questions have been translated from French for this publication. Arendt occasionally replied in a mixture of German, French, and English—her responses in French have been left, with translations in brackets where deemed necessary. Though the other interviews in this collection were edited before their original publication, and Arendt’s general practice was to go over anything she wrote in English with a friend or editor to fix her mistakes, this interview has been only lightly edited to correct some grammatical mistakes and eliminate repetitions. Arendt’s unique style of English and the conversational tone of the interview have been respected.

What follows is the text of my filmed interview with Hannah Arendt, which took place in New York in October 1973. My own interest in Arendt’s work began in 1965. I had reviewed the French translations of Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, and I published French translations of Antisemitism and Crises of the Republic in the Diaspora series at Calmann-Lévy in 1972 and 1973. I had also met Arendt several times, first at her apartment in New York in the winter of 1967, then in Cologne in 1972, and near Ascona in Switzerland, when she stayed in Tegna.

The initiative for the film came from a good friend, the late Pierre Schaeffer, then head of the Research Service of ORTF (French public radio and television). He asked me whether I would be interested. My answer was yes, while Arendt’s was, first, a categorical no. She later accepted. The fact that we had met earlier no doubt helped.

In October 1973, we went to New York. I had spent the summer in Greece reading her books again and preparing the interview. I sent her a short list of topics, which was accepted. We agreed on the procedure: two hours of interviewing every day, over several days, in a rental place, a TV studio or at the office of her publisher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). She strongly refused to be filmed at home.

The moment was not exactly a calm one, politically speaking. In the Middle East, the October War had just taken place. In the United States, the Watergate affair had begun. It would lead to the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974, under the threat of impeachment. If I remember well, we learned, in the course of our talks, of the dismissal of Archibald Cox, then special prosecutor, and the resignation of Elliot Richardson, then attorney general.

There is more than an echo of these events in the interview. During it, Hannah Arendt was extremely courteous and attentive, fully controlled, at times consulting a few notes (for quotations). It seems to me that she said exactly what she meant to say, correcting herself immediately whenever necessary. No anecdotes, no small talk. With a permanent grace she accepted what was for her neither a familiar nor a relaxing exercise.

Many themes were discussed by us: Europe and the United States; the pending constitutional crisis in Washington; the legacy of the sixties and early seventies in the American polity; the uniqueness of totalitarianism in the twenieth century; Israel, the Diaspora, and the Jewish condition. We could have spent hours, even days on each of them. It was a rare privilege for me to see and listen to her thinking aloud.

For several months after the filming, I worked with J.-C. Lubtchansky to assemble the parts of the film and make a whole out of them for the fifty-minute program. The film was broadcast in the spring of 1974.

A year later, I met Hannah Arendt again in New York, in the fall of 1975, shortly before she died on December 4. When, that same day, I learned of her death, I spent the whole night writing an obituary for her which appeared in Le Monde the next day—as a postface to our interrupted dialogue.

ARENDT: I may need a glass of water, if I could have that.

ERRERA: You arrived in this country in 1941. You’d come from Europe, and you’ve been living here for thirty-two years. When you arrived from Europe, what was your main impression?

ARENDT: Ma impression dominante, well, mon impression dominante… Well. See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time understanding this simple fact, which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is, this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the same… There are no natives here. The natives were the Indians. Everyone else is a citizen and these citizens are united only by one thing, and that’s a lot: that is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution. The constitution—that is a scrap of paper, according to French as well as German common opinion, and you can change it. No, here it is a sacred document, it is the constant remembrance of one sacred act, and that is the act of foundation. And the foundation is to make a union out of wholly disparate ethnic minorities and regions, and still (a) have a union and (b) not assimilate or level down these differences. And all this is very difficult to understand for a foreigner. It’s what a foreigner never understands. We can say this is a government by law and not by men. To what extent that is true, and needs to be true for the well-being of the country… I almost said, the nation—but for the well-being of the country, for the United States of America, for the republic, really…

ERRERA: Over the last ten years, America has experienced a wave of political violence marked by the assassination of the president and his brother, by the Vietnam War, by the Watergate affair. Why can America overcome crises that in Europe have led to changes of government, or even to very serious domestic unrest?

