Amor Mundi - 7/28/13

Relevant to the most recent Quote of the Week on the danger of intellectuals is Jan Mieszkowski's review of historian Christian Ingrao's recent book Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine. Ingrao's book employs a particular qualitative methodology to explore the role and motives of intellectuals within the Nazi elite - specifically of lawyers, historians, philosophers, and similarly trained professionals who joined the Sicherheitsdiest or SD - the intelligence arm of the SS. According to Mieszkowski, "Believe and Destroy focuses on "a group of eighty university graduates: economists, lawyers, linguists, philosophers, historians and geographers." Drawing on a range of archival sources, Ingrao follows their careers from school and university through their participation in the SD and subsequent efforts to defend themselves in postwar trials. (A dozen members of the group were hanged; most of the others received prison sentences.) He is particularly concerned with the transition from the 1930s, when the SD evolved into an immense surveillance and social science research organization operating inside Germany, to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when these men took the first steps toward putting their theories about the Germanification of foreign lands into practice." Read Roger Berkowitz's further account on Mieszkowski's essay here.

The Importance of Reading Pushkin

Mikhail Shiskin discusses the way that Russian governance, from the absolutist czars, to the communists, and into today's nominal democracy, has felt that it needed to make a political hero out of Pushkin: "From the times of Pushkin and Nicholas I, it was no longer enough for the earthly czar to be anointed by God; the ruler had also to be sanctified by Russian literature, the second sacred Russian power. That is why Stalin's regime was so concerned with perpetuating the memory of the classic Russian writer. If Orthodox czars based their right to own the bodies and souls of their subjects on heavenly law, the Communists legitimized the dictatorship of the party with "scientific" theses such as, 'The teachings of Marx are omnipotent because they are the truth.' But the real sacred figures who could sanctify the state were Pushkin and Gogol - the poets and the writers. When the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, 'to throw Pushkin overboard the steamboat of modernity.' They could not raise their hand against that which is most sacred for the Russian soul. So this prison state built monuments to Pushkin everywhere, trying to seem righteous in the people's eyes."

The Value of the Prison Paper

In the wake of the recent system-wide hunger strike in the California prison system, Andrea Jones considers the role of the free press in connecting prisoners to the outside world. "There are more prisoners than ever, but the emotional distance we have from prisons is also greater than ever," suggests Sarita Alami, a historian at work on a project that employs digital methods like topic modeling and text mining to identify patterns in archived prison periodicals. Analyzing the volume and content of inmate journalism from 1912 through 1980 -what she calls the "golden years" - Alami studies intervals of collective unrest and activism in prisons. She has determined that the Great Depression, the early 1950s, and the late 1960s through early 1970s - time periods characterized by widespread riots, lawsuits, and work stoppages - corresponded to upswings in prison journalism, which she posits as a key facilitator of resistance and reform." But in recent decades, "as prison populations ballooned..., inmate-produced media did not experience a parallel upsurge. According to Alami, the penal press was suppressed twofold: by the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and by broad shifts in media consumption. ... the ascension of the Internet, while expanding the scope of information on the outside, served to cut off prisoners from the mediated public sphere of the modern world." She goes on to conclude, convincingly, that prisoners are often punished, particularly with solitary confinement, for trying to write and share their experience of the world.

Reconciling Experience with History

Discussing her recent essay in Harper's, writer Rebecca Makkai talks about her experience of her grandfather, whom she knew as a yoga instructor who lived in Hawaii, who was also the principal author of Hungary's Second Jewish Law, which passed in 1939. At one point, she strikes a particularly Arendtian note: "There's also the fact that it's just very difficult, psychologically, to reconcile the face of a real person with one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century. It's not the same as looking at someone who's personally violent, likely to reach out and hit you. This guy is chopping up papaya on his balcony, telling jokes, and I think we have an instinct to forgive, to see just the best in that person, to see him at just that moment. (The irony being that this is what he and his colleagues failed to do - to see humans in front of them.)"

The Confused Readers of "The Lottery"

Ruth Franklin, writing about Shirley Jackson's 1948 horror short story "The Lottery," draws attention to a few of the letters that the New Yorker received after the story's publication in its pages: There were indeed some cancelled subscriptions, as well as a fair share of name-calling - Jackson was said to be "perverted" and "gratuitously disagreeable," with "incredibly bad taste." But the vast majority of the letter writers were not angry or abusive but simply confused. More than anything else, they wanted to understand what the story meant."

Featured Events

 July 22-July 31, 2013
The Hannah Arendt Center 10 DAY/100 MEMBER CAMPAIGN

October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast" The Educated Citizen in Crisis"
Olin Hall, Bard College

From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog

This week on the blog, Jeff Jurgens considers how Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity contributed to her cosmopolitanism. Roger Berkowitz thinks through Arendt's feelings about intellectuals. Your weeked read explores the role and motives of intellectuals within the Nazi elite. And this week we kicked off a short membership drive; Roger explains what's next for the Center, and why you should consider joining us, here.