Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, "Deportations from Western Europe"

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Hannover, Germany, and earned a B.A. in 1924 from Königsberg University and a Ph.D. in 1928 from Heidelberg University. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and became a citizen about ten years later. Arendt was a social worker, a book editor, and taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and at the New School for Social Research. Her books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), and On Violence (1970). Among her many awards and prizes, Arendt was both a Guggenheim and a Rockefeller fellow and held numerous honorary degrees. Arendt died of heart failure in New York City. "Deportations from Western Europe" is an excerpt from Eichmann in Jerusalem.

CONTENT

1. Explain the "first mistake" the Germans made that Arendt describes in paragraph four.
2. What two incidents in the summer of 1942 caught the attention of the court in Jerusalem?
3. Why does the author put quotation marks around the word resettlement in paragraph two?
4. From what country of origin are Sephardic Jews? How were they treated differently in Salonika than in Holland?
5. Who was Vidkun Quisling?
6. What was similar about the treatment of Jewish people in Holland and Poland during the Nazi occupation? What was different?
7. Discuss the general treatment of the Jews in Denmark during the occupation, and how it differed from the other countries under study here.

STRATEGY AND STYLE

1. Were you able to translate all the foreign words and phrases found in this essay? They include nation par excellence, judenrien, sui generis, and pur se débrouiller. If you weren't familiar with them, look them up now. In any case, why do you think the author consistently uses foreign words and phrases here?
2. Discuss this piece as either a division/classification essay or a comparison/contrast essay. What kind of evidence does the author usually provide to make her case?
3. How would you characterize the tone of this piece? Is it chatty, personal, impersonal, academic, or something else? Make sure you describe the tone clearly and use evidence from the reading to support your answer.
4. The author frequently makes use of very specific numbers throughout this reading. For example, in paragraph fourteen the reader learns that Sweden accepted "5,919 refugees," "1,310... half-Jews," and "686... non-Jews." How would the nature of this information change if the author substituted more general terms for these numbers? What's the advantage of being so specific?

1. What media images of the Holocaust have you seen? Which of them, if any, ran through your mind as you read this essay?
2. What do you think of when you think of evil? Are evil people necessarily insane? Did you think of any of these things during your reading? Are you thinking of any part of the reading now?

SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

1. In paragraph ten, the author uses the phrase the bureaucracy of murder. How are these two words related? Could the Nazis have done the things they did without relying upon a bureaucracy? What evidence in the essay, especially concerning Denmark, suggests that they could not have?
2. When discussing the treatment of the Jews in Italy during World War II, the author mentions jokes and farce. Is she being sarcastic? How can you tell? Did you find anything amusing in her description? How are horror and comedy related?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Pick a country from Eastern Europe and do some research about the treatment of Jewish people there during World War II. What major differences do you see compared to the essay you've just read? What's similar?

WEB CONNECTION

Read these reviews of Arendt's book about Adolph Eichmann. Some of them are blurbs. What methods would you use to find the whole review in these cases? What information on this page would you feel comfortable about using for a paper about "Deportations from Western Europe", and what information would you avoid using? Why? What's a major difference between the two types of reviews found here?

LINKS

Biographical

Here's a good start page from the Jewish Virtual Library. On it, you'll find a photo, an in-depth biography, two bibliographies, and some further links.

This link will take you to an Arendt biography that also contains a photo and related links. How does the information you've found here differ from that on the page above? What, do you think, accounts for the difference?

Bibliographical

Ready for some of Arendt's work in etext? Take a visit to the homepage of The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. There, you'll find information about 25,000 related items, some of which are accessible online.

Looking for a great quotation by Arendt to use in a paper? Here's a collection of quotes, arranged by topic, that you'll find handy.

Cultural

Did you know that Arendt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger had a passionate—and secret—love affair? Read more about it here.

Arendt did her dissertation on the subject of love in the writings of St. Augustine. You can find out more about these issues by visiting this page called "The World of Hannah Arendt."