ARENDT: Now let me try it a little differently. I think the turning point in this whole business was indeed the assassination of the president. No matter how you explain it and no matter what you know or don’t know about it, it was quite clear that now, really for the first time in a very long time in American history, a direct crime had interfered with the political process. And this somehow has changed the political process. You know, other assassinations followed, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, et cetera. Finally, the attack on Wallace, which belongs in the same category.[*]

ARENDT: I think that Watergate has revealed perhaps one of the deepest constitutional crises this country has ever known. And if I say constitutional crisis, this is of course much more important than if I said “une crise constitutionelle” en France. For the Constitution… I don’t know how many constitutions you have had since the French Revolution. As far as I remember, by the time of World War I, you had had fourteen. And how many you then had… I don’t want to tackle it, every one of you can do it better than I. But anyhow, here there is one Constitution, and this Constitution has now lasted for not quite two hundred years. Here, it’s a different story. Here, it’s the whole fabric of government which actually is at stake.

And this constitutional crisis consists—for the first time in the United States—in a head-on clash between the legislative and the executive. Now there the Constitution itself is somehow at fault, and I would like to talk about that for a moment. The Founding Fathers never believed that tyranny could arise out of the executive office, because they did not see this office in any different light but as the executor of what the legislation had decreed—in various forms; I leave it at that. We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive. But what did the Founding Fathers—if we take the spirit of the Constitution—what did they think? They thought they were freed from majority rule, and therefore it is a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of the minorities, because they believed that in a healthy body politic there must be a plurality of opinions. That what the French call “l’union sacrée” is precisely what one should not have, because this would already be a kind of tyranny or the consequence of a tyranny, and the tyranny could very well be… The tyrant could very well be a majority. Hence, the whole government is construed in such a way that even after the victory of the majority, there is always the opposition, and the opposition is necessary because the opposition represents the legitimate opinions of either one minority or of minorities.

National security is a new word in the American vocabulary, and this, I think, you should know. National security is really, if I may already interpret a bit, a translation of “raison d’état.” And “raison d’état,” this whole notion of reason of state, never played any role in this country. This is a new import. National security now covers everything, and it covers, as you may know from the interrogation of Mr. Ehrlichman,[†] all kinds of crimes. For instance, the president has a perfect right… the king can do no wrong; that is, he is like a monarch in a republic. He’s above the law, and his justification is always that whatever he does, he does for the sake of national security.

ERRERA: In your view, in what way are these implications of raison d’état, what you call the intrusion of criminality into the political domain, specific to our time? Is this, indeed, specific to our time?

ARENDT: This is propre à notre époque… I really think so. Just as the stateless business is propre à notre époque, and repeats itself again and again under different aspects and in different countries and in different colors. But if we come to these general questions, what is also propre à notre époque is the massive intrusion of criminality into political processes. And by this I mean something which by far transcends those crimes always justified, rightly or wrongly, by raison d’état, because these are always the exceptions to the rule, whereas here we are confronted suddenly with a style of politics which by itself is criminal.

Here it’s by no means the exception to the rule. It is not that they say, because we are in such a special emergency, we have to bug everybody and sundry, including the president himself. But they think that bugging belongs to the normal political process. And similarly, they don’t say, we will burglar once, break in the office of the psychiatrist once[‡] and then never again, by no means. They say, this is absolutely legitimate, to break in.

So this whole business of national security comes of course from the reason-of-state business. The national-security business is a direct European import. Of course, the Germans and the French and the Italians recognize it as entirely justified, because they have always lived under this. But this was precisely the European heritage with which the American Revolution intended to break.

