A Sudden Burst of Light
1. Fighters in a Ring
It was thanks to Hannah Arendt that in November 2023, a month into the war in Gaza, I got a call from Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq War under George H.W. Bush and the former president of the World Bank. Palestinian friends of his were trapped under the rubble of a building that had been bombed by the IDF. Every time rescuers approached the building, Israeli snipers opened fire. Unless the snipers were called off, Wolfowitz warned, his friends were doomed.
It was a surprising phone call, to say the least—how did he even get my number? “What could I possibly do to help?” I asked. I was just a writer and college professor living in Tangier, and he was Dick Cheney’s former righthand man.
He explained that he had read Friendly Fire, a memoir I ghostwrote for Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet. One scene in particular had stuck with him. In the 1990s, Ami was confronted by a Palestinian boy in a refugee camp in Gaza, and the encounter turned him from a killing machine into a supporter of peace. If the story was true, said Wolfowitz, he was certain Ami would try to help him save the Palestinians’ lives. He wanted me to ask.
I phoned up Ami, a man I had come to look up to as a kind of father figure, and the voice on the other end sounded uncharacteristically morose. After I relayed Wolfowitz’s plea, Ami said that no one in the army would listen to him. All the top IDF generals knew how to do was to kill. Within a few days, Wolfowitz emailed me that the people under the rubble had died.
To explain what Hannah Arendt has to do with Gaza, I’ll have to go back to when Ami first approached me about writing his memoir.
In 2014, the Israelis expelled me after several years living in Israel, branding me a persona non grata for venturing into Gaza on the eve of Operation Protective Edge, yet another chapter in the endless war with the Palestinians. I spent 2015 and part of 2016 finishing up a book for University of Chicago Press—a volume of letters between Arendt and the Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem—and I was casting around for a new book project. That was when I got an email from Ami, one of Israel’s most celebrated living soldiers. He wanted me to write his story of transformation from a man who saw all Palestinians as targets to a man who believed in peace.
That summer, I received permission to return to Israel and spent a month living with him on his moshav near Haifa. In our long, rambling interviews, mostly as we walked through the olive groves behind his home, he told me about his early years as a sea commando, his experiences in the Six-Day War, and a daring raid on an Egyptian island in the Red Sea. In the evenings, I’d retreat to my room in his house—originally built by a Palestinian teacher before his expulsion in 1948—and immerse myself in thick volumes of Israeli military history.
That August, I left Israel feeling lost. My literary agent in Jerusalem, Deborah Harris, warned me against writing the book, saying no one cared about old war-and-peace stories. I was starting to agree, as I had no idea how to turn Ami’s escapades into a memoir people would want to read.
The next year was a blur. I began a new job teaching at a study abroad program in Tangier. In November, I got married, and by March, my wife Rebecca and I learned we were expecting our first child. I spent part of the summer back at Ami’s moshav, plugging away, but by the end of my second stint with him, I was ready to give up. There seemed to be two stories at war with one another—Ami the warrior and Ami the peacemaker—and I had no idea how to bridge them. Turning hundreds of pages of notes into a single, immersive story seemed like a task John Grisham could handle easily, but not I.
In early November 2017, the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage and Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center organized a dramatization of my translations of letters between Arendt and Scholem. I couldn’t leave Morocco to attend the event because our baby, Josephine, was due to arrive soon, so I watched it streaming on YouTube from my seat on the living room couch, while Rebecca did prenatal yoga on the carpet.
The director of the Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz, introduced the performance by repeating the standard scholarly line that Arendt and Scholem had “loved” each other—despite their differences over Arendt’s book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal kidnapped by the Mossad in Argentina and hung by an Israeli court in 1961 for his role in the Holocaust.
“Loved? Where did he get that from?” I wondered aloud.
“From the letters?” Rebecca was in cat-cow pose.
“But there’s no love in Arendt’s letters to Scholem.”
“And his to her?”
“The guy didn’t know the meaning of the word.” In all my research, love never figured into Scholem’s vocabulary. For him, the world was so red in tooth and claw that a small nation like the Jews had to put itself first in the never-ending battle for survival. But when it came to an even smaller nation, the Palestinians, he traded his loafers for jackboots. He once mused how different—and superior—Israel would be if the Turks had “deported hundreds of thousands of Arabs as was done with the Armenians.” The Turks, of course, hadn’t “deported” a million Armenians during World War I; they drove them into the desert and left them there to die. Scholem was a genius, but he was also a douchebag.
