This is an interview published by the Goethe-Institut with the late historian Joachim Fest (who passed away Sept. 11 2006) on Hannah Arendt. Quite revealing.
Thinking with Body and Soul
How and where did you become acquainted with Hannah Arendt?
The acquaintance came about through our publisher. He sent Hannah Arendt a copy of my first book The Face of the Third Reich (Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches, 1963). She liked it and expressed herself positively about it in letters, for example to Karl Jaspers. Our publisher then arranged for a meeting: Arendt came to Germany in 1964 to present her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. During a podium discussion, she then simply called to me to join the circle because an historian was needed to clarify some question. That was her inimitable unconventional manner. The next day she invited me to join her on a trip to Baden-Baden for an interview. There we got to know one another better, went often for walks together. She spoke a lot about herself and about people she had once thought highly of and then later despised.
She spoke, then, of Martin Heidegger?
Yes, of course. But not, I think, out of her deepest feelings. She said many things disparaging of Heidegger. And yet I think she loved him to the end. She said of him that he was mendacious, sly, unreliable and disloyal, a quite crooked character. But in 1964 as we boarded the train from Baden-Baden to Frankfurt, she said she would so much like to head in the opposite direction, to Freiburg. To Heidegger, that is. To the end she was deeply divided about him. She never got over it.
Over the years your acquaintance with her became closer?
Quite cordial, quite relaxed. She visited me often when she was in Germany, and I her when I was in New York or Chicago. I ate very often at her place. I recall she once fried some scrambled eggs and said: "Anyone can do this much house-keeping!". She couldn't understand the whole feminist movement that was then making so much about these things. She was a human being in the most real, truest and fullest sense that this concept can have. That always impressed me immensely.
What was so impressive about Hannah Arendt as a person?
Her immense vitality and curiosity. She used to say you had to think with body and soul or better not at all. She was distinguished by this complete engagement of her person for that which she thought and that which she did.
You followed of course her work and discussed it with her.
Yes, naturally. I've always thought The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book which after all gained her world-fame, was a little over-rated. I read Eichmann in Jerusalem and of course Vita Activa. But her best writing are the portraits. They evince such a rich humanity, are so full of loving attention, that they are deeply moving.
From your personal acquaintance with Hannah Arendt and your knowledge of her work, how would you judge her public influence?
Back then her influence was very great, no doubt about it. Today, unfortunately, she has been forgotten. In general, it has been the fate of the generation of promising thinkers who began their careers at the time of Hitler to be treated unjustly. Only those are always highlighted who co-operated with the Nazis. People with not so strong a character have an enormous popularity. That holds for quite a few, not least Heidegger. But people like Dolf Sternberger, Friedrich Meinecke or Hannah Arendt – these members of the generation have been eclipsed by those who worked with the Nazis. Sometimes I think, cynically enough, that actually the others chose the right side. It has brought them at any rate a posthumous fame which they would not have otherwise had, and which they do not really deserve.
That sounds somewhat embittered.
No, not embittered; realistic. It can't be denied that Heidegger has received enormous publicity. Not, for instance, because of Being and Time or Off the Beaten Track, but because of his joining the Nazi Party in 1933. As a thinker, he has received little publicity; that doesn't interest people. And then ask about Hannah Arendt at the universities. Absolute silence. I've done the test several times. Or Gerhard Ritter, who even in Freiburg has been nearly completely forgotten. And he was imprisoned after Stauffenberg's assassination attempt against Hitler and only narrowly escaped execution. If he had only really failed in his principles, then the Germans would have taken him into their hearts.
You mean that the public bestows its love rather on the shady and dubious characters?
No, one recognises oneself again, sees the similarities. Opportunists with each other. That's the reason. There is something reassuring for the average normal opportunist in seeing that others, that "great minds", can be just as small-minded and weak as himself. Why aren't the works of Dolf Sternberger read any longer? Why is Hannah Arendt hardly read any more?
Should Hannah Arendt still be read? Does her work still make a contribution to the understanding of totalitarianism?
Certainly. Totalitarianism was then one of the great subjects and still is today in modified form. Hannah Arendt was the first to discuss the comparability of communism and Nazism. As far as I can see, her book on totalitarianism is still today the best in the field, with a broad survey taking into account other dictatorial movements in the world. The generation of 1968 have attempted to discredit it. But, you know, they are all spoiled and lazy. They would never have even picked up a book of six hundred pages. I've spoken to so many of these people who make judgements about things that don't even understand. Scholarship, however, is a severe discipline, demanding many renunciations.
Was Hannah Arendt prepared to make the renunciations required by scholarship?
Quite prepared. She thought with body and soul. It's such a shame that there is still no good biography of Hannah Arendt. If I were twenty years younger, I'd do it. Now I can't. But someone really ought to do it; hers was such a great life. I was once asked in a television interview to name the greatest person whom I had met in my life. And although I've known people like Konrad Adenauer, Herbert Wehner, Willy Brandt and so forth, I answered without hesitation: Hannah Arendt.
The German historian, journalist and author Joachim Fest was born in Berlin on December 8, 1926 and died on September 11, 2006. He was editor-in-chief of North German Broadcasting (NDR) from 1963 to 1968, and co-editor of the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1973 to 1993. In the latter capacity, he published Ernst Nolte's article Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will (i.e., History that will not pass away), whose appearance started what became known as the "historians' dispute" (Historikerstreit). Fest became known mainly through his biography of Hitler. In 2003 he was awarded the Einhard Prize for biographical literature. In 2004 he received the Eugen Bolz Prize for his journalism dealing with the German resistance against the Nazi regime.
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