In
the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We
ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” Our
newspapers are papers for “Americans of German language”; and, as
far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by
Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were
refugees.
A
refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act
committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have
had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never
dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term
“refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who
have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means
and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.
Before
this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called
refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just
ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free
will to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had
anything to do with “so-called Jewish problems.” Yes, we were
“immigrants” or “newcomers” who had left our country because,
one fine day, it no longer suited us to stay, or for purely economic
reasons. We wanted to rebuild our lives, that was all. In order to
rebuild one’s life one has to be strong and an optimist. So we are
very optimistic.
Our
optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The
story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home,
which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation,
which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We
lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the
simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We
left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have
been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our
private lives.
Nevertheless,
as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several
times—we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as
possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were
told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could
imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country
would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks
in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans. The most
optimistic among us would even add that their whole former life had
been passed in a kind of unconscious exile and only their new country
now taught them what a home really looks like. It is true we
sometimes raise objections when we are told to forget about our
former work; and our former ideals are usually hard to throw over if
our social standard is at stake. With the language, however, we find
no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they
speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years
they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other
language—their German is a language they hardly remember.
In
order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to
concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all
European countries—it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of
confidence in the new homeland. Besides, how often have we been told
that nobody likes to listen to all that; hell is no longer a
religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and
stones and trees. Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary
history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are
put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by
their friends.
Even
among ourselves we don’t speak about this past. Instead, we have
found our own way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody
plans and wishes and hopes, so do we. Apart from the general human
attitudes, however, we try to clear up the future more
scientifically. After so much bad luck we want a course as sure as a
gun. Therefore, we leave the earth with all its uncertainties behind
and we cast our eyes up to the sky. The stars tell us—rather than
the newspapers—when Hitler will be defeated and when we shall
become American citizens. We think the stars more reliable advisers
than all our friends; we learn from the stars when we should have
lunch with our benefactors and on what day we have the best chances
of filling out one of these countless questionnaires which accompany
our present lives. Sometimes we don’t rely even on the stars but
rather on the lines of our hand or the signs of our handwriting. Thus
we learn less about political events but more about our own dear
selves, even though somehow psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion.
Those happier times are past when bored ladies and gentlemen of high
society conversed about the genial misdemeanors of their early
childhood. They don’t want ghost-stories any more; it is real
experiences that make their flesh creep. There is no longer any need
of bewitching the past; it is spellbound enough in reality. Thus, in
spite of our outspoken optimism, we use all sorts of magical tricks
to conjure up the spirits of the future.
I
don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our
dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be
an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think
of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved. I could even
understand how our friends of the West coast, during the curfew,
should have had such curious notions as to believe that we are not
only “prospective citizens” but present “enemy aliens.” In
daylight, of course, we become only “technically” enemy
aliens—all refugees know this. But when technical reasons prevented
you from leaving your home during the dark house, it certainly was
not easy to avoid some dark speculations about the relation between
technicality and reality.
No,
there is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd
optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go
home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an
unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness
is based on a dangerous readiness for death. Brought up in the
conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest
dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than
death—without having been able to discover a higher ideal than
life. Thus, although death lost its horror for us, we became neither
willing nor capable to risk our lives for a cause. Instead of
fighting—or thinking about how to become able to fight
back—refugees have got used to wishing death to friends or
relatives; if somebody dies, we cheerfully imagine all the trouble he
has been saved. Finally many of us end by wishing that we, too, could
be saved some trouble, and act accordingly.
Since
1938—since Hitler’s invasion of Austria—we have seen how
quickly eloquent optimism could change to speechless pessimism. As
time went on, we got worse—even more optimistic and even more
inclined to suicide. Austrian Jews under Schuschnigg were such a
cheerful people—all impartial observers admired them. It was quite
wonderful how deeply convinced they were that nothing could happen to
them. But when German troops invaded the country and Gentile
neighbours started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to
commit suicide.
Unlike
other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed, no
indictment, no charge against a world that had forced a desperate man
to talk and to behave cheerfully to his very last day. Letters left
by them are conventional, meaningless documents. Thus, funeral
orations we make at their open graves are brief, embarrassed and very
hopeful. Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of
us.