Rebecca shrugged and went into butterfly pose.
Just as the actors took to the stage to dramatize the letters, I interrupted her again by asking her what she thought about me writing a dual biography of Arendt and Scholem.
“I thought you were writing the book with Ami? You aren’t exactly going to have time to do both.” She motioned to her belly.
Maybe it was time to cut my losses and move on, I said. An Arendt-Scholem book fell within my skill set—and it would be a work of high drama, likening it to a philosophical version of the heavyweight matchup between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa.
“Huh?”
I moved past the boxing metaphor and summed up the conflict that ended their already shaky friendship. After Arendt published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: On the Banality of Evil, Scholem told her he was aghast at her portrayal of the trial and accused her of lacking ahavat Israel, the love of the Jewish people. And he wasn’t wrong.
Arendt replied by saying she loved individuals, not nations. Shortly thereafter, their correspondence ended. Arendt publicly accused him of leading a “lynch mob” against her, yet Scholem continued pursuing her, not even stopping when she died in 1975. He even spread ugly lies about her. “So, you’d write an entire book about a vendetta?”
“No, it would be about love.”
“You just said they didn’t love one another.”
“Not that kind of love. It would be about ahavat Israel versus amor mundi.” I portrayed Scholem as an Israeli Dr. Faustus in a knotted cravat, sitting at his favorite Viennese cafe on Jaffa Street eating a Linzer torte while expounding to his disciples about demons as drivers of history. Many of these young people would be inspired to take up arms and settle the West Bank.
“And Arendt? What kind of love drove her?”
“Something she called amor mundi.”
“Which is…”
“Good question. The term didn’t come up in her letters to Scholem.” Gazing at Rebecca’s belly, I mentioned Arendt’s notion of “natality,” which crops up often in her work. “My hunch is that for Arendt, childbirth was a metaphor for loving the world and hoping to improve it.”
Rebecca sat up and crossed her legs. Finally, I was saying something interesting. “But what will you tell Ami?”
“Nothing, for now.”
2. And the Word was made flesh
November in Tangier that year was unusually warm, so after teaching my morning classes, on most days I headed to Café Tingis in the old medina. My affinity for the medina is both hereditary—some of my sixteenth century Jewish forebearers, the Jorges, lived in Tangier following their expulsion from Portugal—and prompted by recent history. With Trump in the White House, I was casting about for my own refuge by using my Sephardic heritage to gain Spanish citizenship.
In the 1950s, expat Beat writers gathered in the medina to check out of the modern world. At Café Central, Tennessee Williams wrote his one-act Camino Real. The main character, lured by the decadence of an exotic city, gets robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Williams said the play was “nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.” William Burroughs, sitting around the same table, couldn’t have agreed more. He wrote Naked Lunch while high on heroin in a flophouse around the corner from where I sat, then gathered his fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac for a reading. “Exterminate all rational thought,” goes one memorable line.
On sunny days I sat on the patio of the café with my computer and transcribed recordings I had done that summer with Ami in his moshav, then translated them into English. When the work got too tedious, I switched to my research for the dual biography. The Scholem part was easy because over the years I’d compiled a hard drive of notes on him and his nihilistic brand of nationalism. To get a handle on Arendt’s “love of the world,” her amor mundi, of which I knew almost nothing, I scrolled through PDFs of her books, diaries, and correspondence.
Two weeks of sleuthing yielded nothing. Not only did I find no mention of her loving the world, but I came across a passage in her diaries from the early 1950s in which she admitted to loathing the world that had produced Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Soviet gulags. In one letter, she wrote that she agreed with Bertolt Brecht’s “well-founded wrath” for “the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers.” The world was turning her “ugly.”
It was while plowing through her copious correspondence with Karl Jaspers from the 40s and 50s that I stumbled upon something intriguing. She wrote of fearing for the future of democracy in a country where Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities could persecute Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, and she lamented that Washington, D.C., under “golf-playing” President Eisenhower, was becoming a “government of big business whose sole concern [was] to make big business bigger.” In America, the seeds of fascism were taking root.
