Pariah: can Hannah Arendt help us rethink our global refugee crisis? by Jeremy Adelman
Camps and pariahs are still with us. They have never been more numerous
To be unwanted is never just about
being rejected by those who throw you out.
Hannah Arendt was on her way to lunch with her mother Martha when a Berlin
policeman arrested her and took her to the presidium at Alexanderplatz. It was
1933. Hitler had been in power for several months; Hermann Göring’s agents were
rounding up suspicious activists. The young researcher for the German Zionist
Organization spent eight days in jail while gendarmes scoured her apartment,
examined her philosophical notes, and pored over her mysterious codes — a
selection of Greek quotes. Upon her release, she packed her bags. Since the
torching of the Reichstag in February, life had become hell for socialists,
communists, and Jews. Like others before her, and more after, Arendt fled to
Paris. She would spend the next 18 years as a refugee, a stateless person, a
pariah.
There are 60 million
refugees in the world, the highest sum of pariahs since 1945. The figure
tripled in the past year alone. Half of the world’s unwanted are under age 18.
Most will grow up in a camp. Many will die escaping their places of origin;
more than 3,000 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015. The lucky ones
will make new homes. But how welcome they will feel can be gauged by the
decibel level of nativists like Donald Trump, a chorus of Republican governors
and candidates, Marine Le Pen in France, and the surging Danish People’s Party.
So long as these negative voices have the megaphone, can the resettled ever
feel at home?
This human condition
needs to be taken more seriously. It is fast becoming the worst humanitarian
crisis of our times. Nativists are making it worse by denying a tradition of
granting asylum to the stateless. We have seen the cycle before — and it never
looks good. People look back on shut-them-out policies with shame (this is
certainly the way Americans, Canadians, and others view the treatment
of asylum-seeking Jews in the 1930s and 1940s). Are we destined to repeat
the cycle? If we cannot come up with a coherent response to the nativists in
our midst, the answer will be yes, and the consequences for relations with and
within the Islamic world and other emergency zones will be lasting. Can Hannah
Arendt, the avatar of public philosophy, help us formulate an enlightened
response? Can this former refugee help us reaffirm our obligations to people who
have nowhere else to turn?
The answer is steeped
in her years as a pariah and her insights into dehumanization. Arendt’s own
stateless experience helped forge the elements of the book that would make her
famous in America and worldwide. The Origins of Totalitarianism was
finished in the summer of 1950. In it, she
noted that “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities
which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man.” Without
a political community, man was a pariah. Months later, Arendt closed a long,
agonizing chapter of her life and became a naturalized citizen of the United
States, a pariah no more.
And yet, her
statelessness is often forgotten. We recall her German years and the romance
with Martin Heidegger, the source of much fretting about the limits of her
idealism. And we remember her American years. When I first read The
Origins of Totalitarianism as a student, it was a Cold War classic.
There were many beery nights in the 1980s arguing about the difference between
authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, disputing the ideological distinctions
of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. We obsessed about what kind of
state ruled. But what it means to have no state at all? Not really.
Nowadays, in our age
of terror and fugitives, there is another way to readThe Origins. There
is a different Arendt to remember — not the American made famous by Cold War
politics or her searing words about the Eichmann trial and the banality of
evil, but the stateless Arendt posing for such an iconic image that we have
forgotten the reasons for her mournfulness.
* * *
The Origins of
Totalitarianism is a book drawn from a well of personal experience.
Arriving in Paris, Arendt moved around the small hotels of rue Saint Jacques in
the student quarters of the Left Bank. She was married to a fellow philosopher,
Günther Stern, but by then it was a union in disarray. They officially divorced
in 1937, and Stern left for the United States. She would eventually meet
Heinrich Blücher. Not a Jew, but a self-taught communist, Blücher was a pariah
in his own way. The two moved to an apartment on rue de la Convention in the
15th arrondissement, a quartier swelling with expatriate Germans. The rent came
from bits of her mother’s gold, smuggled out of Germany as buttons sewn to her
clothes and hocked to a wealthy female Jewish patron for cash. Refugee
conditions were squalid. Living nearby, the exiled economics student Otto
Albert Hirschmann (known to us as Albert O. Hirschman) had to combat a
cockroach plague so that he and his sister Ursula (the target of Blücher’s
seductions before he met Arendt) could sleep. The solution: place the bedposts
in pots of kerosene so the swarm of insects could not climb up the furniture
and into the bed.
Exile means eviction
from one’s political community. But it also brings fresh encounters. To be unwanted
is never just about being rejected by those who throw you out. It also
entangles refugees with the ambiguities of their hosts. In the case of the
legions of Central European Jews fleeing to Paris and London, exile meant
dealing with the establishment Jews who often ran the charitable organizations
that took care of the fugitives. Arendt made sense of her pariah-hood in
brushes with a different Jewish condition: these upstart, establishment Jews.
She called them “parvenus,” and they loomed large in her thinking about the
Jewish condition and statelessness... read more:
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