*
I
speak of unpopular facts; and it makes things worse that in order to
prove my point I do not even dispose of the sole arguments which
impress modern people—figures. Even those Jews who furiously deny
the existence of the Jewish people give us a fair chance of survival
as far as figures are concerned—how else could they prove that only
a few Jews are criminals and that many Jews are being killed as good
patriots in wartime? Through their effort to save the statistical
life of the Jewish people we know that Jews had the lowest suicide
rate among all civilized nations. I am quite sure those figures are
no longer correct, but I cannot prove it with new figures, though I
can certainly with new experiences. This might be sufficient for
those skeptical souls who never were quite convinced that the measure
of one’s skull gives the exact idea of its content, or that
statistics of crime show the exact level of national ethics. Anyhow,
wherever European Jews are living today, they no longer behave
according to statistical laws. Suicides occur not only among the
panic-stricken people in Berlin and Vienna, in Bucharest or Paris,
but in New York and Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
On
the other hand, there has been little reported about suicides in the
ghettoes and concentration camps themselves. True, we had very few
reports at all from Poland, but we have been fairly well informed
about German and French concentration camps.
At
the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of
spending some time, I heard only once about suicide, and that was the
suggestion of a collective action, apparently a kind of protest in
order to vex the French. When some of us remarked that we had been
shipped there “pour crever” in
any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of
life. The general opinion held that one had to be abnormally asocial
and unconcerned about general events if one was still able to
interpret the whole accident as personal and individual bad luck and,
accordingly, ended one’s life personally and individually. But the
same people, as soon as they returned to their own individual lives,
being faced with seemingly individual problems, changed once more to
this insane optimism which is next door to despair.
We
are the first non-religious Jews persecuted—and we are the first
ones who, not only in
extremis,
answer with suicide. Perhaps the philosophers are right who teach
that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom; not
being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we
nevertheless are free to throw life away and to leave the world.
Pious Jews, certainly, cannot realize this negative liberty: they
perceive murder in suicide, that is, destruction of what man never is
able to make, interference with the rights of the Creator. Adonai
nathan veadonai lakach (“The
Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away”); and they would
add: baruch shem
adonai (“blessed
be the name of the Lord”). For them suicide, like murder, means a
blasphemous attack on creation as a whole. The man who kills himself
asserts that life is not worth living and the world not worth
sheltering him.
Yet
our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the
world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a
quiet and modest way of vanishing; they seem to apologize for the
violent solution they have found for their personal problems. In
their opinion, generally, political events had nothing to do with
their individual fate; in good or bad times they would believe solely
in their personality. Now they find some mysterious shortcomings in
themselves which prevent them from getting along. Having felt
entitled from their earliest childhood to a certain social standard,
they are failures in their own eyes if this standard cannot be kept
any longer. Their optimism is the vain attempt to keep head above
water. Behind this front of cheerfulness, they constantly struggle
with despair of themselves. Finally, they die of a kind of
selfishness.
If
we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel
degraded. We fight like madmen for private existences with individual
destinies, since wa are afraid of becoming part of that miserable lot
of schnorrers whom
we, many of us former philanthropists, remember only too well. Just
as once we failed to understand that the so-called schnorrer was
a symbol of Jewish destiny and not a shlemihl,
so today we don’t feel entitled to Jewish solidarity; we cannot
realize that we by ourselves are not so much concerned as the whole
Jewish people. Sometimes this lack of comprehension has been strongly
supported by our protectors. Thus, I remember a director of a great
charity concern in Paris who, whenever he received the card of a
German-Jewish intellectual with the inevitable “Dr.” on it, used
to exclaim at the top of his voice, “Herr Doktor, Herr Doktor, Herr
Schnorrer, Herr Schnorrer!”
The
conclusion we drew from such unpleasant experiences was simple
enough. To be a doctor of philosophy no longer satisfied us; and we
learnt that in order to build a new life, one has first to improve on
the old one. A nice little fairy-tale has been invented to describe
our behaviour; a forlorn émigré dachshund, in his grief, begins to
speak: “Once, when I was a St. Bernard …”
Our
new friends, rather overwhelmed by so many stars and famous men,
hardly understand that at the basis of all our descriptions of past
splendors lies one human truth: once we were somebodies about whom
people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords
as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride in
the subway without being told we were undesirable. We have become a
little hysterical since newspapermen started detecting us and telling
us publicly to stop being disagreeable when shopping for milk and
bread. We wonder how it can be done; we already are so damnably
careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing
who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth
certificates were filled out—and that Hitler didn’t like us. We
try the best we can to fit into a world where you have to be sort of
politically minded when you buy your food.