But the world could survive a bad president. What the scientists—the illuminati of modern America—were doing up in Los Alamos was far more dangerous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Arendt gained fame for proposing that people under fascist or communist dictatorships became automatons fed by propaganda. But in a letter to Jaspers, she admitted that leaders and scientists in free America were just as capable of falling for their own lies—and, in the process, they could also destroy the planet. She had clearly missed something in her now-famous book.
The dark tone of her letters from the early 1950s got me picturing her around the table with the Beatniks listening to Burroughs read from Naked Lunch, but I felt no closer to tracking down the source of her amor mundi.
A few days before Thanksgiving, I was back at Tingis transcribing a mind-numbing interview with another retired IDF general when I decided to take another look at Arendt’s letters to Jaspers.
In a missive dated August 6, 1955, Arendt finally mentioned amor mundi. At long last, she confessed, she had figured out how to “truly love the world.” It wasn’t because the world had suddenly become more loveable—American and Soviet physicists had recently moved on to constructing H-bombs. And yet she had made a discovery so life-changing that “out of gratitude” she’d title her next book “Amor Mundi.”
Was this what I had been searching for?
In her letter she detailed how she came to love a world because of Hermann Broch, the Jewish novelist dubbed the “James Joyce of German literature.” She met him in New York after the war, and similar values and experiences made them natural friends. Both were committed to the fight for human rights; both had run afoul of the Nazis and sat in Gestapo prisons. Broch’s five months in a dungeon gave him a ringside seat into “the darkest anarchy, the darkest atavism, the darkest cruelty” mankind was capable of, she wrote.
Over time, they both became disenchanted with American democracy. Broch was particularly aghast at the writers who sold their talent to Madison Avenue, Hollywood, or political parties. Watching Gone with the Wind in February 1940 left him reeling. “Once there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, today we have Gone with the Wind. The emancipation of the slaves began with sentimental trash—does this new sentimentality not announce the reintroduction of slavery?” In the America of the future, he wrote, slaves might be listed on Wall Street.
When Broch died, Arendt was living with her husband Heinrich, an ex-Marxist street fighter, in a shabby rental apartment on West Ninety-Fifth Street. Broch made Arendt his literary executor, and after the stroke that killed him in 1951, she began going through his unpublished writings. She was chain-smoking in the cramped kitchen infested with cockroaches, with Broch’s novels, books, and unpublished papers piled high on the kitchen table, when she had a revelation that opened the doors to the dungeon and let in the light. But the letter stopped there—she says nothing further about her discovery.
It was then that I heard Rebecca calling out from the bathroom. “She’s coming.”
“Who’s coming?”
“Josephine.”
A neighbor raced us to the clinic on Plaza de Toros, a chaotic traffic circle in the old Spanish part of town next to the bricked-up bullfighting stadium. At five in the morning, after eight hours of labor, Rebecca stopped screaming and began to laugh. I watched as Josephine’s tuft of blond hair, forehead, eyes, mouth, hands and feet came into the world.
Moments later, as I clutched Josephine to my chest, the tears welled up, and I was overwhelmed by gratitude: for Rebecca for marrying me, for the Moroccan nurses chattering in their medley of Arabic and French, and for the wonder of life itself. One might say I was struck by a moment of grace.
3. Natality
In the end, I landed a publishing deal for the Ami book, and my research on Arendt became a side project. During my winter break from the university, I pushed myself to pump out a draft of Ami’s memoir. I’d often wake with Josephine in the middle of the night, strap her to my chest in the baby carrier, and wander the waterfront until she fell asleep, before returning as dawn broke to begin writing for several hours. Quixotically, I hoped the act of writing itself would help me get a handle on the story.
In the afternoons, when I had finished my five pages for the day, I waded into the vast cottage industry of Arendt’s scholarship to see if anyone else had written about amor mundi. What did it mean, and why had it led her to repudiate the central premise of Origins of Totalitarianism? But so far as I could tell, no other scholar seemed to have noticed the shift. Maybe I was making too much out of it.
