Locating Nazi Evil: The Contrasting Visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer

Abstract

Why, one might well ask, privilege Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), and Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) and their particular confrontations with Nazism and the Jewish experience? Is this not a rather arbitrary choice? I think not. In the first place, these were all German-Jewish thinkers who, in one way or another, achieved fame in the post-Nazi world. They all arrived at intellectual maturity during the fateful but creative years of the Weimar Republic and were witnesses from the rise of Nazism to power through to its defeat and demise in 1945. All, in very different ways, pondered deeply over the catastrophe and its implications for both Germans and Jews. All left records, not just in their academic publications, but in their intimate chronicles of the time, their letters and diaries. The great advantage of these documents is that they are not privileged by hindsight. Rather, they inhabit the present moment, in which the fluidity of developments and the unfolding reactions of these thinkers are captured in process. They shed light not just on the turbulent times in which these fascinating, albeit headstrong, opinionated, and often infuriating people lived, but also on the very distinctive ways in which each conceived of, and coped with, the changes and challenges around him or her. They provide us with distinctive ideological maps, worldviews in the making, snapshots of options defined and pursued.¹