Hello, I’m Yang Zhao. One defining feature of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and one of her major contributions, is that it takes the Jewish question seriously.

A large part of the book’s opening is called “Antisemitism.” The need to discuss antisemitism is not self-evident. To understand what taking the Jewish question seriously means, and what Arendt did, we must first understand this:

Only after the war ended in 1945 did the world discover the concealed truth of the Holocaust. Six million Jews had been murdered. Under those circumstances, discussing the Jewish question was extraordinarily difficult.

Only someone like Arendt, herself Jewish, could speak this way and be regarded as entitled to do so. A non-Jew approaching the Jewish question in the same manner would almost certainly have appeared cruel and morally unimaginable. When the murder of six million people was first exposed, the Holocaust could be described but not truly narrated, still less explained. Its horror and tragic scale seemed inconceivable.

 

We previously discussed Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno also left a famous statement, rendered in English as:To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric。In Chinese, it means that to continue writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Auschwitz was the largest and most terrifying concentration camp of the Holocaust. Its name came to represent the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews, making visible the atrocity’s most inhuman dimension. Adorno said that writing poetry after such an event was barbaric. This is closely related to Arendt’s courage: the rapid, systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of another people exceeded every existing human mode of expression.

Adorno wanted to stress that the Holocaust was fundamentally inconceivable, beyond common sense and ordinary understanding. It could not be described from the standpoint used for familiar phenomena.