Elements and origins of total domination

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Elements and origins of total rule (published in German in 1955) is the most comprehensive book by the political theorist Hannah Arendt and is often referred to as her main work. In it, Arendt examines the historical origins and the common political characteristics of National Socialism and Stalinism . The title is one of the earliest standard works in totalitarian research .

Emergence

Immediately after the Second World War , Arendt began a comprehensive work on the origins and characteristics of National Socialism, supplemented in 1948 and 1949 by those of Stalinism. Her studies were initially under the working title Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism - Imperialism - Racism . Other titles considered were The Three Pillars of Hell or A History of Total Domination . In the first English version, The Origins of Totalitarianism , published in the USA in 1951 , the explanations about Stalinism, but also the analysis of National Socialism, are not yet complete. The German version from 1955 contains numerous newer sources. In 1958 a new edition, edited and expanded by the author, appeared, and in 1966 the most extensive last edition was published. In 1966, she wrote that the original manuscript was completed in autumn 1949.

The work was divided into three parts according to several intermediate drafts: anti-Semitism , imperialism and total rule . While Arendt was able to draw on historical and literary source material to a large extent for the first two parts, she had to work out the background for the third part. In mid-1947 she said in a letter to Karl Jaspers : "I have to rewrite it from scratch, because I have only now realized the essential things, especially the connection with Russia." ( Arendt )

In addition to studying historical sources, Arendt consulted thinkers such as Kant and Montesquieu and also evaluated literary sources (including Marcel Proust , Joseph Conrad ). Her main method, however, is one of “taking ideological opinions literally seriously” ( Arendt ), since many observers and historians have underestimated them in favor of realpolitical motives.

Arendt dedicated the work to her husband Heinrich Blücher , to whom she owed the terminological suggestion for the term "anti-political principle".

Central theses

In the first part of her book she reconstructs the development of anti-Semitism in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the second part the emergence of racism and imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries up to National Socialism and their political function, and in the third part the two historical forms of total domination. She advocates the thesis that these are based on the growing destruction of political space through the alienation of the individual in mass society . Against the background of the simultaneous disintegration of the nation states through the dynamism of imperialism , traditional forms of politics such as B. the parties , clearly inferior to the techniques of mass propaganda of the totalitarian movements.

According to Arendt, the historians of the immediate post-war period failed to answer the question of why the Jews in particular had suffered abuse, persecution and extermination. For Arendt, the starting point is a critique of the ideologies of the 19th century, with which she questions the theses and methods of historiography that were customary up until then . Arendt deliberately moves away from the causal explanations of the usual descriptions of political history by presenting an analysis of the historical origins and main elements of National Socialism, which takes into account the underlying political entanglements instead of reducing the events to these. It comes closer to the character of National Socialism and Stalinism as a “break in history” than previous works on totalitarian movements. The work is not pure history.

Arendt puts forward the thesis that every world view or ideology can be adopted by a totalitarian movement and converted into a new form of government through massive terrorism . In previous history, only National Socialism and Stalinism could fully realize this process, on the one hand for the ideology of racism and anti-Semitism, on the other hand for that of the “class and nationless society”, at least that was their view up to 1966 (the time of the edition of the third and last edition). In contrast to other authors, Arendt only classifies these two systems as totalitarian and not every “one-party dictatorship” (such as Italian fascism or the systems of the Warsaw Pact states ), not even the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. Arendt names the inclusion of all areas of life in the system of rule (not just political) as the criteria for distinguishing “total rule” from ordinary dictatorship and, in particular, for National Socialism, the complete reversal of the legal system, which made criminal violence and mass murder the rule ; and the claim to global and exclusive validity of this rule:

"The struggle for total rule on a world scale and the destruction of all other forms of government and rule is inherent in every totalitarian regime ..."

- Arendt

Arendt warned that, in addition to communism, anti-communism, as the “official counter-ideology” of the Cold War era , tended to develop an imperial and generally total claim to world domination . Even if there have been world powers over and over again in the course of history, e.g. B. the Roman Empire , however, these did not have totalitarian features. In this historical context she developed a new concept of the peaceful revolution .

Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Total Domination

Arendt traces the connection between modern anti-Semitism and the development of nation states. Rationalism plays a special role in the development of modern anti-Semitism . It rejects all ideologies of the 19th century, such as the bourgeois belief in science, e.g. B. Darwinism . But she also rejects idealism as the origin of the National Socialist “law of nature”. Likewise, she is critical of the historical-philosophical progress optimism , which is shown, for example, in Marxism . In addition, she criticizes the pessimistic view of history, as she does not accept ideas of linear developments in any form, but is convinced of the possibility of a new beginning or the failure of each new generation .

Emergence of modern anti-Semitism

In the 18th and 19th centuries, anti-Semitism became an irrational ideology tied to nationalism . “One could say that it is the essence of ideology to make a premise out of an idea , out of an insight into what is, a prerequisite for what is inevitably supposed to happen. However, the transformation of the ideas underlying the ideologies into such premises was only really accomplished by the totalitarian rulers. "

In terms of nationalism, Arendt makes a big distinction between socialist and anti-Semitic parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While the former fought for the national independence and freedom of all oppressed peoples on the line of the best traditions of the 18th century - with modifications depending on personal attitudes - the anti-Semitic parties represented a nationalist supranationalism.

Arendt sees particular importance for the development of this national-folk ideology in imperialism, which she examines with reference to Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism as the basis for the further development of anti-Semitism and racism. While “national” anti-Semitism demands the exclusion of Jews from the nation, “imperialist” anti-Semitism is about the extermination of Jews across all nations. From this she formulates her central thesis on the relationship between the bourgeoisie , imperialism and the National Socialist movement:

“Everywhere the nation-state institutions resisted the brutality and megalomania of imperialist aspirations, and the attempts of the bourgeoisie to use the state and its means of violence as instruments for their own economic goals have always been only half successful. This only changed when the German bourgeoisie put all their cards on the Hitler movement in the hope that the mob would give them power. But by then it was already too late. It is true that the bourgeoisie succeeded in destroying the nation state with the help of the Nazi movement ; but this was a Pyrrhic victory , because the mob very quickly proved that they were willing and able to govern themselves, and disempowered the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and state institutions. "

Against the background of the importance of imperialism for anti-Semitism, the second part deals intensively with the forms of imperialism in the 19th century. Arendt traces the constraints and functioning of capitalist production and explains the necessity of imperialism for the nation states.

"And so it came about that, for the first time, the state's means of political power went the way that capital had shown them."

In addition to the need for expansion, imperialism also means that capital escapes its state ties. Arendt describes how imperialism decomposes the political spaces of society. In both foreign policy and domestic policy, obstacles that interfere with the expansion of capital are removed. She puts forward the thesis that the political is destroyed to the extent that imperialism has no limits.

"Overall, however, it can be said of the element of anti-Semitism in the construction of totalitarian forms of rule and movement that it only developed fully in the process of disintegration of the nation-state, i.e. at a time when imperialism was already in the foreground of political events."

Racism as a Dimension of Imperialism

The author extends the Marxist concept of imperialism to include the dimension of racism and criticizes the reduction of the confrontations with capitalism to purely economic questions:

“The early discovery of the purely economic causes and mainspring of imperialism… rather obscured rather than cleared up the actual political structure, namely the attempt to divide humanity into master and slave races, into <higher and lower breeds>, into black and white . "

Here it distinguishes between two forms of imperialism, overseas and continental imperialism. Using the example of the “racial society” in South Africa and the despotism in colonialism of a Carl Peters ( “I was tired of being counted among the pariah and wanted to belong to a master race ” ), she illustrates the interaction of racism and capitalism in overseas imperialism.

