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Authority without Foundations: Arendt and the Paradox of Postwar German Memory Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2014

J. Matthew Hoye  and
Benjamin Nienass
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Abstract

Hannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , Summer 2014 , pp. 415 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

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9 One initial caveat is in order. Our discussion of authority being derived from the Holocaust should not be taken as an apologetic and uncritical celebration of Germany's new (post)national imagination, and even less as a laudation for incorporating the Shoah into a progressive narrative for Germany or Europe more generally. In our argument that authority is being derived from a negative absolute we employ authority as a descriptive term. In this regard, our analysis has strong analytical affinities with, for example, Dubiel's argument. However, Dubiel claims that in the case of the Holocaust, “the transformation of a historical occurrence into a political and moral criterion . . . [had] a doubly ‘negative’ nature” (“Rememberance of the Holocaust,” 60.) By this he meant that no positive precept could be established on its ground, and that the criterion emerging from it followed a logic of prevention and avoidance. Which particular principles of avoidance are derived from this view is not always immediately clear and the potential range of answers seems vast. Faced with a similar argument, the historian Peter Novick has remarked “that there is something absurdly ‘minimalist’ about a moral consensus based on affirming that, indeed, murdering six million men, women, and children is an atrocious crime” (“Comments on Aleida Assmann's Lecture,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 40 [2007]: 31Google Scholar). Furthermore, Dubiel notes that “these imperatives are viewed negatively in view of their social genealogy” (“Rememberance of the Holocaust,” 60), which is to say that they are built on the premise of avoiding conflicts in increasingly pluralistic societies, rather than on the premise of integration based on new positive values, which is closer to our analytical concern here.

10 BPF, 92–93.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 122.

13 Ibid., 104.

14 Ibid., 105.

15 Ibid., 107–9.

16 Ibid., 111.

17 Ibid., 120.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 121.

20 Ibid., 120.

21 Ibid., 91–92.

22 Ibid., 138.

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52 Including from, among many others, Arendt herself, who in the 1967 preface to part 1 of OT, Antisemitism, criticized Norman Cohn's claim that “the mass of the German population was never truly fanaticized against the Jews” (OT, xi n1). Interestingly, in 1968 Arendt wrote her piece on the problem of collective responsibility, Responsibility and Judgment (hereafter, RJ) (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 147–58Google Scholar.

53 Alexander, “Social Construction of Moral Universals,” 34. Arendt's own account of the Eichmann trial was one of the momentous “events” that added to this new focus (38).

54 Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?,” 551.

55 Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory, 104.

56 Moses, A. Dirk, “The Non-German German and the German German: Dilemmas of Identity after the Holocaust,” New German Critique 34, no. 2 (2007): 45–94Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., 65.

58 H. A. Winkler, “Lesarten der Sühne,” Der Spiegel, December 24, 1998.

59 Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?,” 553.

60 Ibid.

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75 Waldron, “Arendt's Constitutional Politics,” 213. Arendt wrote that “amendments to the [American] Constitution augment and increase the original foundations of the American republic . . . the very authority of the American Constitution resides in its inherent capacity to be amended and augmented” (OR, 202).

76 Ankersmit, F. R., “The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer,” History and Theory 40, no. 3 (2001)Google Scholar: 318.

77 Ibid., 322.

78 An important qualification is necessary, however. The latest phase we describe here is by no means the only current tendency in German memory politics. Much has been said and written about the recent and not so recent debates around German victimhood, whether triggered by literary contributions, as in the cases of the novelists Friedrich or Grass (Taberner, Stuart and Berger, Karina, eds., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic [Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013]Google Scholar), or around the issues of German expellees that continue to strain relations with Poland. Eric Langenbacher, for example, claims that the “Bonn regime” of public Holocaust memory has been challenged by new discourses about other German crimes (in the GDR) and about non-German perpetrators and German victims during World War II (“Twenty-First Century Memory Regimes”; see also Langenbacher, Eric, “Changing Memory Regimes in Contemporary Germany?,” German Politics and Society 21 [2003]: 46–68Google Scholar). This only goes to show that these phases are anything but neatly divided, subsequent developments. Such a claim would mean dismissing the underlying politics persisting in the view that these different strategies cannot coexist or are mutually exclusive, both of which are claims we would hope to avoid. While the latest phase of German memory discourses has functional implications in the light of the problems highlighted here in Arendtian language, the trajectory is an outcome of real political struggles that involve pressures on official government discourses both from “below” (i.e., alternative narratives emerging from civil society) and “above” (i.e., reactions from international actors).

79 Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”

80 Interestingly, this discourse also links back to Germany's European “exit strategy” discussed earlier (in footnote 44), albeit not in a straightforward manner. Often, Germany's “politics of regret” are presented by political actors on the ground as an example of a new European memory paradigm. See Katrin Hammerstein and Birgit Hofmann, “Europäische ‘Interventionen’: Resolutionen und Initiativen zum Umgang mit diktatorischer Vergangenheit,” in Aufarbeitung der Diktatur; Nienass, Benjamin, “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’?,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2013): 41–55Google Scholar. Yet, the European dimension by no means inevitably transcends national imaginaries, but often becomes part of it or indeed acts as its very source (see Frevert, Ute, “Europeanizing Germany's Twentieth Century,” History & Memory 17, no. 1 [2005]: 87–116Google Scholar; Stråth, Bo, “Introduction: Europe as a Discourse,” in Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, ed. Bo Stråth (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 13–44Google Scholar. Lorraine Ryan claims, for example, that “external collective memory mandates may quite possibly be incidental or self-interested” (“Cosmopolitan Memory and National Memory Conflicts: On the Dynamics of Their Interaction,” Journal of Sociology 48 [2012]: 12Google Scholar.).

81 Arendt appears to have understood this task as paradoxical as well. In January of 1945, in an essay published in Jewish Frontier, Arendt remarked famously that “for many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.” At the heart of the problem, as Arendt saw it, was that the notion of humanity—and the concomitant love of the world that the notion itself demanded—as a universal moral concept had been supplanted by the race thinking of Nazi totalitarianism. The break, Arendt believed, was so definitive as to invite concern as to whether the war was only the first salvo in a coming age of race warfare. The only salve—which Arendt in 1945 could only imagine as an expressly private apolitical phenomenon—was in those who “in fear and trembling, have finally realized. . . what man is capable of” (Portable Hannah Arendt, 154–55). For a discussion of Arendt's dismissal of guilt in politics and her conception of political responsibility as an ethic of worldliness, see Schaap, Andrew, “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Arendt, Jaspers and the Resonance of the ‘German Question’ in Politics of Reconciliation,” Political Studies 49, no. 4 (2001): 749–66Google Scholar.

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89 OR, 213.

90 Ibid., 214.

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97 Arendt, BPF, 121.

98 Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, 41.

99 Ibid.

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101 Beck, Ulrich, German Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2013)Google Scholar, 3.

102 Ibid., 4.