In early January, I returned to Café Tingis with a sleeping Josephine to read a 1955 essay Arendt wrote about Hermann Broch, an introduction to a collection of his unpublished writings that she published first in German, and later in English as part of Men in Dark Times. It was the first sunny day after a week of rain, and the medina could have been the setting for Casablanca: expats reading French newspapers, well-heeled tourists from the cruise ships mingling with rug-dealers, migrants from West Africa waiting for their shot to cross the Strait to Spain, hashish smugglers, and members of Mother Theresa’s order walking to Mass.
In the essay, Arendt begins by describing Broch’s childhood. Born into a wealthy Viennese Jewish family in 1886, Broch never had much interest in the family’s textile business. As a teen he rebelled against capitalism and the idea that the world was an object to own, manipulate, and consume. In Arendt’s telling, Broch traced this idea to late Renaissance humanism, the era of Machiavelli and Copernicus, who made themselves, the master thinkers, the center of the cosmos. This shift led to a “loss of the standard of measurement” and let loose the “anarchy of the world, and man’s desperate flounderings within it.” Repelled by this disorder, Broch came to idealize medieval Catholicism because, at least during this earlier era, a common belief in a loving God provided a foundation for a universal morality. In 1909, Broch was twenty-three when he marched into a church and asked to be baptized.
This quest for a stable truth outside the vicissitudes of modern life stayed with him, even after he lost interest in the holy sacraments and joined up with the circle of logical positivists at the University of Vienna. His first novel, The Sleepwalkers (1932), written on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, was a study on the disintegration of values—how people living in a society lacking a moral anchor are susceptible to ideologies like fascism, capitalism, communism, and the vacuous cult of l’art pour l’art. “Should we happen to conceive of the beautiful in terms of burning torches,” Arendt sums up his attitude with evident approval, “we will be prepared, like Nero, to set living human bodies aflame.”
Broch’s passion for truth eventually steered him toward a crisis. The most dramatic scene in his 1945 novel, The Death of Virgil, takes place when the dying Roman poet vows to burn his masterpiece the Aeneid because it is no more than imperial propaganda for Emperor Augustus. “Art’s…despairing attempt to build up the imperishable from things that perish makes the artist treacherous, self-seeking, unreliable, and oblivious to the essentially human.”
At this point, Virgil encounters a young boy who embodies purity, innocence, and a connection to a higher realm. In Arendt’s reading, this child figure evokes associations with the Christ child and the promise of redemption and new beginnings. Virgil dies longing for a new era heralded in by Christ.
Death of Virgil came out just as the first newsreels from liberated Europe showed the world the human capacity for nihilistic destruction. With this “revelation of massacres in the death camps,” Broch vowed to stop writing fiction because “literature imposes no binding edicts.” He had “reached the point of the Either-Or: either poetry is able to proceed to myth, or it goes bankrupt.” This was his dark night of the soul—he could either talk humanity away from the ledge by recovering an absolute value system once represented by the Church, or he could side with “bourgeois society whose leisure and craving for culture had to be fed with entertainment.”
The “Either-Or” led to sacrifice—Broch abandoned literature—followed by a revelation. “If all the world’s contents could actually be brought into balance,” Arendt writes, summing up his thinking, “if the world could actually be formed and re-formed into one total system, a system in which all parts mutually condition and sustain each other, if this state—which science seeks in the strictly rational realm—could actually come into being, then the ultimate pacification of Being would have come about, the redemption of the world, into which all the metaphysically religious aspirations of humanity will flow.”
By the skeptical tone she took in describing his “total system,” it was clear to me that Arendt didn’t take her friend seriously as a theorist.
“Broch’s central concern is always redemption,” Arendt wrote at the conclusion of the essay. In the “dying world of the twentieth century,” Broch clung to “Jesus of Nazareth’s ‘good tidings’ of the conquest of death.” At the heart of his philosophy, as in his fiction, was a reenactment of those lines in the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word [the Logos] and the Word was made flesh.”
“My God,” I exclaimed, slapping the table so hard that my tea sloshed over the edge. Amor mundi is about epiphany—that pivotal moment in the classic dramatic arc when the hero, transformed by newfound insight, fully grasps the weight of his plight and brings back the elixir of wisdom, forging ahead to face the world anew.