ERRERA: In your essay on the Pentagon Papers[§] you describe the psychology of those you call the “professional problem-solvers,” who at the time were the advisers to the American government, and you say: “Their distinction lies in that they were problem-solvers as well, hence they were not just intelligent but prided themselves on being ‘rational,’ and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory,’ the world of sheer mental effort…”

ARENDT: May I interrupt you here? I think that’s enough. I have a very good example, precisely from these Pentagon Papers, of this scientific mentality, which finally overwhelms all other insights. You know about the “domino theory,” which was the official theory throughout the Cold War from 1950 till about 1969, shortly after the Pentagon Papers. The fact is that very few of the very sophisticated intellectuals who wrote the Pentagon Papers believed in this theory. There are only, I think, two or three guys, pretty high up in the administration, but not exactly very intelligent ones—Mr. Rostow and General Taylor[‖] (not the most intelligent boy…)—who really believed it. That is, they didn’t believe in it, but in everything they did they acted on this assumption. And this not because they were liars, or because they wanted to please their superiors—these people really were all right in this respect—but because this gave them a framework within which they could work. And they took this framework even though they knew—and every intelligence report and every factual analysis proved it to them every morning—that these assumptions were simply factually wrong. They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.

ERRERA: Our century seems to me to be dominated by the persistence of a mode of thinking based on historical determinism.

ARENDT: Yes, and I think there are very good reasons for this belief in historical necessity. The trouble with this whole business, and it is really an open question, is the following: We don’t know the future, everybody acts into the future, and nobody knows what he is doing, because the future is being done. Action is a “we” and not an “I.” Only where I am the only one, if I were the only one, could I foretell what’s going to happen, from what I am doing. Now this makes it look as though what actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history. Nobody knows what is going to happen simply because so much depends on an enormous amount of variables; in other words, on simple hasard. On the other hand, if you look back on history retrospectively, then you can—even though all this was contingent—you can tell a story that makes sense. How is that possible? That is a real problem for every philosophy of history. How is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise? All the variables have disappeared, and reality has such an overwhelming impact upon us that we cannot be bothered with what is actually an infinite variety of possibilities.

ERRERA: But if our contemporaries cling fast to determinist ways of thinking, in spite of this being refuted by history, do you think it’s because they’re afraid of freedom?

ARENDT: Ja. Sure. And rightly so. Only they don’t say it. If they did, one could immediately start a debate. If they would only say it. They are afraid, they are afraid to be afraid. That is one of the main personal motivations. They are afraid of freedom.

ERRERA: Can you imagine a minister in Europe, seeing his policy about to fail, commissioning a team of experts from outside the government to produce a study whose aim would be to find out how…

ARENDT: It was not extérieur de l’administration. They were taken from everywhere and also from…

ERRERA: True, but people from outside the government were involved too. So can you imagine a European minister in the same situation commissioning a study of that kind to find out how it all happened?

ARENDT: Of course not.

ERRERA: Why not?

ARENDT: Because of reason of state, you know. He would have felt that… He would have immediately started to cover up. The McNamara attitude—you know, I quoted this…[a] McNamara said “It’s not a very nice picture, what we are doing there; what the hell is going on here?” This is an American attitude. This shows you that things were still all right, even if they went wrong. But they were still all right because there was still McNamara who wanted to learn from it.

ERRERA: Do you think that, at present, American leaders faced with other situations still want to know?

ARENDT: No. I don’t think that a single one is left. I don’t know. No. No, I take that back. But I don’t believe that… I think that McNamara was on Nixon’s list of enemies, if I am not mistaken. I saw it today in The New York Times. I think that is true. And this shows you already that this whole attitude has gone out of American politics—that is, on the highest level. It is no longer there. They believed, you see, these people already believed in image-making, but still with a vengeance, that is: Why didn’t we succeed with image-making? And one can say that it was only images, you know. But now they want everybody to believe in their images, and nobody should look beyond them, and that is of course an altogether different political will.

ERRERA: After what Senator Fulbright calls the “arrogance of power,”[b] after what we might call the “arrogance of knowledge,” is there a third stage that is arrogance pure and simple?

