Two terms do not appear in this conversation from 1964: “banality of evil” and “thinking without railings”. These terms are so good that they’ve become about as famous as Hannah Arendt, the woman who coined them. She hated clichés. Arendt explains to Günter Gaus that her mother tongue has remained, while English lacks the idiomatic. When it comes to people who have lost their mother tongue, she notices what happens: “One cliché follows another.”
Günter Gaus’ series of talks “Zur Person” is the best that has ever been seen on television in terms of dialogue. Gaus’ pricked questions with pointed S usually got to grips with politicians who knew how to defend themselves – the interviews with Konrad Adenauer, Franz Josef Strauss, Willy Brandt, Ludwig Erhard can be seen in the ZDF media library, among others. In 1964, Arendt’s essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem” was published in German translation (she had originally written it in English). Even when the original edition was published, there had been a dispute about the “tone” of the text, and representatives of Jewish associations complained that Arendt blamed the Jews for their fate, so to speak, insofar as they had not emigrated.
To these accusations, she replies to Gaus that it is pure propaganda. The “tone” in turn is the author, the person himself: “I can’t say anything against that.” The tone here is not pathetic, but ironic, because Adolf Eichmann was a clown. When she read his statements, she “laughed, and laughed out loud – and I would still be laughing out loud three minutes before my execution.”
In the 70-minute conversation, Hannah Arendt, mostly smoking a cigarette, explains that understanding is what drives her – writing is part of the process of understanding, it is “copying” thoughts, a manifestation of “after-thinking”. That philosophizing is a male occupation – “it doesn’t always have to stay that way”. She doesn’t think about the effect: “Men always want to make an impression so terribly.” When the text is finished, she has a kind of “feeling of home”. She herself, who taught political theory in Chicago, does not consider herself a philosopher. Gaus contradicts: He thinks it is such. “Yes, well, I can do that
do nothing.”