How Would Hannah Arendt Approach Holocaust Education?
What Hannah Arendt Can Teach Us Now: An Elephant in the Room Series
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I am unable to publish this week’s installment of conversations on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. I will resume publishing next week.
For this week, I’ll briefly address the first bonus question of Conversation 1.1:
Consider this quote from Origins: “But what drove the Jews into the center of these racial ideologies more than anything else was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements’ [pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism] claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim. It did not matter that the Jewish concept had nothing in common with the tribal theories about the divine origin of one’s own people” (314).
If Arendt were alive today, what strategies would she employ to evaluate Holocaust education as a tool against hate?
This question was meant as a brainstorming exercise. Here is my personal take:
Arendt notes that the concept of “chosenness” doesn’t have the same meaning for European political movements in the late 19th and early 20th century as it does in Judaism. This differentiation is important because it signals that the driving forces behind these political movements are independent of theology and scholarship. The European idea of a chosen people may have used the Jewish people as a model or a foil, but the concept had no grounding in the actual ways Jews interpreted their relationship to God.
This suggests to me that Arendt would not see Holocaust education as the best solution to combat hate. I don’t think she would reject it outright, since she had a strong belief in the relationship between thought and ethical conduct. Nevertheless, I think she would probably be skeptical, for example, of bringing those with entrenched antisemitic beliefs to Holocaust museums because she portrayed hate as operating independently from facts. For Arendt, a sense of being German or Slavic at the fin-de-siècle was more dependent on conforming to social trends than grounding collective identity in common cultural and historical references. In other words, true and false didn’t matter for these movements, only the shifting winds of conformity.
This is something to consider when we evaluate today’s far-right and far-left. Are contemporary political extremes grounded in truth or the pressure to conform?
