Gerhard Kraiker
Zum Verhältnis von Hannah Arendt und Karl Jaspers. Auffälligkeiten ihres Briefwechsels

Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers knew each other since 1926, when Jaspers accepted her as a PhD student at Heidelberg University. At the beginning of the 1930s they entered into an intensive dialogue. Very soon after the end of World War II they renewed their contact, and a very close and productive friendship developed between the two, which included their respective partners. Arendt helped Jaspers with so-called ‘CARE packages’ through the poverty and deprivation of the post-war period, and they supported each other with publications in West Germany and in the United States respectively. Their communication was mainly by letters, which today are important testimonies to a great friendship between two of the most distinguished philosophers of the 20th century.

Friederike Rese
Hannah Arendts Geschichtsverständnis. Über den Zusammenhang von Denken, Urteilen und Handeln

The article, “Arendt’s Understanding of History. On the Relation of Thinking, Judging and Human Agency”, focuses on Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s deeds in her monograph Eichmann in Jerusalem as well as on Arendt’s analysis of the response of the German citizens to the NS-regime in her lecture course Some Questions of Moral Philosophy. Central to both of these studies is the question whether the deeds of an exemplary Nazi-criminal as well as the reaction to the NS-regime of a large part of the German population can be primarily explained by referring to a significant absence of thinking in both cases, an absence for which Arendt also coined the term “thoughtlessness.” In the following article, I will, at first, present Hannah Arendt’s account of explanation – an account that is also known by the key phrase “banality of evil.” In a second step, I will add some critical remarks. For the critical reflection of her account, I will draw upon a text by Hannah Arendt as well, namely the concluding chapter of Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism. In contrast to the other two textual sources, this chapter offers an investigation of the political conditions, under which people live in a totalitarian state and that are created by a totalitarian government, thus, providing an additional and alternative perspective onto the political situation during the national socialist period in Germany.

Melissa Raphael
From the Ruins of History: The Modern Jewish Pariah as an Agent of Messianic New Beginning in Hannah Arendt and Franz Rosenzweig

This essay draws on recent studies of the theological and ethical foundations of Arendt’s life-long enquiry into the nature of political engagement to argue that the messianic character of Weimar Jewish theology – especially that of Rosenzweig – influenced Arendt’s valorization of the Otherness of the Jewish Conscious Pariah to a far greater extent than has been generally acknowledged. The Jewish Pariah can inaugurate a new world order precisely in being situated in a free, disinterested and unassimilable space outside it. Without claiming Arendt as a self-identified theologian, and without suggesting that her early theological studies were to determine every aspect of her thinking, Arendt’s phenomenology of the Jewish pariah can be read as an only partially secularized late contribution to the German-Jewish theological conversation about the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness of the figure of the Jew to the nations after the catastrophes of the First World War and the Holocaust. In Arendt’s thinking Jewish Pariahdom is politically abject but it is also, when voluntary, a quintessentially modern condition of the utopian or messianic novum of the natal. Arendt did not believe that the Jewish people should enter world history with the power of a nation state. To the contrary, the stateless Jewish Pariah – a suffering but free outsider to the total historico-political system – represents a prophetic judgment on the modern nation state as an empty idol while figuring, under the sign of numinous love, the possibility of its end.

Bethania Assy
Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Messianic Tradition – Singular Event and Testimonial Narrative

Among most of Arendt scholars it is well-known that Hannah Arendt had a rather suspicious relationship towards a Jewish account on history. Her idea of ‘new beginning’ has been mainly attributed to her readings either of Augustine or of the Roman foundation. The proposition to read Arendt through the Jewish messianic tradition aims to shed some new light on some Arendtian concepts crucial to political thinking nowadays, such as: political event, testimony, narrative, the rupture on history and the politics of the losers. By relating Arendt to a certain intellectual Jewish messianic tradition from the 1920’s, this paper focuses on two features in dealing with political philosophy and history, namely the notions of singular event and testimonial narrative. Those notions rest beyond the gaze at two major elements, mainly considered here in Arendt’s notion of history and politics: First, singular events and rupture rather than universal progress and means-end process are the subject matter of history. And second, testimony and single historical narrative are considered as a self-revealing phenomenology of history. It is my claim that those aspects lead directly to the very core of Jewish messianic historiography.

Michael Daxner
Unbequeme Anamnesis

Hannah Arendt had struggled throughout her life with her position towards Zionism, Israel and the Jewish People. In many ways, her legacy provokes reading her texts against the usual paradigms both of historical and political sciences. She was not a thinker of modern "statehood" and her ideas for a Jewish "state" were far away from the options there are: one-state or two-state solutions. Her concern has always been an effort to reintegrate Jews into the global humanity, from which they had been exiled for long periods of time and in many ways. Hannah Arendt had much sympathy for the Jewish Pariah, and this makes her position universal and specific at once.

Außerhalb des Schwerpunkts

Hans Otto Horch
„[…] was wir mitgenommen haben, ist das Erinnern“ – Jüdisches Erzählen in Edgar Hilsenraths Roman Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (1993)

Edgar Hilsenrath’s fame as a major representative of German-Jewish Holocaust literature rests mainly on his hyper-naturalistic style (Nacht) or his grotesque satire (Der Nazi & der Friseur). Rarely the question is raised to what extent Hilsenrath also utilizes Jewish forms of narration in order to remember the victims of the Holocaust. His late novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr, which is discussed in this study, gives ample evidence of such narrative traditions.

Hans Friedrich Fulda
Nachruf auf Reiner Wiehl, sel. A. (1929-2010)

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