Arendt’s Anton Schmidt

09-20-2024

“During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question––how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.”
 
(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, p. 231)

 
During the Second World War, Anton Schmidt, a Viennese forty-year-old reserve soldier in the Wehrmacht, did something deeply unexpected: he helped Jews, and then also the Jewish underground, intentionally and consistently, for several months, until he was arrested in January 1942 and, a few months later, executed for treason. The story of his heroic acts, which moved Arendt and the rest of the audience in the courtroom in Jerusalem so profoundly, was not wholly unknown at the time of the Eichmann trial. Arendt notes that it was already published in Yad Vashem’s Hebrew Bulletin and that, following this publication, it was also mentioned in a few Yiddish-American papers. However, it does seem to have found its way into Arendt’s report as if by accident––told in the Israeli courtroom and then commemorated by Arendt only due to the prosecution’s interest in a relatively insignificant comment Schmidt once uttered. Apparently, Schmidt had told Abba Kovner, one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, who later became a renowned poet and a leading public figure in Israel, that he had heard rumours about “a dog, called Eichmann,” who “arranges everything.” Fortunately for us, this was enough for the prosecution to ask Kovner about Schmidt on the witness stand.

According to Arendt, Kovner’s skillfully delivered testimony turned out to be quite a “dramatic moment” in the trial. It seems as if the audience of the tedious and “endless sessions” that took place in the courtroom could not have stayed indifferent to the story of the Austrian soldier serving in the German army who did the entirely unpredictable and risked his life for the Jewish population that he had miraculously still took for humans, despite the directly opposite orders he received and the dehumanizing consensus surrounding him.

Moreover, Kovner’s testimony turned out to be quite a dramatic moment in Arendt’s book itself. In her theoretico-historical tractate on refusal and obedience in Israel, Idith Zertal––a prominent Israeli historian who consistently challenges the Israeli consensus in her works, the Hebrew translator of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and one of the most significant figures in the Arendt Hebrew scholarship and translation enterprise of recent decades––suggests taking Arendt’s rendering of Schmidt’s tale as the Archimedean point of the book: “Not merely a book about opaque, blind and foolish evil anymore,” she writes, “but also a thrilling vision of the other alternative, of the history that was not, that could have been, and of the good, no less than the bad, as part of the possible.” A vision so thrilling that it inspires Zertal to identify Schmidt as the true protagonist of Arendt’s book: Schmidt, who, precisely in his passing and marginal appearance in the book, coupled with his unusually luminous deeds, embodies the direct opposite of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and zealous obedience, which was, and still is, so terrifyingly normal.

Indeed, Arendt concludes the chapter on “Evidence and Witnesses,” where she discusses Schmidt, in a strangely optimistic and excited tone––countering not only the irony characterizing her portrait of Eichmann, but also her incredibly depressing account of the destruction of the human being in the death factories in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published a decade earlier. In the penultimate chapter of her seminal research into the new phenomenon of totalitarianism, Arendt famously describes the mechanism of the production of “living corpses” through the “murdering,” as it were, of the three personae––the legal, the moral, and the individual––that constitute our being-in-the-world, with-others. Discussing “the murder of the moral person in man” through the “making [of] martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible,” Arendt quotes the following, chilling testimony of David Rousset: “‘How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the S.S. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony’.” Exactly for this reason, Arendt dubs the camps, throughout the chapter, “holes of oblivion.”

Twelve years later, pondering in Eichmann in Jerusalem why there are no more stories like Schmidt’s to tell, Arendt turns to discuss Peter Bamm’s memoir, Die Unsichtbare Flagge, which was, according to her, “one of the few subjectively sincere memoirs of the war published in Germany.” In his memoir, Bamm, who served as a military physician during the war, admits that he and his fellow soldiers did not do anything to stop the mass murders that the S.S. committed before their very eyes. Not because they approved of it, he explains, but because they knew that the totalitarian government immediately silenced every act of resistance, erasing its traces before it can spur others to act, thereby making it “practically useless,” and certainly not worth sacrificing one’s life for.

Responding to Bamm, but also to her earlier self, Arendt deems this argument completely false, claiming that:

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today [....] if there were more such stories [as Schmidt’s] to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not (emphasis in the original).

But how can Arendt be so sure that “one man will always be left alive to tell the story”? Do the holes of oblivion truly not exist?

That the story of Schmidt’s actions could have easily not been told in the courtroom is, in our context, rather revealing. It captures something of the unpredictable, transient, and futile character that Arendt ascribes to political action in The Human Condition, whose meaning is revealed in full only in hindsight, to the storyteller, and whose story must be rendered into a lasting object if it is to be salvaged from its fleeting into nothingness. But what first appears to be a strictly ontological problem is, in fact, exactly as such––as is always the case with Arendt––also political through and through. The “problem” of action’s ephemeral existence concerns not merely its “nature” as an event, but also the plurality of actors that are always-already involved in such an event––laying the ground for its appearance in the world, responding to it, and finally, remembering it. It is not only that Kovner was there to testify, but that, as Zertal underscores, he made a conscious decision to tell Schmidt’s story; that, even though he was quickly interrupted by the prosecutor and the judges, the audience, again, in Zertal’s words, “did not let this rare moment […] fleet and disappear;” and, finally, that Arendt herself decided to incorporate this turn of events in her account of the trial, “making this seemingly negligible story, which flickers like a tiny candle, into the fulcrum with which she turns her book on its head.” In this sense, the question we should ask is not simply whether there is a person left alive to tell the story, but rather, what should we do with the stories we already inherited––not (to paraphrase Arendt’s famous reference to René Char in Between Past and Future) without a testament, but with one still waiting for us to act upon.

“Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future,” Arendt once wrote about Passover’s Haggadah, in an extremely Nietzschean spirit (see The Jewish Writings). “Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.” “Understand the present and fight for a better future,” Arendt implores us, while, in our current present––at least that of those of us who are somehow tied to that cursed and dismembered land stretching from the river to the sea––another genocide is taking place. The state of Israel, which was founded on the promise: “Never Again,” has––following Hamas’ horrifying attack on Israel on October 7, 2023––decided to declare its own bloody attack on Gaza, under the pretext of self-defense. With around 1,200 people brutally murdered in the span of one morning––most of whom civilians––and with 251 people kidnapped––dozens of them still held by Hamas and abandoned by Netanyahu’s criminal government––the Israeli society, revengeful, frightened, eaten up with conspiracies, dangerous––is now, more than ever, as the renowned Israeli historian of genocide Omer Bartov recently testified, convinced in the need to demolish the Palestinian people of Gaza. The Israeli army is bombing Gaza indiscriminately, barbarously, killing, to this day, over 41,000 people, at least half of whom are women and children. Counting the bodies still buried under the rubble, the number of fatalities is probably even higher, as if not already monstrous, ungraspable.

The reactions to the war in the Israeli public are diverse: some are openly cheering for genocide and some are genuinely sorrowful for the loss of lives; some wish to recolonize Gaza and some bravely protest against the government’s intentional thwarting of the negotiations with Hamas while facing police brutality––in the past few weeks, following the horrendous news of Hamas’ execution of 6 of the hostages held in Rafah due to the unlawful activity of the Israeli army in the area, calling even more urgently and fiercely than before to accept a ceasefire that will end the war and bring the remaining hostages back. Yet everyone across this entire scale is still complicit in the Israeli killing machine, convinced in our just ways, silently permitting or wilfully participating in the murder of innocent human beings and the destruction of the Palestinian people and the now-uninhabitable Gaza. Anton Schmidt’s story might have physically survived, but its meaning and heritage are nowhere to be found in our midst. The burden of Arendt’s tale still weighs on us, Israelis; the ghost of Schmidt still haunts us, begging: “Do not let me fall into the holes of oblivion. Disobey.”

But maybe now, exactly now, amidst our very own zealously-obedient-men-made disaster, some of Arendt’s optimism is also warranted. In her tractate, Zertal tells us of several young Israelis who, in recent years, following their readings of Arendt’s report on the banality of evil, were inspired to refuse their service in the army. They, I believe, together with this war’s dissidents—who perhaps never heard of Schmidt and Arendt before, but are refusing to take part in the ongoing genocide—are the ones truly commemorating Schmidt’s story, as told by Arendt, bringing some light into the “impenetrable, unfathomable darkness” that threatens to swallow us all.
 
References:
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New Edition with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
–––––. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised and Enlarged Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
–––––. The Human Condition. Second Edition. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998.
–––––. The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kahn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.
–––––. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Edition with added Prefaces. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1979.
Bartov, Omer. “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel.” The Guardian. August 13, 2024. Accessed on August 29, 2024:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov.
Segalov, Michael. “‘More killing won’t bring back lost lives’: Tal Mitnick, 18, on going to prison instead of joining IDF.” The Guardian. January 23, 2024. Accessed on August 30, 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/23/israel-man-jailed-refuse-serve-idf-military-tal-mitnick-interview.
Yad Vashem. “The Soldier ‘Whose Heart was in Jewish Matters.’” Yad Vashem’s Website. Accessed on August 29, 2024: https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/schmid.html.
Zertal, Idith. Refusal: Conscientious Objection in Israel [in Hebrew; translations mine]. Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameochad, 2018.
Ziv, Oren. “Three war refuseniks: We will not participate in Genocide [in Hebrew]. Siha Mekomit. August 5, 2024. Accessed on August 30, 2024: https://www.mekomit.co.il/שלושה-סרבני-מלחמה-לא-נשתתף-ברצח-עם/.
 
About the Author:
Omri Shlomov Milson is a doctoral student in the department of Political Science at CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in political theory. He is currently finishing his master’s thesis in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, examining the spatiotemporal aspects of Hannah Arendt’s concept of thinking. More generally, he is interested in questions concerning sovereignty, plurality, the conditions of possibility for political action, and the production of space and time in the thinking of Arendt, Benjamin and Heidegger. His article “Rights and the human condition of non-sovereignty: Rethinking Arendt’s critique of human rights with Rancière and Balibar,” was recently published in Philosophy and Social Criticism.