Ken Krimstein (2018) The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth.
This graphic biography is an excellent introduction to Hannah Arendt and her intellectual milieu. One learns an enormous amount of the intellectual history that shaped the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Diaspora of escaped Jews and the post-war world up to Arendt’s death in 1975. Her upbringing is as fascinating as her early days as a philosophy student, mixing with all the icons, alas, with the unfortunate inclusion of Heidegger with whom she has a love affair that will haunt her throughout her life. Her social circle in Berlin extends far and wide into the intellectual scene that includes all the famous names one cares to conjure up, including luminaries such Albert Einstein and Walter Benjamin (the latter dying en route to Spain, the same escape route that Arendt also took). As a student and somewhat peripheral academic myself (at LMU and Otago and Auckland, as well as many other universities where I attended linguistics conferences) I can only lay claim to knowing Noam Chomsky (greatest intellectual of our time according to the NYT) but otherwise have never been immersed in an intellectual milieu that brings together an intellectual tour-de-force, not in the slightest approaching that of Hannah Arendt. One is quite envious if not depressed about it all. Of course, as a German expatriate myself, I cannot even begin to understand the situation Arendt was in when the Weimar Republic began to collapse and the Nazis took power. Her last-minute escape seems to be based on her observation that the rise of the Nazis was to be expected but what was never to be expected was the Holocaust. This crossed the line of utter degradation but when Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial in Israel she coined the unforgettable line of ‘the banality of evil’ that brought her lots of criticism. I personally find this to be the best characterisation of the Nazi atrocities: the pathological German predilection for bureaucratic totalitarianism knows no limits. Eichmann merely carried out orders as much as the obedient accountant tallies the ledger. Her volume on The Origins of Totalitarianism does however grate with me in that it gave rise to the equation of Stalinist totalitarianism with Hitler’s version. In my view, whatever crimes Stalin may have perpetrated, they cannot be compared to the outrages committed by Hitler. When Arendt comes face to face with being sent to a concentration camp when in internment in France, she just walks out and quite incredibly, by mere chance, finds her husband in a village nearby. Their subsequent escape via Spain and Portugal to the USA is legend amongst many of the Jewish Diaspora of the time. While the intellectual climate in the USA is dim there are at least all the escapees who find a foothold in academe and prosper accordingly. Arendt and her husband command a growing reputation amongst philosophers and political scientists, and Arendt’s literary output establishes her as a great moral academic voice in the post-war Western world. Ken Krimstein’s astute illustrations along this amazing journey bring life to what is otherwise a collection of biographical facts – with a bit of the imagination thrown in when it comes to picturing Arendt making love to Heidegger. Presumably Arendt’s last disastrous meeting with Heidegger and his wife in post-war Germany is also laced with Krimstein’s imaginary dialogue – and why not! Obviously this is an episode in Arendt’s life that is hard to explain apart from saying that love can be blind. On the other hand her continuing academic association with her erstwhile doctoral supervisor, Karl Jaspers, as the great post-war German philosopher is also a bit perplexing. Having read Jaspers somewhat sterile work (including the outrageous suggestion that an intellectual elite should rule the world) I cannot understand how Arendt kept up her admiration for him. Jaspers remained in Germany throughout the war but was of course in constant danger for having a Jewish wife, while his contemporary, Heidegger, was feted by the Nazis. Having also read the works by another famous post-war German philosopher, Juergen Habermas, who supports both Arendt and Jaspers, one comes to the conclusion that Arendt quite rightly refused to be classified as a philosopher, for many a philosopher of that era lived in the pseudo-Marxist ivory tower, espousing mild critiques of Marxist philosophy, and when it came to the 1968 student uprisings they locked themselves in. Hannah Arendt in contrast was in a league of her own, a lone female voice amongst her male peers, and Ken Krimstein has managed to produce a graphic biography that is also in a league of its own.
Jason Lutes’ BERLIN trilogy.
The fascination with the Weimar Republic is real: no other historical period has produced such an astonishing contrast between good and evil (the latter in Hannah Arendt’s terms), between capitalism and communism, between man and woman, between nature and nurture, between sanity and insanity, between yin and yang, between however and whatever. Looking in from the outside – and removed from time – is akin to a sort of Freudian long-term therapy session, trying figure out how and why this all had to happen. Jason Lutes as a visionary – in the literal sense of the word – can picture some of the scenarios and create a graphic novel accordingly. His understanding is not that of a historian but that of a struggling artist, him impersonating the main female protagonist Marthe Mueller. Since the reversal of gender roles is an age old story line, the Weimar Republic certainly put a new spin on such proceedings, and Jason Lutes gives a lot of space – visually and textually – to the sexual politics on one hand (Marthe, Kurt and Anna) and the singular female anti-fascist warrior (Silvia) on the other. If there is any criticism to be voiced at this stage, one cannot fail to mention the somewhat voyeuristic male gaze when it comes to sex between Marthe, Kurt and Anna. There is also the cryptic inclusion of one Margarethe von Falkensee – as Kurt’s high society liaison – who in real life was the notorious author of the trash-hedonistic and semi-erotic Blue Angel books, and who in Jason’s novel became a fundraiser for Hitler. What does all this obsession with sex mean? Perhaps Jason Lutes has an inkling when Silvia meets Marthe and the former calls the latter a ‘bourgeois bitch’. Is all this intellectual and erotic posing a symptom of bourgeois decadence? Lutes is clearly sympathetic towards the communists and attendant working classes, what with his generous advertisements for the K.P.D. and yet, his greatest admirations seems to be that for Carl von Ossietzky, the left of centre social democrat who became an early martyr in the war against the Nazis. Perhaps this was the greatest of the tragedies in that the social democrats saw the communists as the main danger for the Weimar Republic and not the fascists. True enough, in the novel as in real life it was the communists who fought the Nazis while everyone else seemed to sit on the fence, silently betting on the Nazis. Lutes’ portrayal of the Jews in Berlin is also conflicted: while giving shelter to the radical Silvia, the good deed comes with a cost (i.e. virtual house arrest). Since the novel ends in 1933, there is not much scope to dwell on what happened next to the Jews: the Holocaust and the banality of evil, so well characterized by Hannah Arendt (and unwittingly portrayed in Heimatby Nora Krug – as reviewed earlier). The other out and down Jew, Pavel, befriends Silvia in a pact of life on the streets, almost saint-like. So did Jason Lutes get into the heads of the Germans and come up with an explanation for the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis? Being German myself and having lived in Berlin for a couple of years or so (1976-77), I cannot begin to understand what went on there. Since Germans are generally reluctant to confront their utterly horrific past, it is only fitting that ‘foreigners’ like Jason Lutes and Ken Krimstein try to visualize history in the making. The recent preponderance of ‘graphic novels’ dealing with Germany’s recent history is quite amazing (Lutes, Krimstein, Krug and Folman - the latter for a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary) and while graphic novels and treatments of historical events are not new, I did in fact learn from Lutes that Frans Masereel – a Flemish artist – composed a novel without words as early as 1919. Lutes’ creative idea to imagine a budding female artist – Marthe – making the move to Berlin from Cologne and becoming enmeshed in the artistic, political and social life of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, is a stroke of genius, flaws included. The artist as a witness of history is not new either but in this case the art is peripheral while the uncertain life of the artist is the focal point. While history does not repeat literally, the failure to learn from it is a human weakness spread across the globe today as much as it was during the Weimar Republic. Let’s just hope that the consequences are not as bad.