Hannah Arendt uses the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad as a literary source for her derivation of racism . She considers the European expansion policy in the age of imperialism to be decisive for the emergence of race theory in the 20th century. The starting point of their analysis is the Boer race concept , which arose as a reaction to the encounter with what they saw as "ghostly beings" of Africans, "who seemed to be neither humans nor animals" and "without any tangible civilizational or political reality [, ] populated and overpopulated the black continent. ”The Boers, however, did not want to belong to the same species of living beings as these in their eyes terrifying natives. Arendt interprets the terrible massacres that the racial madness provoked (the extermination of the Hottentot tribes , the murder of Carl Peters, the monstrous decimation of the Congo population by the Belgian king) as a consequence of this defense. The insanity and dire consequences of racism far exceeded the horror from which it arose, but it is only understandable for this reason. The experience that preceded this cruel practice of overseas racism can be inferred from Conrad's texts:

"[W] if one should understand the horror out of which it arose, then one should not get information from the scholars of ethnology, since they had to be free from the horror in order to be able to begin research at all. nor with the racial fanatics who pretend to be above horror, nor finally with those who, in their justified fight against racial ideas of all kinds, have the understandable tendency to deny them any real basis of experience at all. Joseph Conrad's story " The Heart of Darkness " is in any case more suitable to illuminate this background of experience than the relevant historical, political or ethnological literature. "

In Arendt's analysis of early capitalism in South Africa , which was carried by lawless adventurers and adventurers without ideals who embodied the scraps of European society, she again mentions Conrad as an informant. He has aptly described this kind of repulsive individuals in the figure of Mr. Kurtz : "through and through empty and hollow, reckless and soft, cruel and cowardly, full of greed, but without any boldness." Arendt assumes that Carl Peters Conrad as Model for Mr. Kurtz . Arendt also refers to other characters from Conrad, such as Mr Jones from his novel Sieg : outwardly gentlemen of good society, inwardly vicious villains who met in the lawless jungle and got along brilliantly there. Arendt depicts the “natives” based on Conrad as inscrutable schemes that reminded the European racists of inmates of a madhouse. Killing them was like not murdering a person; on the other hand, they were reminiscent of prehistoric people who in principle seemed to have the same nature as the "ruling race".

A few decades later, according to Arendt, the ethical standards were also abandoned in Europe and the ideologies and behavioral patterns that had been tried and tested in Africa were reimported.

Biologistic-ethnic anti-Semitism as the basis of the extermination policy

Continental imperialism finds its expression in the folk nationalism of the "belated nation". The nations in Eastern and Central Europe in particular could not look back on a national history. According to Arendt, those political forces find their concerns here that have not yet succeeded in emancipating themselves nationally. In this context, she explains how the democratic concept of the people of the Enlightenment is rejected and romantically charged by the völkisch movement and shows how this völkisch nationalism makes anti-Semitism biologistic , racist, racism anti-Semitic and leads to an anti-Semitism of annihilation. The ideology of the “ Volksgemeinschaft ” was able to develop from the Völkisch nationalism .

"Totalitarian governments, which in the course of their policy of world conquest anyway had to endeavor to destroy the nation-states, have made a conscious effort to multiply the stateless groups in order to destroy the nation-states from within."

The situation of the refugees and stateless persons, the destruction of their legal and subsequently moral position, as fully developed in the refugees in internment camps in the interwar period up to the extermination camps under National Socialism, becomes decisive for Arendt's analysis of totalitarian politics:

“Denaturalization and disenfranchisement were among the most effective weapons in the international politics of totalitarian governments, because they were able to impose their own standards on foreign countries, which within their own constitutions were unable to secure the most elementary human rights for the persecuted. Whom the persecutors chased out of the country as an expulsion of humanity - Jews, Trotskyists, and so on - was received everywhere as an expulsion of humanity, and whoever they had declared undesirable and a nuisance became an annoying foreigner wherever he went. "

In a circular from the Foreign Office of January 1939 , "shortly after the November pogroms , to all German agencies abroad" it is emphasized that the aim of these persecutions is not only to remove Jews from Germany, but rather to promote anti-Semitism to western countries in which Jews had found refuge. The emigration of a hundred thousand Jews had already shown the desired results in this regard; Germany is interested in the dispersion of the Jews, since this forms the best propaganda for the current German Jewish policy . It is in the German interest to chase the Jews across the borders as beggars, because the poorer the immigrant, the greater the burden on the host country. Arendt meticulously clarifies the connection between totalitarian propaganda for anti-Semitism through a policy of disenfranchising refugees, since political rights were tied to a statehood:

“It was evident that this propaganda of the fait accompli would produce better and faster results than all the propaganda speeches put together. Because not only did it succeed in making the Jews really the dregs of humanity, it also succeeded in demonstrating in practice, using the model of an unheard-of need for innocent people, which was far more important for totalitarian rule, that such things like inalienable human rights mere gossip and that the protests of the democracies are only hypocrisy. The mere word < human rights > became everywhere and for everyone, in totalitarian and democratic countries, for victims, persecutors and viewers alike, to the epitome of a hypocritical or idiot idealism. "

By tracing the historical development of the destructive anti-Semitism up to National Socialism in its origins, Arendt rejects the scapegoat theory and the “valve theory” as an explanation and refers to the development of nationalism, which did not give Jews their own place in the state.

“Here it does indeed look as if we have the“ scapegoats ”of those theories before us, and there is no question that here, for the first time, there is a real temptation to explain anti-Semitism as something akin to historical Existence is in no way related. Because there is nothing as horribly memorable about what actually happened to the Jews as the total innocence of all who were caught in the terror machine. In view of this justified horror, one should not forget that terror reveals itself as the form of rule of the regime only in its final stage and that this stage must necessarily be preceded by a series of stages in which it must justify itself ideologically. So the ideology must first have convinced many and even a majority before the terror can be fully let loose. For the historian it is crucial that the Jews, before they became victims of modern terror, were at the center of Nazi ideology, because only terror can arbitrarily choose its victims, but not propaganda and ideology that want to convince and mobilize people. "

The question of why the Jews were chosen as victims is a constant concern of Hannah Arendt. Already in the introduction she criticizes the aporias of historians who do not question the image of the eternal Jew and who themselves become anti-Semitic historiography in the search for the guilt of the Jews, who bind them to hypotheses such as the scapegoat theory:

“... why the Jews in particular were driven into the storm center of events, historians have surprisingly owed us so far. Mostly one makes do with the assumption of an eternal anti-Semitism, which one does not need to approve in order to present it as a natural matter, documented from the history of almost two thousand years of hatred of Jews. That anti-Semitic historiography has professionally seized this theory needs no explanation; in fact, it provides the best possible alibi for all atrocities: if it is true that humanity has always insisted on murdering Jews, then murdering Jews is a normal human activity, and hatred of Jews is a reaction that does not even need to be justified . "

Delimitation and characterization of total domination

Arendt limits her concept of total domination to National Socialism, ending with Hitler's death, and the system of Stalinism , which she sees implemented in the Soviet Union from 1929 until Stalin's death in 1953 . In their view, it is a matter of “variations of the same model”. It is not the state and the nation that are ultimately important for totalitarian politics, but the mass movement that is based on ideologies such as racism or Marxism.

"In so far as the totalitarian movements, regardless of the origin of their leaders, liquidate the individualism of both the bourgeoisie and the mob it has created, they can rightly claim that they are the first truly anti-bourgeois parties in Europe."

She sees the following characteristics of this form of rule: the transformation of the classes with interests into fanatical mass movements, the elimination of group solidarity, the leader principle , millions of murders, the passivity of the victims, denunciations and “admiration for the crime”.

In addition, there is “unselfishness”, i. H. Self-forgetfulness, the individual in motion. Personal well-being, experiences and the instinct for self-preservation are ignored. Supporters of totalitarian mass organizations are not open to arguments. This is not due to demagoguery alone , but to the voluntary submission of the mob, which stands outside of constitutions, party and moral systems. Totalitarian leaders boast of the crimes they have committed and announce future ones.