Under
such circumstances, St. Bernard grows bigger and bigger. I never can
forget that young man who, when expected to accept a certain kind of
work, sighed out, “You don’t know to whom you speak; I was
Section-manager in Karstadt’s [A great department store in
Berlin].” But there is also the deep despair of that middle-aged
man who, going through countless shifts of different committees in
order to be saved, finally exclaimed, “And nobody here knows who I
am!” Since nobody would treat him as a dignified human being, he
began sending cables to great personalities and his big relations. He
learnt quickly that in this mad world it is much easier to be
accepted as a “great man” than as a human being.
*
The
less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more
we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles. We
were expelled from Germany because we were Jews. But having hardly
crossed the French borderline, we were changed into “boches.” We
were even told that we had to accept this designation if we really
were against Hitler’s racial theories. During seven years we played
the ridiculous role of trying to be Frenchmen—at least, prospective
citizens; but at the beginning of the war we were interned as
“boches” all the same. In the meantime, however, most of us had
indeed become such loyal Frenchmen that we could not even criticise a
French governmental order; thus we declared it as all right to be
interned. We were the first “prisonniers volontaires” history has
ever seen. After the Germans invaded the country, the French
Government had only to change the name of the firm; having been
jailed because we were Germans, we were not freed because we were
Jews.
It
is the same story all over the world, repeated again and again. In
Europe the Nazis confiscated our property; but in Brazil we have to
pay 30% of our wealth, like the most loyal member of the Bund
der Auslandsdeutschen. In
Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we
were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are “enemy
aliens.” Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find
out who we actually are.
Unfortunately,
things don’t look any better when we meet with Jews. French Jewry
was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine
were what they called Polaks—what
German Jewry called Ostjuden.
But those Jews who really came from eastern Europe could not agree
with their French brethren and called us Jaeckes.
The sons of these Jaecke-haters—the
second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared
the opinion of the French Jewish upper class. Thus, in the very same
family, you could be called a Jaecke by
the father and a Polak by
the son.
Since
the outbreak of the war and the catastrophe that has befallen
European Jewry, the mere fact of being a refugee has prevented our
mingling with native Jewish society, some exceptions only proving the
rule. These unwritten social laws, though never publicly admitted,
have the great force of public opinion. And such a silent opinion and
practice is more important for our daily lives than all official
proclamations of hospitality and good will.
Man
is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are
cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a
society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own
integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely
confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and
legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change
of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The
confusion in which we live is partly our own work.
Some
day somebody will write the true story of this Jewish emigration from
Germany; and he will have to start with a description of that Mr.
Cohn from Berlin who had always been a 150% German, a German
super-patriot. In 1933 that Mr. Cohn found refuge in Prague and very
quickly became a convinced Czech patriot—as true and loyal a Czech
patriot as he had been a German one. Time went on and about 1937 the
Czech Government, already under some Nazi pressure, began to expel
its Jewish refugees, disregarding the fact that they felt so strongly
as prospective Czech citizens. Our Mr. Cohn then went to Vienna; to
adjust oneself there a definite Austrian patriotism was required. The
German invasion forced Mr. Cohn out of that country. He arrived in
Paris at a bad moment and he never did receive a regular
residence-permit. Having already acquired a great skill in wishful
thinking, he refused to take mere administrative measures seriously,
convinced that he would spend his future life in France. Therefore,
he prepared his adjustment to he French nation by identifying himself
with “our” ancestor Vercingetorix. I think I had better not
dilate on the further adventures of Mr. Cohn. As long as Mr. Cohn
cant’t make up his mind to be what he actually is, a Jew, nobody
can foretell all the mad changes he will have to go through.
A
man who wants to lose his self discovers, indeed, the possibilities
of human existence, which are infinite, as infinite as is creation.
But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as
hopeless—as a new creation fo the world. Whatever we do, whatever
we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire to be
changed, not to be Jews. All our activities are directed to attain
this aim: we don’t want to be refugees, since we don’t want to be
Jews; we pretend to be English-speaking people, since German-speaking
immigrants of recent years are marked as Jews; we don’t call
ourselves stateless, since the majority of stateless people in the
world are Jews; we are willing to become loyal Hottentots, only to
hide the fact that we are Jews. We don’t succeed and we cant’t
succeed; under the cover of our “optimism” you can easily detect
the hopeless sadness of assimilationists.
With
us from Germany the word assimilation received a “deep”
philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were
about it. Assimilation did not mean the necessary adjustment to the
country where we happened to be born and to the people whose language
we happened to speak. We adjust in principle to everything and
everybody. This attitude became quite clear to me once by the words
of one of my compatriots who, apparently, knew how to express his
feelings. Having just arrived in France, he founded one of these
societies of adjustment in which German Jews asserted to each other
that they were already Frenchmen. In his first speech he said: “We
have been good Germans in Germany and therefore we shall be good
Frenchmen in France.” The public applauded enthusiastically and
nobody laughed; we were happy to have learnt how to prove our
loyalty.
