When Arendt Knew
Hannah Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo for going to the library too much.
The political theorist would one day be best known for the definitive, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” and coining the term, “The Banality of Evil,” but at the time, she was a 26 year-old woman with work to do.
“Indifference was no longer possible in 1933. It was impossible even before that,” she said in a 1964 interview. “I read the newspapers with suspense. I had opinions. By 1931 I was firmly convinced the Nazis would come to power. And I was constantly arguing with others over these issues.”
On February 27, 1933 the Reichstag burned, and Arendt, previously “unpolitical,” felt compelled to resist what she already believed inevitable.
Tasked with collecting proof of the many anti-semitic actions and statements made outside of the official works of government and the Nazi party, thus less likely to make international headlines, Arendt began daily visits to the Prussian State Library. The world needed to know what was happening to Jews in the streets, the village squares, in the universities and cafés of Germany.
She was picked up by the secret police, and interrogated for eight days while men broke into her apartment looking for enough evidence to put her in “protective custody.” One notebook filled with endless pages of code looked promising, until someone figured out it was actually Ancient Greek. And people wonder what good a philosophy degree is.
When Arendt was released, she hastily fled Germany for Czechoslovakia on foot, then on to France. She thought she would be safer, there. On May 15, 1940 her Parisian neighbors looked on as she reported to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a venue of the 1924 Olympics, to eventually be moved with her fellow “enemy aliens” to a camp in Gurs. Two years later, 13,152 of Arendt’s fellow Jews would wait five interminable days in the same venue usually used for bike races and boxing matches, to be shipped to Auschwitz. 400 survived.
There is a meme floating around that reads, “If you were ever curious what you would have done if you lived in 1930s Germany…You’re doing it.”
You have no doubt heard the myriad comparisons between the Trump Administration’s enactment of Project 2025 and the early rise of the Third Reich. The dehumanizing language aimed at immigrants, the fixation on transgender citizens. A lesser known similarity might be that the Nazis were also flamboyantly inept, with a lazy and self-obsessed leader dead set on pitting subordinates against each other. The parallels are clear. Yet we should not expect the future to play out precisely like the past. I say this because I suspect we are awaiting for what those history nerds amongst us will know as a Reichstag moment. That is, an extraordinary event with a clear before and after, The BC/AD changeover of democracy to fascism.
But even the Reichstag fire, which burned the house of elected parliament in Berlin, wasn’t THE Reichstag event in pre-WW2 Germany. As M. Gessen, one of the worryingly few must-read writers responding to and explaining this moment we are in, wrote in their fearfully prescient 2020 book, Surviving Autocracy, “Even the original Reichstag Fire was not the Reichstag Fire of our imagination — a singular event that changed the course of history once and for all. The Reichstag burned five years before the Anschluss, six years before the start of the Second World War. Those years were filled with events big and small, each a step that made the darkest view possible.”
I know that as I am writing this, 56,579 people have been rounded up by, in the best case scenario, unidentified masked agents of I.C.E — soon to have a budget which exceeds that of some countries’ militaries. Judicial warrants and badge numbers have been sparse. Ditto Due Process. As White House Deputy Stephen Miller pushes to meet a daily quota of 3000 kidnappings a day, those picking up my fellow Angelenos may be bounty hunters, retired officers, volunteers, or some other, as yet unknown type of police. Secret, if you will.
This is what some people were doing in 1930s Germany: Sitting by the lake. Making a note to pick up milk on the way home. Reading about the new concentration camp. Dachau was initially not for racial and ethnic prisoners, but for those who had voted for the other political parties, trouble-causing artists, and those considered “asocial” or “work-shy,” (often addicts and the unhoused) amongst others. The government was so confident, Dachau was built within the borders where “the Nazis readily granted tours of the camp to government functionaries, teachers, and students.” They did not sell merch like they are at “Alligator Alcatraz”, but I bet Goebbles would have loved the idea. (In the mischegos of the camp closing, “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald.”)
They told busy citizens that places like Dachau had to be built to handle all these threats to social safety, the economy, our neighborhoods. Something had to be done about the crime, after all. Some believed them. Most didn’t even notice.
I’ve successfully Debbie Downer-ed a number of meals that were supposed to be for lightening the general mood. Inevitably comes the questions, “How bad is this going to get? Are you thinking about leaving?” And without fail someone will chime in, “As people with privilege we need to stay and fight to make it better.” Naturally we all solemnly nod in agreement, writing checks we hope never to have to cash.