During February and March, I dug for evidence that discovering amor mundi had led Arendt to turn her back on her own theories. In the 1955-56 winter semester, I found out, Arendt taught the course Political Experience in the Twentieth Century at Berkeley. According to the syllabus, she didn’t assign The Origins of Totalitarianism or other works on modern history or political science—as she had done for previous courses she taught at Princeton—but instead had students read memoirs, essays, and works of contemporary fiction by Faulkner, Joyce, Brecht, Camus, and of course Broch.
Students recalled her pacing the room with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers, telling them in her raspy voice that novelists and biographers, trained in the art of epiphany and the dramatic arc, do a much better job than theorists at capturing how actual people behave in times of war and upheaval. “Imagination is the prerequisite of understanding,” she said. “You students should imagine how the world looks from the points of view … of an unknown soldier,” a “revolutionary,” or a draft “resister.”
The task of the storyteller, she now believed, was to identify individual acts of defiance, resistance, and self-sacrifice during times of danger when most people keep their heads down or fall in line. In a lecture printed in the Chicago Review in 1960, she explained why storytellers are uniquely equipped to make moral sense of catastrophe. In the normal course of human affairs, she declared, “disaster” seems always to “happens automatically” and therefore appears to be “irresistible.” But the skilled novelist knows that “the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of the disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear.” The task of the storyteller is thus to find those miraculous deeds, products of freedom, and bring them to light so they can teach us how to live. The true political theorist sifts through the rubble of history looking not for ideas but for stories of transcendence to tell.
It was while reading the lecture in late March that I had my own epiphany. Writing the Broch essay was Arendt’s first attempt at becoming a storyteller.
I reread the essay, this time looking beyond the ideas and focusing on its narrative structure. It was just as I suspected. The essay came alive as a hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell, a dramatic arc that leads a character through struggles, trials, danger, epiphany, and self-sacrifice to redemption. “Hermann Broch,” Arendt even declared at one point, “was a poet in spite of himself.” In other words, despite his vow to quit fiction, his own life ended up resembling that of a heroic archetype.
Amor mundi, I understood at long last, is an imaginative act of creation, a form of resistance to an ugly world that seems impossible to love.
4. The Human Condition
The book Arendt told Jaspers she was going to call “Amor Mundi” ended up with the title The Human Condition. When I read it as an undergraduate at Brandeis, I wrote it off as dull and confusing. But back then, I was reading it as political theory, not storytelling.
One evening at home, the French doors opened to the Mediterranean, I sat down with a PDF of the book and a bottle of wine. A quick search yielded eighteen uses of the term “natality;” she mentioned it more often than “atomic weapons.” As I skimmed, I also came across a line about a “miracle that saves the world … from ruin.” Yes, I felt certain, the book is about rescuing us from self-destruction by teaching us faith and hope.
In the prologue, Arendt hints at the central conflict in the book. No longer was she writing about twisted ideologies corrupting people all the way to Auschwitz like in Origins of Totalitarianism. Her quest, rather, was to understand how otherwise decent people, elite scientists in democratic America, willingly and proudly participated in a greater evil than even Hitler’s Endlösung—potentially, the wholesale destruction of humanity, including future generations. Even if this apocalypse hadn’t yet happened, scientists were already turning people into “thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
Arendt begins by giving us the backstory of how humanity had arrived at the either/or of collective suicide or the “miracle that saves the world.” Beginning with the Renaissance, “men of action” booted theologians, contemplative dreamers, and poets like Broch to the curb and seized control of “progress.” By the twentieth century, scientists had emerged as “the most potent power-generating group in all history.” It was at this point of triumph, two-thirds into the book, that I caught on to Arendt’s literary strategy, when she introduced opposing principles of dramatic writing: Greek and Christian.
Greek tragedians employed principles that grew out of a system of honor and fate, which discounted acts of “faith” and especially hope, which belonged among the “evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.” Arendt applies this pagan Greek framework to the actions of scientists, business tycoons, and politicians pursuing status, fame, wealth, and power, who boast about their “intentions, aims, and motives.” Together, these actors and their deeds belong to the “normal, ‘natural’ ruin” of “human affairs.”
But like Icarus or Oedipus Rex, these actors are also in the dark about the meaning of their own lives, the fateful consequences of their actions, and the disasters awaiting them.