ARENDT: Yes, I don’t know whether it’s l’arrogance tout court. It is really the will to dominate, for heaven’s sake. And up to now it hasn’t succeeded, because I still sit with you at this table and talk pretty freely. So they haven’t yet dominated me; and somehow I am not afraid. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I feel perfectly free in this country. So they haven’t succeeded. Somebody, I think Morgenthau,[c] called this whole Nixon enterprise an “abortive revolution.” Now, we don’t yet know whether it was abortive—it was early when he said that—but there’s one thing one can say: successful it wasn’t either.

ERRERA: But isn’t the big threat these days the idea that the goals of politics are limitless? Liberalism, after all, presupposes the idea that politics has limited objectives. These days, doesn’t the biggest threat come from the rise of men and movements who set themselves unlimited objectives?

ARENDT: I hope I don’t shock you if I tell you that I’m not at all sure that I’m a liberal. You know, not at all. And I really don’t have any creed in this sense. I have no exact political philosophy which I could summon up with one ism.

ERRERA: Of course, but all the same your philosophical reflections lie within the foundations of liberal thought, with its borrowings from antiquity.

ARENDT: Is Montesquieu a liberal? Would you say that all the people whom I take into account as worth a little… I mean, “moi je me sers où je peux” [I help myself to what I can]. I take whatever I can and whatever suits me. I think one of the great advantages of our time is really, you know, what René Char has said: “Notre héritage n’est garanti par aucun testament” [Our inheritance is guaranteed by no testament].[d]

ERRERA:… is preceded by no testament…

ARENDT:… n’est précédé par aucun testament. This means we are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and the thoughts of our past.

ERRERA: But doesn’t this extreme freedom risk alarming many of our contemporaries who would prefer to find some ready-made theory, some ideology they could then apply?

ARENDT: Certainement. Aucun doute. Aucun doute.

ERRERA: Doesn’t this freedom risk being the freedom of a few, those who are strong enough to invent new modes of thought?

ARENDT: Non. Non. It rests only on the conviction that every human being is a thinking being and can reflect as well as I do and can therefore judge for himself, if he wants to. How I can make this wish arise in him, this I don’t know. The only thing that can help us, I think, is to réfléchir. And to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general convictions, et cetera. Everything which happens in thinking is subject to a critical examination of whatever there is. That is, there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. So how I can convince… I think, nonthinking is even more dangerous. I don’t deny that thinking is dangerous, but I would say not thinking, ne pas réfléchir c’est plus dangereux encore [not thinking is even more dangerous].

ERRERA: Let’s go back to René Char’s words: “Our inheritance is preceded by no testament.” What do you think the inheritance of the twentieth century will be?

ARENDT: We are still there, you know—you are young, I am old—but we are both still there to leave them something.

ERRERA: What will we leave to the twenty-first century? Three quarters of the century have already gone by…

ARENDT: I’ve no idea. I’m pretty sure that modern art which is now rather at a deep point… But after such an enormous creativity as we had during the first forty years, especially in France, of course, this is only natural. A certain exhaustion then sets in. This we will leave. This whole era, this whole twentieth century will probably be one of the great centuries in history, but not in politics.

ERRERA: And America?

ARENDT: No. No, no, no…

ERRERA: Why?

ARENDT: You know, this country… You need a certain amount of tradition.

ERRERA: There isn’t an American artistic tradition?

ARENDT: No, not a great one. A great one in poetry, a great one in novels, in writing, et cetera. But the only thing that you could really mention is this, the architecture. The stone buildings are like tents of nomads which have been frozen into stone.

ERRERA: In your work, you’ve frequently discussed the modern history of the Jews and anti-Semitism, and you say, at the end of one of your books, that the birth of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century was the only political response the Jews ever found to anti-Semitism.[e] In what way has the existence of Israel changed the political and psychological context in which Jews live in the world?

ARENDT: Oh, I think it has changed everything. The Jewish people today are really united behind Israel.[f] They feel that they have a state, a political representation in the same way as the Irish, the English, the French, et cetera. They have not only a homeland but a nation-state. And their whole attitude towards the Arabs depends, of course, to a large extent on these identifications, which the Jews coming from Central Europe made almost instinctively and without reflection; namely, that the state must necessarily be a nation-state.

