The Negation of Politics

12-17-2023

Roger Berkowitz

After a crazy week of absurdist theater that veered from tragedy to comedy, Masha Gessen was awarded the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Bremen on Friday, December 15th. The award ceremony, however, did not take place as had been planned in the beautiful City Hall in Bremen, the place where it is traditionally given. Just days before the ceremony was to have happened, rumors emerged that the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, the group that funds the prize, had decided to rescind the award. The cause, while never officially confirmed, seems to have been an article Gessen published in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” The Böll foundation in Bremen apparently found parts of the article offensive. Gessen, who is Jewish, took issue with the description of Gaza as an open-air prison. Instead, Gaza is, they argue, like a ghetto, and not a modern ghetto, but a ghetto in the sense of the Jewish ghettos under Nazi occupation in eastern Europe. Gessen writes: 

“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

Gessen’s characterization is designed to provoke. They know the analogy is flawed, and they admit it two paragraphs later, where Gessen writes:

"The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences."

Gessen downplays the essential differences, focusing on what the ghettos share: “that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.” 

The people at the Bremen office of the Böll Foundation found Gessen’s provocative comparison of Israel’s retreat from Gaza to the Nazi’s concentrations of Jews in Ghettos to have crossed a line. The Böll Foundation in Bremen never explained what line precisely Gessen crossed. According to Gessen, no one from the Böll Foundation ever contacted them to explain the decision or to discuss the article. There was simply an attempt to cancel the prize ceremony and Gessen’s award. Thankfully, that did not happen. 

That a Foundation which presents an award in the name of Hannah Arendt would seek to rescind the award because of a provocative statement in an essay is utterly inconsistent with the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Arendt understood that the life of the mind as well as the life of political action requires that one listen to and engage with opinions that challenge our own. Arendt herself was a provocative thinker. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was widely condemned in Israel and by many Jews around the world for her statement, amongst others, that Jewish collaborators with the Nazis were, for a Jew, the darkest part of the whole dark history. Her essay on the desegregation of the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas was first suppressed and then widely and vigorously condemned by those who thought it wrong to criticize forced desegregation. Her rejection of Zionism and her belief that a particular form of Zionism—one that demands a religiously Jewish state as opposed to a state where Jews could live safely and securely as Jews—was a mistake, led her to worry that a Jewish state could lead to an unjust rule of Jews over Arabs. Her essay “Zionism Reconsidered” led some of her Jewish friends to demand she apologize. If the criteria for winning the Hannah Arendt Prize is that the winner not say anything that might upset Jews or frustrate a liberal consensus, then Hannah Arendt herself could not win the prize now given in her name. It goes without saying that the Böll Foundation in Bremen owes Gessen and also the memory of Hannah Arendt an apology. 

This story is not altogether an unhappy one. An uproar inside Germany and around the world ensued, with Arendt scholars and others flabbergasted that the Böll Foundation could act so fully at odds with the spirit of the prize they were funding. Thankfully, the prize committee for the Hannah Arendt Prize never wavered in its support for Gessen and the prize ceremony was indeed held on Friday December 15th, just in a different space. Also the Böll Foundation in Berlin has invited Gessen to give a lecture in Berlin and promised to award the monetary prize if their colleagues in Bremen don’t do so. As the Böll Foundation in Bremen reels from bad press, it does look as if the Foundation will come to its senses and award Gessen the full prize. 

As the dust from this absurdist controversy settles, there are lessons to be learned. Gessen’s essay is above all about Germany’s cultural and political efforts to respond to its Nazi past. Because of the Holocaust, Germany has embraced an official policy of philo-semitism. It has created what Gessen calls a “vast bureaucracy” to fight Antisemitism, which “includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts…. There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

To give government bureaucracies the power to shame and even punish individuals for holding opinions that are thought to be antisemitic or racist or sexist is dangerous. What is happening in Germany with regards to antisemitism is similar to what goes on in the United States under the cover of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracies. And the idea of creating governmental DEI bureaucracies as advocated by Ibram X. Kendi is something Gessen’s essay raises deep questions about. In both places, the creation of sprawling bureaucracies to regulate speech leads to precisely the kinds of misguided cancellations that Gessen suffered in Bremen. 

The guiding principle of the bureaucratic regulation of speech is the belief that democratic politics is dangerous and needs to be protected from itself by elite bureaucrats. Against an Arendtian belief that there is no truth in politics and that politics happens wherever people act together, bureaucracies insist that the public sphere must be cleansed of unworthy opinions. In this way, bureaucracies that regulate speech act in the name of an anti-politics, an expert driven effort to restrict the freedom of speech and freedom of the press that Arendt calls the treasure of the public sphere. 