If
patriotism were a matter of routine or practice, we should be the
most patriotic people in the world. Let us go back to our Mr. Cohn;
he certainly has beaten all records. He is that ideal immigrant who
always, and in every country into which a terrible fate has driven
him, promptly sees and loves the native mountains. But since
patriotism is not yet believed to be a matter of practice, it is hard
to convince people of the sincerity of our repeated transformations.
This struggle makes our own society so intolerant; we demand full
affirmation without our own group because we are not in the position
to obtain it from the natives. The natives, confronted with such
strange beings as we are, become suspicious; from their point of
view, as a rule, only a loyalty to our old countries is
understandable. That makes life very bitter for us. We might overcome
this suspicion if we could explain that, being Jews, our patriotism
in our original countries had rather a peculiar aspect. Though it was
indeed sincere and deep-rooted. We wrote big volumes to prove it;
paid an entire bureaucracy to explore its antiquity and to explain it
statistically. We had scholars write philosophical dissertations on
the predestined harmony between Jews and Frenchmen, Jews and Germans,
Jews and Hungarians, Jews and … Our so frequently suspected loyalty
of today has a long history. It is the history of a hundred and fifty
years of assimilated Jewry who performed an unprecedented feat:
though proving all the time their non-Jewishness, they succeeded in
remaining Jews all the same.
The
desperate confusion of these Ulysses-wanderers who, unlike their
great prototype, don’t know who they are is easily explained by
their perfect mania for refusing to keep their identity. This mania
is much older than the last ten years which revealed the profound
absurdity of our existence. We are like people with a fixed idea who
can’t help trying continually to disguise an imaginary stigma. Thus
we are enthusiastically fond of every new possibility which, being
new, seems able to work miracles. We are fascinated by every new
nationality in the same way as a woman of tidy size is delighted with
every new dress which promises to give her the desired waistline. But
she likes the new dress only as long as she believes in its
miraculous qualities, and she discovers that it does not change her
stature—or, for that matter, her status.
One
may be surprised that the apparent uselessness of all our odd
disguises has not yet been able to discourage us. If it is true that
men seldom learn from history, it is also true that they may learn
from personal experiences which, as in our case, are repeated time
and again. But before you cast the first stone at us, remember that
being a Jew does not give any legal status in the world. If we should
start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean
that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected
by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human
beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we
actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to
exist for quite a while, since society has discovered discrimination
as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any
bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even
income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of
social distinction. It is true that most of us depend entirely upon
social standards, we lose confidence in ourselves if society does not
approve us; we are—and always were—ready to pay any price in
order to be accepted by society. But it is equally true that the very
few among us who have tried to get along without all these tricks and
jokes of adjustment and assimilation have paid a much higher price
than they could afford: they jeopardized the few chances even our
laws are given in a topsy-turvy world.
The
attitude of these few whom, following Bernard Lazare, one may call
“conscious pariahs,” can as little be explained by recent events
alone as the attitude of our Mr. Cohn who tried by every means to
become an upstart. Both are sons of the nineteenth century which, not
knowing legal or political outlaws, knew only too well social pariahs
and their counterpart, social parvenus. Modern Jewish history, having
started with court Jews and continuing with Jewish millionaires and
philanthropists, is apt to forget about this other trend of Jewish
tradition—the tradition of Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Sholom
Aleichemn, of Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka or even Charlie Chaplin. It
is the tradition of a minority of Jews who have not wanted to become
upstarts, who preferred the status of “conscious paria.” All
vaunted Jewish qualities—the “Jewish heart,” humanity, humor,
disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities. All Jewish
shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority
complexes and money-grubbing—are characteristic of upstarts. There
have always been Jews who did not think it worth while to change
their humane attitude and their natural insight into reality for the
narrowness of castle spirit or the essential unreality of financial
transactions.
History
has forced the status of outlaws upon both, upon pariahs and parvenus
alike. The latter have not yet accepted the great wisdom of
Balzac’s “On ne
parvient pas deux fois”;
thus they don’t understand the wild dreams of the former and feel
humiliated in sharing their fate. Those few refugees who insist upon
telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in
exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is
no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the
privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish
people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most
European nations. Refugees driven form country to country represent
the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity. For the
first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of
all other nations. The comity of European peoples went to pieces
when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and
persecuted.
By
Hannah Arendt