Now this, that is, the whole relationship between the Diaspora and Israel, or what formerly was Palestine, has changed because Israel is no longer just a refuge for those underdogs in Poland, where a Zionist was a guy who tried to get money from rich Jews for the poor Jews in Poland. But it is today really the Jewish representative of the Jewish people all over the world. Whether we like that or not is another question, but… This doesn’t mean that this Diaspora Judaism has to always be of the same opinion as the government in Israel. It’s not a question of the government, it’s a question of the state and so long as the state exists, this is of course what represents us in the eyes of the world.

ERRERA: Ten years ago, a French author, Georges Friedmann, wrote a book called The End of the Jewish People?,[g] in which he concluded that in the future there would be, on the one hand, a new state, an Israeli nation, and on the other, in the lands of the Diaspora, Jews who would be assimilated and would gradually lose their own characteristics.

ARENDT: Cette hypothèse sounds very plausible, and I think it’s quite wrong. You see, in antiquity, while the Jewish state still existed, there was already a great Jewish Diaspora. Through the centuries, when there were many different forms of government and forms of state, the Jews, the only ancient people that actually survived these thousands of years, were never assimilated… If Jews could have been assimilated, they would have been assimilated long ago. There was a chance during the Spanish period, there was a chance during the Roman period, there was, of course, a chance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Look, a people, a collective, doesn’t commit suicide. Mr. Friedmann is wrong, because he doesn’t understand that the feeling of the intellectuals, who can indeed change nationalities and can absorb another culture, et cetera, does not correspond to the feeling of the people as a whole, and especially not of a people that has been constituted by those laws which we all know.

ERRERA: What does it mean for Jews to be assimilated into American society?

ARENDT: Well, in the sense in which we spoke of assimilated Jewry, by which we meant assimilation to the surrounding culture, it doesn’t exist. Would you kindly tell me to what the Jews should assimilate here? To the English? To the Irish? To the Germans? To the French? To the… you know, whoever came here…

ERRERA: When people say that American Jews are very Americanized, not just Americans but Americanized, what are they getting at?

ARENDT: One means the way of life, and all these Jews are very good American citizens… That is, it signifies their public life, not their private life, not their social life. And their social and their private life is today more Jewish than it ever was before. The younger generation in great numbers learn Hebrew, even if they are from parents who don’t know any Hebrew any longer. But the main thing is really Israel, the main thing is: Are you for or against Israel?

Take, for example, the German Jews of my generation who came to this country. They became in no time at all very nationalistic Jews, much more nationalistic than I ever was, even though I was a Zionist and they were not. I never said I’m a German, I always said I’m a Jew. But they now assimilate. To what? To the Jewish community, since they were used to assimilation. They assimilated to the Jewish community of America and that means that they then of course, with the fervor of new converts, became especially nationalistic and pro-Israel.

ERRERA: Throughout history, what has ensured the survival of the Jewish people has been, mainly, a religious kind of bond. We are living in a period when religions as a whole are going through a crisis, where people are trying to loosen the shackles of religion. In these conditions, what, in the current period, comprises the unity of the Jewish people throughout the world?

ARENDT: I think you are slightly wrong with this thesis. When you say religion, you think, of course, of the Christian religion, which is a creed and a faith. This is not at all true for the Jewish religion. This is really a national religion where nation and religion coincide. You know that Jews, for instance, don’t recognize baptism and for them it is as though it hadn’t happened. That is, a Jew never ceases to be a Jew according to Jewish law. So long as somebody is born by a Jewish mother—la recherche de la paternité est interdite [he is forbidden from trying to find out who his father was]—he is a Jew. The notion of what religion is, is altogether different. It’s much more a way of life than it is a religion in the particular, specific sense of the Christian religion. I remember, for instance, I had Jewish instruction, religious instruction, and when I was about fourteen years old, of course I wanted to rebel and do something terrible to our teacher and I got up and said “I don’t believe in God.” Whereupon he said: “Who asked you?”