My wine bottle was half empty when, at long last, I got to natality—storytelling à la Broch. Arendt contrasted classical Greek tragic structure with a narrative strategy that produces epiphany through faith and hope, literary tools which came into Western culture through Christianity. Faith and hope, moreover, are inextricably joined with natality, which I now understood meant a lot more to Arendt than just childbirth. As a literary principle, natality is about abandoning the ambitions of people on stage—scientists, industrialists, professors, and bourgeois politicians laboring so monuments might one day be erected in their honor—and finding stories of people whose actions can shine light in the darkness and “save the world … from ruin.” Natality, Arendt writes, makes possible the “revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.”
The storyteller thus has a greater affinity to the authors of the New Testament than to Sophocles or Heidegger. “It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings:’ ‘A child has been born unto us.’”
5. Sergeant Anton Schmid
I celebrated my breakthrough by getting up at three the next morning, as had become my habit, because that was the only way to get work done before Josephine needed a walk or a diaper change. I brewed a pot of coffee and applied amor mundi to the book that turned Scholem against her. If Arendt indeed considered natality the historian’s most valuable tool, surely the concept would appear in her pivotal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In May 1960, Mossad agents bundled Adolf Eichmann into the back of a cargo plane and took him to Israel to stand trial. In August, Arendt wrote to William Shawn, the chief editor of the New Yorker, about her “temptation” to attend the trial in Jerusalem. She asked him if he’d be interested in commissioning her to cover it.
Shawn operated the New Yorker as his personal fiefdom and was known to make risky editorial choices in what was then a gossipy high-brow magazine: In 1945 he ran John Hersey’s story about the atomic bomb the US Air Force dropped on Hiroshima. In the case of Arendt, he knew there was no telling what the iconoclastic philosopher would come up with. Which was probably the reason he agreed.
Upon her return from the trial a year later, Arendt began pouring over her notes and the court transcripts running over 3,500 pages.
But progress was slow. First her husband Heinrich suffered an aneurism, and then a truck slammed into Arendt’s cab in Central Park and left her with broken teeth, a concussion, hemorrhaging eyes, and fractured ribs. The injuries were so grave that part of her wanted to die, but a deeper source reminded her that life was too beautiful to give up. As soon as she had recovered some of her strength, she returned to the project.
Applying her storytelling structures to the proceedings was easy because Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had turned them into a show trial. Arendt set the scene by describing the courthouse as a mock concentration camp:
The proceedings happen on a stage before an audience, with the usher’s marvelous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of the rising curtain. Whoever planned this auditorium in the newly built Beth Ha’am, the House of the People (now surrounded by high fences, guarded from roof to cellar by heavily armed police, and with a row of wooden barracks in the front courtyard in which all comers are expertly frisked), had a theater in mind, complete with orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrance. Clearly, this courtroom is not a bad place for the show trial David Ben-Gurion had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnaped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish question.” And Ben-Gurion, rightly called the “architect of the state,” remains the invisible stage manager of the proceedings.
In the show trial, Eichmann, the man behind the bulletproof glass docket, was much more than just a war criminal or a functionary of the Nazi regime: he was the entire history of anti-Semitism and the best justification possible for Israel under the leadership of Ben-Gurion and his Labor Party.
Had Arendt written about the trial as if it were a Greek tragedy, she wouldn’t have found herself at odds with Ben-Gurion’s official narrative. But by applying the principle of natality, she sought a very different storyline than the one reported by the hundreds of other journalists covering the trial. Grounded in the concepts she laid out in The Human Condition, the true merit of such a show trial—and of her role as a writer—was to bring readers to a point of epiphany and transformation.
From her run-down apartment, Arendt, missing teeth and purple with bruises, laid out the high stakes for her report, and it wasn’t to inform readers about Eichmann’s guilt: Our “planet,” she wrote, must “remain a place fit for human habitation.” Going after all the Eichmanns in the world wouldn’t change a thing, and in fact would make our collective survival a lot more difficult because it would give cover to those perfectly normal scientists, officers, business leaders, and politicians who are blind to what is really at stake, and to moral cowards in front of leaders driving us to mass destruction.