While Arendt assesses the entire period of National Socialism as totalitarian and ascribes complete totalitarianism in a criminal state to Stalin, she describes the Soviet Union as a "revolutionary dictatorship" or "revolutionary one-party dictatorship" until 1928, which was later transferred to "full totalitarian rule" by Stalin. For Lenin as a "statesman" she finds - in addition to his very critically assessed role in the establishment of the dictatorship and the power-opportunistic disempowerment of the councils that can be traced back to him - also to a limitedly positive assessment, for example in his personal ability to recognize and admit his own mistakes to be able to lie. In the conflict between freedom and material and social development, Lenin gave preference to the soviets with electrification , established the New Economic Policy as a way out of hunger and misery and thus first emancipated the peasants and strengthened the working class, and “tolerated and encouraged the beginnings of a new middle class “And initiated an extensive nationality policy. In this respect, the New Economic Policy was the beginning of a reconciliation between the people and their government. In addition to Stalin's seizure of power and the establishment of a system of totalitarian rule with a terrorist atomization of the masses, there was consequently the alternative of continuing Lenin's new economic policy, which served to stratify society through the formation of new classes. However, Lenin had already suffered his worst defeat in the course of the civil war , "when, under the pressure of the civil war, the actual power in the state, which he had wanted to unite in the elected councils (soviets), passed into the hands of the party bureaucracy ," a development that for which he himself was directly responsible, since he consciously brought about the supremacy of his party, which could not be achieved democratically in the councils, by disempowering the councils, as well as his understanding of the communist party as an elitist vanguard. This could later be claimed by Stalin and radicalized further. Hannah Arendt's view of Lenin's role is rated too positively by Andrew Arato , because on the one hand she misjudged Lenin's motivation for class formation and, although she saw the development of totalitarian organizations such as the secret police under him, she neglected it in their evaluation.

In the preface to the third part from June 1966, the author deals with the history of China under Mao Zedong , which at times shows totalitarian features, and expresses the fear that the fully developed system of total rule is imminent in China. The Cultural Revolution had begun in Beijing a month earlier . There is a threat of a “bourgeois counter-revolution” by “revisionists”, “anti-party elements in the party”, “intellectual rattlesnakes” and “poisonous herbs”.

According to Arendt, total rule is the only form of government with which there can be no coexistence and no compromise.

What chases modern people so easily into totalitarian movements… is the increasing abandonment everywhere. It is as if everything that connects people collapses in a crisis. ... The iron tie of terror , with which the totalitarian apparatus of rule tears the masses organized by it into an <unleashed> movement, appears as a last stop .

Totalitarian rulers act not on the basis of time-bound, changeable but also stabilizing positive law , but rather through direct commands that “execute the laws of nature or history ... in the most terrible sense” . While the Nazis' belief in racial laws was based on Darwin's idea of ​​man as a coincidental occurrence of the evolution of nature, the Bolsheviks relied on Marx's idea of ​​the gigantic historical process, which is racing towards its end and which is eliminating history itself. However, while dialectical materialism is based on the best traditions, racism is pathetic and vulgar. Both ideologies, however, boiled down to the elimination of the "harmful" or the superfluous in favor of the smooth running of a movement.

Temporary alliance between "mob" and "elite"

The essay On Imperialism , published in 1946, is a preliminary study for this section of her book . In the American first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt included the English version of this text Imperialism: Road to Suicide, which was also published in 1946 in the Jewish political magazine Commentary , The Political Origins and Use of Racism included unchanged.

According to Arendt, neither the mob nor the elite play a role in the actual ruling apparatus . Totalitarian movements, however, are shaped by the genuine devotion of their followers. A large part of the intellectual and artistic elite has identified - at least temporarily - with the totalitarian governments. Before the “collapse of the class system” created the “mass individuals”, the elite had (for good reasons) renounced society and could now understand the masses. Likewise, the mob, which "as an early waste product of the bourgeoisie" formed the underworld, the rabble ("sexual criminals, drug addicts or perverts"), stood on the fringes of society. For the first time he was ready and able to organize the masses and since he could not pursue a professional career to take on political offices. The leaders of the parties believed that this discredited the mob, but it was the other way around, as the situation of the masses was so desperate that they no longer hoped for civil society. Hitler's "hysterical fanaticism" and Stalin's "vengeful cruelty" bore traits of the mob. In the long term, total systems with rather pedantic, stubborn leaders are possible.

