The German Genius

refugee scholars, the school founded the University in Exile, which evolved into the Graduate Facility of the New School for Social Research.
    From 1945 until 1949 Arendt worked on the first of several major books, The Origins of Totalitarianism , which appeared in 1951 and had an enormous impact on its American audience and made her famous. The book attempted to come to grips with the events that led up to World War II and examined in particular how a small group—the Jews—became the catalytic agent for the Nazi movement, the world war, and the death factories. 26 She drew parallels between communism and fascism, arguing that although they were intended to lead mankind into a glorious future by eradicating class differences, they had instead produced only atomization, alienation, and homelessness. The point of mass society, she argued, was that instead of creating “a higher form of human community,” it produced isolation and loneliness which, she insisted, were the common ground of terror, and the cold and inflexible logicality of bureaucracy, leading to the executioners. There was no role for heroism, she said, and this absence helped to crush man’s soul. One of her main points in Origins was that there had been an alliance in Germany in the 1930s between the educated middle classes and the “mob,” and this was one of the main reasons why what happened happened. 27
    The Origins of Totalitarianism offered no solutions to the problems it described and diagnosed, though her next book, The Human Condition (1958), argued that the main aspects of political life were structure and action, and that in the modern world these two entities had all but disappeared in the highly administered politics of modern society—no one had the power to alter the structure of public life and to act on it. This turned out to be an important message, and Arendt’s books became influential texts in regard to the revolutionary student movements of the 1960s and helped to cohere the aims of the so-called alternative culture.
    In some ways, however, Arendt—along with Brecht, whose art she admired as much as she loathed his politics—was the great nonsentimentalist, the writer who, even more than Thomas Mann, kept her individuality intact, uncontaminated by fame and by her status as a Jew. Even though she was a German victim of the Holocaust, she was never sentimental about it, and she distrusted inwardness—for her, public action in a public space was the only guarantee of honesty or authenticity in human affairs, and so the political, defined in that way, took priority. (Jewish émigrés, she liked to say, had “committed no act.”) Private life, she insisted, was the great aim but, increasingly in the modern world, it was a luxury. 28 The real battle in the modern world, she felt, was not between classes but between the increasingly “totalitarian fictions” of all-powerful government and the “everyday world of factuality” in which we live. 29
    In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem , about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1962, the “mastermind” of Auschwitz, who had been captured by Israeli special forces in Argentina, where he was hiding, and smuggled to Israel, she was unflinchingly unsentimental about the man on trial and about the Holocaust and Jewish behavior in resisting persecution. The book created a furor but she held to her view, that evil was banal, that it is where nihilism ends. 30
    Herbert Marcuse became, for a brief time, the most famous of the Frankfurt school theoreticians, though he was by then already elderly. Born in 1898 into a middle-class Jewish family, he had not been much involved in politics until the revolutionary movements that emerged in Germany in the wake of World War I (he was part of a “worker’s council” in Berlin). But even then his involvement did not last long and he moved to Freiburg to study under Heidegger and Husserl. He broke with Heidegger as the latter’s flirtation with the Nazis began to show itself, and joined Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm at the Frankfurt Institute. 31
    He was in America from the late 1930s, where he obtained a position at the new Brandeis University near Boston. In the postwar era, he became one of the main critics of the world he saw around him, a world of increasing uniformity, consensus, and order, all subsumed under what was for him a tyrannical rubric of “progress.” This led to the first of two books by Marcuse that captured the public