ERRERA: Your first book, published in 1951, was called The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this book you tried not just to describe a phenomenon but also to explain it. Hence this question: In your view, what is totalitarianism?

ARENDT: Oui, enfin… Let me start with making certain distinctions upon which other people… They are not agreed upon. First of all, a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny.

When I analyzed a totalitarian government, I tried to analyze it as a new form of government that wasn’t known before, and therefore I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. Among these, I would just like to remind you of one characteristic which is entirely absent from all tyrannies today, and that is the role of the innocent, the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn’t have to do anything in order to be deported or in order to be killed. You were given the role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. With respect to this, no government before has killed people for saying yes. Usually a government kills people or tyrants kill people for saying no. Now, I was reminded by a friend that something very similar was said in China many centuries ago, namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better than the disobedient who oppose. And this of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism, in that there is a total domination of men by men.

Now, in this sense there is no totalitarianism today, even in Russia, which has one of the worst tyrannies we have ever known. Even in Russia you have to do something in order to be sent away into exile, or a forced labor camp, or a psychiatric ward of a hospital.

Now, let’s for a moment see what tyranny is, because after all totalitarian regimes arose when the majority of European governments were already under dictatorships. Dictatorships, if we take them in the original sense of the concept, of the word, are not tyrannies; there’s a temporary suspension of the laws in the case of an emergency, usually during a war or civil war or such. But, anyhow, the dictatorship is limited in time and tyranny is not…

ARENDT: When I wrote my Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III or et cetera. I found in Brecht[h] the following remark: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.” Now, that Hitler was an idiot was, of course, a prejudice of all—of the whole opposition to Hitler prior to his seizure of power. And therefore a great many books tried to justify him and to make him a great man. So he [Brecht] says: “That he failed did not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man.” That is, neither the one nor the other; this whole category of greatness has no application. “If the ruling classes,” says he, “permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.” And generally speaking, he [Brecht] then says in these rather abrupt remarks: “One may state that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.”

This, of course, is a shocking statement. I think that at the same time it is entirely true. What is really necessary is—if you want to keep your integrity under these circumstances—then you can do it only if you remember your old way of looking at such things and say: No matter what he does, if he killed ten million people, he is still a clown.

ERRERA: When you published your book on the Eichmann trial, it aroused some very violent reactions. Why were there such reactions?

ARENDT: Well, as I said before, this controversy was partly caused by the fact that I attacked the bureaucracy, and if you attack a bureaucracy, you have got to be prepared for the fact that this bureaucracy will defend itself, will attack you, will try to make you impossible and everything which goes with it. That is, more or less, dirty political business. Now, with this I really had no real quarrel. But suppose they had not done it, suppose they had not organized this campaign, then still the opposition to this book would have been strong, because the Jewish people were offended, and now I mean people whom I really respect. And therefore I can understand it. They were offended chiefly by what Brecht referred to, by laughter. My laughter was, at that time, kind of innocent and kind of not reflecting on my laughter. What I saw was a clown.

So, Eichmann, for instance, was bothered never by anything which he had done to the Jews in general. But he was bothered by one little incident: he had slapped the face of the then president of the Jewish community in Vienna during an interrogation. God knows many worse things were happening to many people than to be slapped in the face. But this he has never condoned himself for having done, and he thought this was very wrong, indeed. He had lost his cool, so to speak.

ERRERA: Why do you think we are seeing the emergence of a whole literature that, when it comes to Nazism, for instance, often describes its leaders and their crimes in a novelistic way and tries to humanize them, and thereby indirectly to justify them? Do you think that publications of this kind are purely commercial, or do they have a deeper significance?

ARENDT: I think it has a signification, at least it shows that what happened once can happen again, and this indeed, I believe, is entirely true. You see, tyranny has been discovered very early, and identified very early as an enemy. Still, it has never in any way prevented any tyrant from becoming a tyrant. It has not prevented Nero, and it has not prevented Caligula. And the cases of Nero and Caligula have not prevented an even closer example of what the massive intrusion of criminality can mean for the political process.