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Die Welt: What did Hannah Arendt mean to you, when you were still a real, radical leftist 68er?
Daniel Cohn-Bendit:
That's complicated, because she was a friend of my parents. I knew her
and was aware of her theses as a child. After emigrating in 1934, she
belonged to a group of intellectuals in Paris along with my parents, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt's husband Heinrich Blücher.
My father and Blücher were interned together at the beginning of the
war, and that resulted in a deep friendship. But you make a point in
your question: Hannah Arendt was not the most influential thinker for
me at that time. When did you meet Hannah Arendt?
Hannah Arendt 1941. Foto: Fred Stein
When she held a laudatio for Karl Jaspers
in 1958, when he received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels.
My father had just died and she visited my mother. The second time I
saw her was at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. I was there with my
school class – and she happened to be there too.
When did you begin to get interested in Hannah Arendt's work?
In
the 1970s, as the discussions about totalitarianism became more and
more pressing. I was a leftist anti-communist and when I came to
Germany in 1968, I was perplexed by the reluctance to compare communism
with national socialism, which was rooted in German history.
Did your referring to Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" lead to conflicts with your colleagues?
There
was conflict from the outset, because when I was expelled from France
in 1968, I was absolutely certain that, despite my revolutionary
convictions, I would prefer to live in West Germany than in the GDR. I
saw in France and the GDR bourgeois societies – that's what we called
them back then – that needed reform but not totalitarian systems.
What does Hannah Arendt's still controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" mean to you?
That
the demonisation of the Nazis doesn't help us in the long run. The most
insane thing, that has to be understood is that the Nazis were "normal
people"! Eichmann was a nobody who was only to achieve the status and
commit the annihilation he did in a totalitarian, totally racist system.
But
some of the claims that Hannah Arendt makes in "Eichmann in Jerusalem"
don't hold up historically. Take for example her complete condemnation
of the Jewish councils...
Daniel Cohn-Bendit facing the police in Nanterre 1968
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