“The anarchic desperation that took hold of the masses of the people in this collapse seemed to suit the revolutionary mood of the elite as well as the criminal instincts of the mob.” … “In any case, the temporary alliance between the elite and the mob was largely based on the real pleasure that the mob prepared the elite when it set out to expose the respectability of good society, whether the German steel barons received <house painter Hitler> or whether intellectual and cultural life was thrown out of its academic path with clumsy and vulgar falsifications. "

The elite were particularly fascinated by radicalism , by the abolition of the separation between the private and the public and by the capture of the whole person by the respective worldview. The mob's beliefs were in fact the pure, not hypocritical, behavior of the bourgeoisie. However, the hopes of both groups were not fulfilled, as the leaders of the totalitarian movements, most of which came from the mob, represented neither its interests nor those of the intellectual supporters, but sought "millennial empires". Initiatives by the mob and the elite would have been more of a hindrance to “building functioning systems of domination and destruction”. The rulers therefore preferred to fall back on the “masses of the same-minded philistines”.

Totalitarian propaganda

While the mob and the elite want to independently overturn everything that exists through terror, the masses can only be integrated into totalitarian organizations through propaganda . Totalitarian movements change society's perception of reality and fix it on universal meanings that the movement with the ideologies of a “racial society or a class and nationless society” as well as theories of conspiracies against society by Jews or party enemies such as Trotskyists .

"In the Bolshevik version of the totalitarian movement we find a curious collection of conspiracies in contrast to the Nazis, who used to cling to one, the Jewish world conspiracy ."
“The mentality of the modern masses before they were captured in totalitarian organizations can only be understood if one takes full account of the effectiveness of this type of propaganda. It is based on the fact that masses do not believe in the reality of the visible world, never rely on their own controllable experience, distrust their five senses and therefore develop an imagination that can be set in motion by anything that has apparently universal meaning and in is consistent. The masses are so little convinced by facts that even false facts make no impression on them. "

Hannah Arendt made a distinction between the ideology and the goal of terror of totalitarian movements, a point of view that was new and that is still not consistently shared by historians to this day. The ideology - "socialism or racial doctrines" - is not arbitrary in its aims. It is the prerequisite for the influence and development of totalitarian movements. In contrast, terror can be directed against anyone and is ultimately completely arbitrary, i.e. H. never tied to any factual or calculable reason: “For the historian it is decided that the Jews, before they became victims of modern terror, were at the center of Nazi ideology, because only terror can choose its victims arbitrarily, but not propaganda and ideology that want to convince and mobilize people. "

For National Socialism, Arendt emphasizes the importance of this phenomenon using the Protocols of the Elders of Zion .

“In other words, if such a blatant forgery as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is believed by so many to become the Bible of a mass movement, it is a matter of explaining how it can be done, not that to prove for the hundredth time what everyone knows anyway, namely that one is dealing with a forgery. Historically, the fact of counterfeiting is a secondary fact ” (1986, p. 30). With this belief in the Jewish world conspiracy and its modern elements, this anti-Semitism could be used to convey answers to the problems that were new to the masses as problems of modernity: “It is essential ... that in their manner they address all central questions of our immediate past take up and give an answer that is contrary to the existing conditions. … It is the peculiarly modern elements to which the protocols owe their extraordinary topicality and which have a stronger effect than the much more banal admixture of ancient superstitions ” .

In Stalinism, too, she finds anti-Semitic traits based on the Nazi model. The reference to a Jewish world conspiracy in the sense of the Elders of Zion , the reinterpretation of the term “Zionism”, which included all non-Zionist organizations and thus all Jews, was more suitable for realizing claims to world domination than the existing anti-Semitic resentment in the population capitalism or imperialism.

Once the movements have taken power, the propaganda is replaced by indoctrination , and the terror is directed not only against the supposed enemies, but also against the friends of the movements who have become uncomfortable. The devotion of the loyal members goes so far that they are ready at any time to die a sacrificial death for the leader or the party. Arendt proves this z. B. with the attitude of the defendants in the Moscow trials .

The lies about the conspirators are not invalidated by their obviousness:

"Thus, the apparent helplessness of the Jews against their extermination did not destroy the fable of the omnipotence of the Jews, nor did the liquidation of the Trotskyists in Russia and the assassination of Trotsky destroy the fable of the Trotskyists' conspiracy against the Soviet Union."

A mixture of “cynicism” and “gullibility” can be found in all hierarchical levels of totalitarian movements, with cynicism predominating in the higher ranks.

