Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in and died in New in 1975.Arendt was one of the great political thinkers, philosophers and writers of the twentieth century. She wrote works that are still read today such as works such as “The Human Condition,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” and “The Life of the Mind.” She fled Germany in 1933 to escape Hitler's rise to power. As a German- Jewish immigrant escaping Nazi Germany this gives Arendt an authoritative perspective. She then moved to Paris where for six years where worked for a number of Jewish refugee organizations. In 1941 she moved to the United States and was part of the academic staff at several American Universities. Arendt died in 1975. She is best known for her works that discuss the reasoning and rational for the Nazi and Stalinist regimes.” The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951 explores these ideas. Arendt stated,”The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” In her view, reasoning needed to be created as an explanation so the human race would be able to understand and reflect on the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Arendt’s belief was that what occurred because of Nazi and Stalinist aggression was so unbelievable, a rational had to be provided for people to be able to understand it. She wrote that there were often times when concentration camp victims who were freed from the camps were not believed because of the magnitude of the atrocities. Arendt states.” There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences”(Jacobus 94). This is some of the reasoning in her book entitled “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” She developed a new set of ideas that were often controversial including Darwinist and Marxist theory. One of the last chapters included in the required anthology, is entitled “Total Domination.” Arendt was faced with the constraint and the arduous task of explaining the tragic events of the Holocaust and could not rely on precedent or experience to help the reader understand the horror. The concentration camps according to “Total Domination” are a tool meant to exterminate people, but moreover to control those on the outside with fear. They serve to degrade the human such that they become as animals or subhuman. According to Arendt, this is how the leaders of the SS and Third Reich were able to somewhat justify in their own minds the atrocities for which they were responsible. Adolf Eichmann is featured in this work as an example of a person who did not fully understand the levity of what he had done. According to Arendt, he was following orders to exterminate people who had already been assigned by Germany as sub-human. Arendt’s rhetoric seems to excuse Eichmann and the Nazis, but upon a closer reading, it is explained that there is no other way to explain a horror such as this unless a human face is put on the perpetrators.
Arendt explains that the totalitarian state is an ideology that is a perverted version of the Darwin thesis that describes “survival of the fittest.” In Hitler’s view, the white European race was the fittest, so it followed naturally that they must be preserved at the expense of what he considered less desirable. For Arendt, the terror and torment of the concentration camps served no other purpose to the Third Reich except to show, ”that everything is possible” (86). What might be more descriptive is to say that “anything is possible if the lie is big enough.” Arendts’ argument is that totalitarianism equals terror. It is impossible to achieve one without the other because absolute terror dominates. Arendts’ theory continues on to what she calls,”The Big Lie” (87). Hitler described this to mean that if a lie was big enough, large numbers of people would believe it no matter how absurd it sounded. He used this to dominate and control his state.
Arendt attempts to use the theories of Karl Marx to help explain the totalitarian state. In Marx’ “The Communist Manifesto,” he states that, “the most progressive classes need to destroy the less progressive classes” (860. Marx was only subscribing to survival of the fittest. They main idea of this text is not to excuse the atrocities of the Nazis and the death camps, but to try to explain what the reasoning may have been inside the minds of the murderers, so that it never happens again.
Arendt, Hannah. “Total Domination.” A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. 7th ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 88-96.
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