It is ironic, therefore, that Gessen themselves is someone who has, over the last decade, often come out on the side of deplatforming and censoring speakers and opinions that Gessen believes are outside the bounds of reasonable political discourse. I’ve written about Gessen’s argument, for example, that Louis Farrakhan should not be given a platform to speak. In considering Gessen’s argument that the embrace of Farrakhan by leaders of the Women’s March is wrong because Farrakhan is outside the bounds of politics, Gessen takes the position that some opinions simply need to be excluded from public discourse. In thinking about their argument, I wrote,

For Gessen, Farrakhan’s bigotry threatens to present a similarly one-sided situation. Farrakhan is also simply evil and thus demands an anti-political response: “It’s hard, if  not impossible, to make the case for compromise with — or in any way involving — Farrakhan. No politics is possible here” (Gessen, 2018). In Russia and in response to Farrakhan, Gessen argues that the emergence of simplistically evil opinions negates the field of politics.

Within this context of confronting evil and the dissolution of politics, Gessen argues that it is possible to criticize the Women’s March for not disavowing Farrakhan; as long as Tamika Mallory or any of the leaders of the Women’s March are associated with a vicious bigot like Farrakhan, the entire organization risks being de-legitimated. Gessen goes on to say that there’s an “oddly satisfying” idea that we feel morally superior: we say, “Oh well, you know the Women’s March won’t criticize Farrakhan;” but we will and therefore we feel pretty good about ourselves. This feeling of righteousness is a familiar one, Gessen admits. As someone raised in Russia, Gessen feels righteous in their feelings about the government, so they embrace this righteousness and say it is a great sense of righteous power to feel superior, to know my enemy is wrong. Gessen argues that we should condemn the Women’s March, Tamika Mallory, and Louis Farrakhan, just as we should condemn the Russian government. 
 
To their credit, Gessen complicates their argument. An important tenet of this dissolution of politics in the face of evil is the way the loss of politics is empowering both sides. The simplistically evil regime or person asserts their power. And when you are staring unadulterated evil in the face, it is easy to feel morally superior. Instead of the Arendtian claim that politics is about opinion, the injection of evil into the discourse replaces politics with the certainty of moral rectitude. To articulate this anti-political moral empowerment, Gessen cites Arendt’s description of private citizens who joined the French Revolution in Between Past and Future. 
 
These citizens, because they had been mobilized toward such an unambiguous cause in opposition to the Nazis, were no longer plagued by feelings of insincerity or of being “carping, suspicious actors of life” — they had “found” themselves, in and through the Resistance. In the action, the camaraderie, the brotherhood of the movement, a person could strip off the different masks he wore to protect himself in private society. Tese challengers to the status quo, to the Nazis, “had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore without knowing or even noticing . . . had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear,” to quote from the same passage of Arendt’s which Gessen cites. Amidst the apolitical realm of the Resistance, a certain freedom to act emerges, one that is deeply connected to Arendt’s understanding of political freedom. What Arendt is discussing here and what Gessen finds important, is that it is in the cells of the resistance, in that places where we are so comfortable that we strip off the masks and know ourselves, that we begin to act in complete freedom, as who we truly are. 
 
As individuals in our plurality we can enter the public space. This freedom to be who we are, to be unique, is what Arendt calls the treasure of the revolution. It is the treasure of the public happiness and public life of being able to be yourself in public. Gessen is attracted to this and they says that maybe they were wrong. Maybe it is good that Tamika Mallory, the Women’s March, Louis Farrakhan and the Russian state can be who they are, and be free. Maybe we should not expel them from the public space and the public discourse. 

Gessen appears to have reversed [their] position. Arendt says that freedom is not free will but the freedom to act in concert. Freedom is political freedom, and such freedom for small groups is the freedom of politics. At some point [they] seem to conclude that politics is good, actually. We like politics: talking, discussing, arguing, persuading and even hating each other are all politics. Politics, they say, quoting Bismarck, is “the art of compromise,” “the art of the possible,” the attainable, the next best.
 
Following this approach, we do not worry about evil, we say “let us get the best we can.” It seems that Gessen adopts the Arendtian spirit and embraces the idea of agonistic politics. But then [they] flip again and say: “But is compromise possible with a bigot? Can someone who won’t denounce a bigot be acceptable as the “next best?”
 
And here is Gessen's answer: “It’s hard, if not impossible, to make the case for compromise with — or in any way involving — Farrakhan. No politics is possible here.” Gessen says that they understand Arendt’s admiration for politics, but we cannot do politics anymore. We cannot allow bigots. We cannot allow tyrants. We cannot allow people who violate the norms that we think govern society. Thus, they accept the idea that no politics are possible anymore. 
 
I find Gessen’s fatalism about the possibility of politics today troubling because it abandons Arendt’s faith in politics, in newness, in radical regeneration and revolution; these are, in my opinion, the true essence of what it means to do politics. Gessen’s lack of confidence in contemporary politics also led them to criticize my choice of speakers at the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual fall conference at Bard College. In another New Yorker  article, they explain how I crossed the line from where political compromise is possible and wound up endorsing bigotry.
 
I’m glad to see that this week, as Gessen herself was subjected to an attempt to deplatform them, Gessen has embraced the Arendtian argument for politics, that we should be wary of those bureaucracies and elites who would claim to speak for us, and tell us who can and who cannot participate in the public discourse. 

You can read Gessen’s essay in the New Yorker here. 

You can listen to a conversation I had with Gessen about Arendt, politics, and the dangers to democracy on the Arendt Center podcast, here. 

You can read about the controversy in German in Die Zeit, here.