Terror as a being of total domination

First of all, during the National Socialist era, the power apparatus was fully established, brought into line and gradually made more and more radical. B. from the SA , through the SS as an elite organization to the guards of the concentration camps and the security service , to which the negative population policy, the race and settlement system were subordinate. State and party bodies acted simultaneously, and it remained unclear which of the instances was actually in power. The “right to murder” together with methods to remove knowledge from the world was visibly presented as a worldview.

"The fact that the Nazis wanted to conquer the world, resettle <alien> peoples and <eradicated inferior geneticists>> was as little a secret as the world revolution and conquest plans of Russian Bolshevism."

While the Nazis always upheld the fiction of the Jewish world conspiracy, the Bolsheviks changed their fiction several times: from the Trotskyist world conspiracy, through imperialism, to the conspiracy of the <rootless cosmopolitan> etc. Stalin's instrument of power was the transformation of the Communist parties into branches of those ruled by Moscow Comintern . Within the total world, the police apparatus ruled as secret police , GPU or Gestapo .

The number of Jews murdered in the Nazi extermination camps and other groups, as well as those killed in the “predatory war”, was verifiable. From Arendt's sources, however, no precise quantification of the victims of Stalinism was possible. The murders ranged from the liquidation of the kulaks to the losses during the forced collectivization of agriculture , the Moscow trials and the Great Terror . It was also based on information from contemporary young Russian intellectuals on "mass purges, deportation and extermination of entire peoples".

Hannah Arendt describes the concentration and extermination camps as experimental institutes that served to exterminate people and humiliate individuals. In them it should be proven that people are totally controllable, "that absolutely everything is possible". Identity, plurality, and spontaneity of all people should be destroyed. The camps are central to maintaining the apparatus of power. The crimes and atrocities are so monstrous, the horror so great, that they can easily seem unbelievable to bystanders. Because the truth of the victims offends common sense. Hitler's "announcements repeated hundreds of times that Jews are parasites that must be exterminated" was not believed.

The horror of “ radical evil ” brings the realization that there are no political, historical or moral human standards here. Rather, it is about all or nothing: the extermination of humans in the concentration camp and the extermination of the human race by the hydrogen bomb. The “insane mass production of corpses” becomes more understandable if the historical processes that led to it are understood.

Concentration camps are always outside the normal penal system. They are based on the "killing of the legal person". Humans are reduced to: “Jew”, “carrier of bacilli”, “exponents of dying classes”. Criminals are only brought in after they have served their sentences and often form the “aristocracy” of the camp. In Germany during the war, this role was partly played by the communists. In the case of criminals and politicians, according to Arendt, the destruction of the legal person cannot completely succeed “because they know why they are there.” Most of the inmates are completely innocent. It was precisely these who were liquidated in the gas chambers, completely wiped out, while real enemies of the regime were often killed in advance. The disenfranchisement of the human being is a "precondition for his total domination" and applies to every inhabitant of a totalitarian system.

In addition there is the "murder of the moral person". It is a system of forgetting that extends into the families and friends of those affected. Death is anonymized. Moral action, decisions of conscience become impossible. Arendt cites Albert Camus' account of a woman who was given the choice of the Nazis to decide which of her three children should be killed.

The only thing that then remains to prevent people from being transformed into “living corpses” is to maintain “differentiation, identity”. Hannah Arendt clearly shows: the conditions during the transports to the camps, the shaving of the skull, the undressing, the torture and the murder. While the SA still killed with “hatred” and “blind privacy”, the murder in the camp was a mechanized act of extermination, sometimes without “individual bestiality” by normal people who had been brought up to be members of the SS.

According to Montesquieu, there is the essence of government and its principle in every political formation. The essence of totalitarian government, as Arendt elaborates, is terror, which at first exerts a peculiar attraction to modern uprooted people, later compresses the masses and destroys all relationships between people. The principle is the ideology, "the inner compulsion", reinterpreted and accepted until people are driven forward full of fear, despair and abandonment into the experiences of their own death, when one finally belongs to the <superfluous> and <pests> oneself .

