Lyndsey Stonebridge - Preparing for the impossible: Hannah Arendt's legacy

Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, explores Hannah Arendt’s use of irony.

About Lyndsey Stonebridge

"I am Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.

I work on the intellectual history and literature of the 20th century, and I’ve written books on war, justice, war-time trials, statelessness, human rights and Hannah Arendt."

Arendt’s potent use of irony

There’s this extraordinary moment in an interview that Hannah Arendt gave in 1964 on German television with Günter Gaus. She says that when she read the transcripts of Eichmann’s interviews with the Israeli secret services, she just laughed out loud. ‘I laughed and laughed and laughed,’ she said.

It’s hard to think of a more singularly inappropriate way to respond to the memories of a mass killer, and to some extent, that was what got her into trouble with her reports on Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote in this kind of brutally ironic way, as if she didn’t care.

Irony, of course, can be defensive. People have said that Arendt just couldn’t come to terms with the horror of the Holocaust, so she used irony as a form of defence and a way of distancing herself from it. She’d lost so many friends and family, and her life had been devastated. Maybe there’s something in that, but I think that she used irony very seriously. She laughed seriously.

Key Points

• For Arendt, the ironic voice was terribly important as a means of countering the banality of evil. It’s a way of saying the unsayable.
• Even after totalitarian States fall, totalitarian elements can remain in culture, enabled by thoughtlessness in institutions, capitalism and politics.
• Thinking might be something you do by yourself, but judging can only be done within a political community.