Her first task was therefore to undercut the scripted premise of the trial by showing that Eichmann was not the master of his own fate, that he didn’t have the agency attributed to him, and that he was morally incapable of grasping the meaning of his actions because he was completely bereft of human empathy. If, according to Ben-Gurion’s script, Eichmann was the angel of death strutting from camp to camp in his black uniform, Arendt deems him a character of profound shallowness whose central quality was not evil but “thoughtlessness.” He was ordinary, neither monstrous nor demonic, interchangeable with a thousand others. Even his murderous anti-Semitism he could turn on and off according to instructions from above. He claimed to be a great admirer of Herzl’s The Jewish State and would have shipped Europe’s Jews to Palestine if Hitler had so ordered. Conversely, he admitted during the trial that he would have dispatched his own father to a death camp if it would have pleased his superiors.
Another thing Arendt set out to accomplish with her account was to show how the apparent heroes of the trial—German military officials and Zionist functionaries, for instance—all found rational reasons not to sacrifice themselves, collaborating with the Nazis out of opportunism, weakness, or desire to save their own skins. She cites a German Army physician serving in the Crimea who was aware of the massacre of Jews being carried out by the SS but sat on his hands because opposition would have been futile, the killings would have continued, and he, sealing his own fate, would have simply “disappeared in silent anonymity.” “It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century,” said the officer, “that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.” The officer and his comrades would have accepted a martyr’s death, just not dying alone and forgotten, without even a memorial to testify to their courage. “None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.”
She wrote all this as a kind of non-fiction novel, I found myself thinking. In the dramatic arc, this is the point of the story where all seems lost. Everyone, both victims and victimizers, has betrayed humanity.
I read on, expecting a turning point, a moment of epiphany. Sure enough, a few lines later Arendt announces that the officer was wrong to believe his death would have been in vain. “It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis’ feverish attempts, from June 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres … were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents ‘disappear in silent anonymity’ were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.”
The example she gives, which she deems the most “dramatic moment” of the soul-crushing trial, “came unexpectedly.” Late in the trial, the Hebrew poet and partisan leader, Abba Kovner, stood in the dock and told the story of Sergeant Anton Schmid, a devout Catholic Austrian recruit in the Wehrmacht.
Schmid, while leading a patrol looking for German soldiers separated from their units, came across members of the Jewish underground, and he ended up providing them with forged papers and military trucks. He kept this up for five months before he was arrested and shot in March 1942.
Following Kovner’s account of Schmid’s self-sacrifice, a stunned silence spread through the courtroom. In Arendt’s words, after the silence came a “sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness.”
This epiphany led Arendt to disclose the real theme of her book: “A single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question: How utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all the countries of the world, if only more such stories could be told!”
6. A Sudden Burst of Light
Most reviewers, like Scholem, savaged her for the book. Of all people, Saul Bellow should have figured out what she was up to, but didn’t, smearing her as “that superior Krautess” for downplaying Eichmann’s evil and equating his actions to those of Jewish leaders.
Her friend the novelist Mary McCarthy was one of the few early readers who understood her. In a review of the book in Commentary in 1963, McCarthy wrote: “I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or the Messiah. As in the chorus a pardon or redemption of some sort was taking place. The reader ‘rose above’ the terrible material of the trial or was born aloft to survey it with his intelligence. No person was pardoned, but the whole experience was brought back, redeemed, as in the harrowing of hell.” Reading these words, I thought of the line from the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.”
Arendt thanked McCarthy for being the “only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria.” Her euphoria came from sifting through thousands of pages and finding a turning point, a moment where love intervened in the story and shone light into the darkest moment of human history.
With Handel playing in the background, I returned to my notes for Ami’s book. Could there be something the ex-commando and general had experienced that could account for his transformation from killer to peacenik?
I found what I was looking for in a transcript to a conversation we had the first summer I was with Ami at the moshav. He had been sent to a Gaza refugee camp during the First Intifada when a boy, no older than eight, looked at him with such burning hatred that he was forced to rethink everything he’d been raised on. Nothing he had learned at the US Naval War College, where he studied international laws of war, or at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he got a master’s, came close to making the impact of a boy willing to risk his life to expose the violence of the occupation. “I looked at myself through the boy’s eyes, and I hated what I saw,” Ami said.
With that “sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness,” I knew how to tell his story.