According to Arendt, total rule does not collapse in a lengthy process, but suddenly collapses, and then most of its supporters deny participation in crimes, even belonging to the movement.

expenditure

  • Elements and origins of total domination, Frankfurt am Main, European Publishing House 1955.
  • Elements and origins of total domination, Frankfurt am Main, Gutenberg Book Guild 1955.
  • Elements and origins of total domination, Frankfurt am Main, European Publishing House 1958.
  • Elements and origins of total domination I: Antisemitism, Berlin / Vienna, Ullstein 1975.
  • Elements and origins of total domination II: Imperialism, Berlin / Vienna, Ullstein 1975.
  • Elements and origins of total domination III: Total domination, Berlin / Vienna, Ullstein 1975.
  • Elements and origins of total domination. Anti-Semitism, imperialism, total domination. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1986 (TB). (12th edition. 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-21032-4 )
    • engl. first The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York 1951; identical to The Burden of Our Time. London 1951.

Others

  • Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin : Dispute over totalitarianism. Texts and letters. Ed .: Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research in collaboration with the Voegelin Center. V&R unipress Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8471-0492-6 .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 629.
  2. ^ HA & Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926–1969. Munich 2001, September 4, 1947, letter to Jaspers, p. 134.
  3. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 968.
  4. ^ Hans Mommsen: Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence . In: Steven E. Aschheim (ed.): Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem . S. 227 .
  5. ^ Barbara Hahn: Hannah Arendt - passions, people and books. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2005, p. 54.
  6. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 31.
  7. ↑ a b EuU 1986, p. 706.
  8. ↑ EuU 1962, p. 579.
  9. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 635.
  10. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 721.
  11. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 110f.
  12. ↑ EuU 2005, p. 334.
  13. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 218.
  14. ↑ EuU 1955, p. 225.
  15. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 34.
  16. ↑ EuU 1955, p. 209.
  17. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 307f.
  18. ↑ EuU 1986, pp. 407f.
  19. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 413f.
  20. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 415f.
  21. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 277 f. "Ethnic solidarity as a substitute for national emancipation". P. 366 f. Volkish nationalism , etc. a.
  22. ↑ a b c EuU 1986, p. 426.
  23. ↑ 1986, p. 426.
  24. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 30.
  25. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 31.
  26. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 640.
  27. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 507.
  28. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 685. In the American edition she also uses the term “dictatorial terror”. see: Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism . First editions New York 1951, Books LCC, 2009, p. 322.
  29. ^ Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism, Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1958, p. 318 original formulation there: "full totalitarian rule")
  30. ^ Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism, Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1958, p. 500).
  31. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 641.
  32. ↑ a b EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 686.
  33. ↑ The Origins of Totalitarianism. P. 326.
  34. ^ Foreword to Part Three , The Origins of Totalitarianism. P. 31.
  35. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 642.
  36. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 587.
  37. ^ Hannah Arendt: The origins of totalitarianism. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1958, p. 500 and p. 366).
  38. ↑ cf. Andrew Arato : Dictatorship Before and After Totalitarianism. In: Social Research. 69 (2), 2002, Special Issue: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 50 years later, pp. 473-503.
  39. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 637.
  40. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 978 and EuU (1951), 9th edition. Munich 2003, 978
  41. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 948ff.
  42. ↑ published in the Heidelberg magazine Die Wandlung . I (1945-46), No. 8, pp. 650-666.
  43. ↑ Commentary I (1945-1946), No. 4, pp. 27-35.
  44. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 703ff.
  45. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 704.
  46. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 713.
  47. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 719ff.
  48. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 559.
  49. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 559.
  50. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 30.
  51. ↑ EuU 1986 - TB-, p. 758, see also, p. 757 ff.
  52. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 641f.
  53. ↑ EuU 1986, p. 739ff.
  54. ↑ EuU, 1986 -TB-, p. 763.
  55. ↑ EuU1986 -TB-, p. 794.
  56. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 639f, p. 827.
  57. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 907ff.
  58. ↑ EuU, 1986 -TB-, p. 916ff.
  59. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 929ff.
  60. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 960ff.
  61. ↑ EuU 1986 -TB-, p. 765.