The problem with “we need to stay and fight” is that by the time the BC/AD switch happens, it will be too late. It will be too late, but it will feel like it hasn’t even started yet — because we’re expecting fascism, in part because that word has been thrown around a lot. Fascism isn’t the Marines being deployed to stand around LA, bored but for the photo opportunities. Fascism in practice is corpses and blood in the streets, political violence on a personal scale, per capita.
Authoritarianism, conversely, is ignorable. How do I know this? Because I’ve been to Istanbul and enjoyed every moment. Yet Turkey is ruled by a corrupt authoritarian. Same with Budapest in Hungary. It’s easy to look the other way when all you want to do is get your hairline touched up, or have a lovely holiday. It can be even easier when you’re not on holiday, merely trying to get the kids out the door on time or finish that project for your crummy boss.
Yes, authoritarianism can slide into fascism, but there is a lot of money to be made if you can keep the street thugs merely standing back and standing by. According to The New Yorker’s recent report by David D. Kirkpatrick, President Trump has netted somewhere around $3.4 Billion dollars from this whole situation. Neither Erdogan, Orbán, or Trump fancy ending up in a ditch covered in petrol or hanging from a gas station sign. Fascism burns out. Authoritarianism lingers. It infects.
Once the rot sets in… Well, think of Turkey. Russia. El Salvador. Hungary. What at first seems unsustainable, over a disconcertingly short amount of time turns out to be entirely sustainable as long as the right people are able to profit, and everyone else — well, those who can stay out of prison, or a gulag, or a camp — has a job to report to, errands to run, families to focus on. Private life goes on. But only for some.
And this brings me to “We have to stay and fight.”
Once that authoritarian rot sets in, the conversation about who has to stay and use their privilege and resources to stop what’s happening, is in fact over. When democracy is lost, and there’s a number of barometers by which to judge that sliding scale, the moral thing to do is leave, take your assets with you, and help as many without the means to do the same get out. To live as an immigrant. Unless you’re ready to take your Andor cosplay to the next level…? Not likely, is it? As American historian Heather Cox Richardson put it, at that point “the only two options are apathy or violence.”
Hannah Arendt coined the term, “The Banality of Evil,” in her reporting of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “Butcher of Budapest,” for The New Yorker. That reporting, which later became a book still in print around the world, still prompts passionate debate.
Arendt argued that not only Germany, but all of Europe suffered a cataclysmic collapse of morality. Easy enough to swallow. What makes Arendt controversial in some circles is that she argued that in a society quickly devolving into a death cult in which resistance was most often futile, the moral collapse not only happened amongst the Nazis, but amongst their victims and ‘bystanders’ as well. This is how children end up reporting their parents to the Gestapo. True evil sticks around like dog shit — even the most glancing brush with it might as well be a head to toe smearing. No one, even innocents, gets away clean.
History is what happens while you’re busy getting on with your life, and by the time most of us look up to clock what is happening, it’s entirely possible that the time in which we can stop these people will have passed. By some estimations, we have less than 400 days.
I’m telling you that the time when you put normal life on hold as much as possible and focus your attention on saving the Republic? It’s now. Right now. Do not wait for something to be set on fire — America is already burning.
If this window to save the Republic closes, protest and action will be at best ineffectual, at worst dangerous. I cannot blame the instinct to stay, and try to live “non-politically” within the confines of your private life. To exist as a neutral presence, neither condoning or condemning the messiness, the eagerness, of politics. Being political is to care, and caring is cringe.
But I urge you to interrogate the idea of neutrality. Perhaps we can borrow a framework from Ibram X. Kenji’s definition of racism: “I think to be racist is to support policies that are leading to inequality or injustice. And there are two ways to support policies that are leading to inequity or injustice: by your actions, or inaction.” Racism, in other words, comes from supporting policies which inflict racist existences (“inequality or injustice”). In this light, neutrality comes from supporting policies that result in neutral existences.
Small concessions here, bitter compromise there, keeping one’s head down does not result in a politically neutral situation. If we slip any further down the authoritarian scale, our resources and our silence —because anything less than compliant silence will eventually become too dangerous— will be corrupted, metastasized into support. Every cent you own, your tax dollars, every email you send as if it’s a normal day, every brunch and evening stroll will, however inadvertently, support the downfall of our Republic.
In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt, who eventually escaped from the camp in Gurs wrote “Nothing proved easier to destroy than the private morality of people who thought nothing of safeguarding their own private lives.”
She also said of the work in the library that got her rounded up by the Nazi secret police, “I had instant satisfaction. I thought, at least I have done something. At least I’m not ‘innocent.’ Nobody shall say that of me!”