Hannah Arendt: Banality Of Evil

One of the ideas explored in Hitler’s Daughter is about the dangers of making generalisations about people based on their race, gender, family connections, etc. In the story Hitler hated the Jews, he blamed everything on them and killed them or made them work for him. Hitler started a war because of this, and the war had killed many innocent people. This is shown when one of the side characters Johannes Wilhem Schmidt tells Heidi, the main character how the Russians killed his sister Helga. Also, when one of the soldiers that were meant to guard Heidi got his arm blown off he died. This

Victor Frankl once said, “Any person, regardless of the circumstances, can decide what shall become of them – mentally and spiritually.” This is true for Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, who both had very different reactions to World War II. Human goodness is when one sees the truth, accepts it, and makes rational decisions based on the truth. Human evil is irrational decision-making, and when a person sees and understands the truth but choses to defy it. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, philosophers Kant and Rahner would agree that Schindler is a representation of human goodness, and Goeth represents human evil.

Hanneli ‘Hannah’ Pik-Goslar was much like other Jewish children in Germany in the 1930’s, she was shunned, not allowed to go to the movies or ice skate, and was forced to attend a special school. Most of Germany was segregated against the Jewish and against her family. Hannah was born in Germany in 1928 to Ruth Klee and Hans Goslar, by the time she’s 5 years old she and her parents are already on the run from Nazi’s. When she’s 12 her sister Gabi was born. She is already friends with Anne when she hears they’ve fled to Switzerland. This is not true as they have just started their two year hiding period in the Secret Annex. In 1942 Hannah’s mom dies in childbirth with a stillborn baby. While her dad managed to get passport, they were still arrested

Arendt explains that the ultimate power of a totalitarian government is the acceptance of the ideology being propagated. The laws that are put into place in totalitarian government are not to empower the people and protect their rights. Instead, the laws tell the people what they must do, not what they must not do. Arendt tells how the law of nature is the foundation for Hitler's Nazis, and the law of history for Russia's communist regimes. According to Arendt, both the Nazi and communist regimes maintained that those laws gave them justification for their cruelty. These laws of nature and history are not permanent or stable. They are in motion to keep history and nature moving, so that it progresses without ever stopping. <p>Arendt claims that these laws of motion sustain the terror fueling the totalitarian government. Arendt says that terror is the realization and execution of these laws with nothing standing in its way. Throughout the selection, Arendt speaks of terror. Terror is essential for the state to keep its power, or else it will fall. According to Arendt, in a totalitarian state terror terminates individuality among the people. Individual men become a mass of humankind, in the eyes of the state. "Terror exists neither for nor against men", claims Arendt, "it substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt uses the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann to explore man's responsibility for evils committed under orders or as a result of the law. Due to the fact that she believed that Eichmann was neither anti-Semitic, nor a psychopath, Arendt was widely criticized for treating Eichmann too sympathetically. Still, her work on the Eichmann trial is among the most respected works on the issue to date.

(Schloss 77) This is when she is going to a work camp and she asks if her mother can come with her, which was very courageous of her, because they could have gotten mad and just killed her and her mother. Even small decisions or choices could affect someone’s life, like if they were to say something wrong in front of a Nazi they could get reported and then be sent to a concentration camp or even a death camp. Also, people had to choose carefully about who they trusted because they could easily trust someone that was on the opposite side and they could be turned in. In the Holocaust, there must have been many very hard choices that must have made people’s life very hard and

Therefore, her loyalty to Hitler was in question. Some people could have been in this scenario. Hitler also hid the camps from other nations. They did not know the full terror of the camps until the Allies took Europe. The result was the Nuremberg trials, retributions to German leaders for their actions.

Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and

Hannah Arendt’s begins the chapter with the first part of after the fall of the First World War stating the condition of the stateless people clarified the catastrophe of the nation-state model and the failure of human rights. When the nation-system was created, the people in power in Europe separated the people into 3 major groups which are the state people, the nationalities like the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, and the minorities like the Germans, being the strongest officially economically and in number. The “Minority Treaties” were created by the League of Nations to seek security to the minority groups in the new states. The “real significance of the Minority Treaties” (pg.274) was that currently millions of people were known by the international law since by the nation-states, they have the power to strip down the citizens of that state by banishment or other worse factors. Only nationals could be citizens and

The “Truth in Politics” expands upon Arendt’s “history of thought and politics and in her situation less between Europe Totalitarianism and post-war American democracy” (qtd. in Rosenfeld 221). Moreover, Arendt resolves politics and deception link together in some way. Furthermore, not all lying past to present are identical in form or effect. In “Truth and Politics” Arendt stands firm on the position of “total totalitarian regime in all reality become phony and boundaries between truth and lies blurred” (qtd. in Arendt 221).

In Schindler’s List, Goeth is a Nazi, who is in charge of a concentration camp. He was ‘born’ to hate the Jews and has no mercy towards them. He shoots them off his balcony, at random, showing that he has no disregard for their lives. When he comes to take charge of the concentration camp he lines up all the women to pick one as his cleaning lady. He picks Helen by chance and she begins her job. Helen tells Schindler that the first night she was working, Goethe beat her. He beat her even harder when she asked him why she was being beaten. Throughout the war, and movie Goethe starts to develop feeling towards Helen. Helen thinks that “someday he will shoot” her. Schindler can see Goethe mixed feeling towards Helen and know that he will not because

Hannah Arendt essentially used long paradoxical sentences, and scholarly analogies, to ask the questions I ask all of the time. What is the truth? Why are there so many falsehoods in common dialogue? Why must politics and lies be synonymous? Why as a whole are we so easily persuaded to believe these lies? Why are factual truths overcome by so many opinions? Why is it so much easier to lie or argue the facts, than to simply accept the truths? Quite honestly, I am not sure whether or not there are concrete answers to these questions, but Arendt tries her best to find a common ground at least in regards to politics. She stresses that politics and lies are so synonymous because, it is natural for those in power to hold secrets from the masses.

Margaret Canovan argued that Hannah Arendt failed to realize that political opinions too have drawbacks. According to Arendt, different people have different opinions and claims that one political opinion can bring an enhancement on another. Based on this assumption, she adopted Kant’s notion of “judgement,” that is, “to think for the sake of general” into her political thinking. But Habermas rejected her ideas on the ground that it is “monologic.” She seems to have left no room for “rational truth” in political affairs. On the other hand, Canovan also disputed on Habermas’s insistence for fixing his attention on rational consensus. Habermas assumes that “just” society can be institutionalized if political discourse is based on ideal discourse.

Does Hannah Arendt have a conception of purely private freedom? If so, what is it?