Manfred Henningsen's response to my letter to Ben-David

Dear Ari:
I forgot to answer a question concerning Taubes. You are right about his troubled life, though I don't think it was troubled in the normal sense of the word. One authentic voice was his wife, Susan Taubes, who actually published in 1970 a Schluesselroman about him. When it got a bad review in the New York Times, she committed suicide. The novel presents the portrait of an egomaniacal intellectual who is focused on nothing but the promotion of his own reputation. There was something to this image, though there were also a lot of envious people who couldn't stand his brilliance. I liked him personally, even if there was one detail about him, which I couldn't figure out. Taubes was the son of a Zurich rabbi but had also very close relations with a prominent conservative, if not right-wing, intellectual in Munich, Armin Mohler (I mention him in the introduction to the Hitler lectures). Mohler was a Swiss volunteer to the SS who, after being rejected for service for health reasons, received >from the SS a scholarship to study art. He became after the war the private secretary of Ernst Juenger and, then, Carl Schmitt, and finally for many years the leader of the Siemens-Stiftung in Munich. I couldn't stand that man and attacked him frequently. He once called me in an article a "Nationalmasochist". I never understood why Taubes always insisted on meeting him when he was in Munich.

I found your letter in response to the review of the Arendt book terrific. This is the Arendt I experienced many times in the 1960s in public discussions in Munich. It is the Arendt that comes across in Young-Bruehl's biography and, especially, in the correspondence with Karl Jaspers, one of the most exciting books I have read. Your treatment of her German background is exactly right.
I have written about that in a piece that I gave as a paper in Florence in 1997, " Politics and Catastrophe: Why is the World so obsessed with German History?" (in: Witoszek/Traegaardh, eds., Culture and Crisis. The Case of Germany and Sweden, New York:Berghahn 2002). One of these days I will have to come back to this theme. I have partly dealt with it in a paper on "The Varieties of Memory: Germany and the Rest of the World", which will be published this year.
In March of this year I was invited by the Juedisches Museum in Berlin to give a talk about Darfur. They knew about my interest in the Anti-African racism in German philosophy and my critical arguments about the uniqueness thesis concerning the Holocaust. German intellectuals have completely accepted that thesis and they become very agitated when one confronts them with the consequence of its internalization, namely the inability and unwillingness to see comparable, not identical, scenarios of terror in front of their eyes. When I raised that issue in my keynote talk I encountered some sounds of shocked disbelief in the audience. The director of the Museum, Michael Blumenthal, was not shoscked.
Well, I hope you are not shocked.
All the best,
Manfred Henningsen
P.S. By the way, I asked Miguel Vatter whether he got his PhD at the New School, and he confirmed it. He is an interesting and very lively character who speaks at least 5 languages fluently: Italian, Spanish, German, English and French.

Manfred Henningsen