58 The New York ReviewLETTERS
THE ORIGINS OF ‘BANALITY’To the Editors:Seyla Benhabib’s assertion that Hannah Ar-
endt’s concept of “the banality of evil” was
handed down to her by her husband, Hein-
rich Blücher, merits correction [“Thinking
Without Banisters,” NYR, February 24,
2022]. The source for this misconception is
a letter from Arendt’s teacher and friend
the philosopher Karl Jaspers on December
13, 1963. In this letter, Jaspers informs Ar-
endt that he has been told that the phrase,
which has brought down so much critique,
not to say hatred, on her, was “invented”
by Blücher.
Arendt replies in a letter that was not in-
cluded in the published exchange between
Arendt and Jaspers, because it was only
found later.^1 In this reply, dated December
29, 1963, Arendt states that “the banality of
evil” is her own concept, and not something
someone else has formulated for her.
However, the juxtaposition of “evil” and
“banality” goes back to a much earlier ex-
change between Arendt and Jaspers, which
both of them seem to have forgotten. In
1946, when they resumed their exchanges
after the war, Jaspers underlines in a letter
to Arendt that the Nazis are to be seen as
banal criminals: “Mir scheint, man muss,
weil es wirklich so war, die Dinge in ihrer
ganzen Banalität nehmen, ihrer ganz nüch-
ternen Nichtigkeit—Bakterien können
völkervernichtende Seuchen machen und
bleiben doch nur Bakterien.” In my transla-
tion: “It seems to me, because this is how it
really was [during the war], that we should
see the total banality of these things [the
Nazi crimes], their sober nothingness—bac-
teria may cause pandemics exterminating
peoples and yet remain just bacteria.”
So, when Arendt finds herself in the
Jerusalem courtroom fifteen years later,
she invents the concept of banality of evil
when she observes Eichmann during the
trial—without remembering the previous
exchange with Jaspers. And just as Arendt
has forgotten their discussion of evil and
the Nazis, so has Jaspers.Kenneth Hermele
Gothenburg, SwedenSeyla Benhabib replies:I am grateful to Kenneth Hermele for call-
ing my attention to the unpublished letter
from Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers from
December 29, 1963. This letter, which is not
included in the Arendt–Jaspers correspon-
dence, was also missing from the Marbach
Literature Archives, and the matter was
brought to Elisabeth Young- Bruehl’s at-
tention by Ursula Ludz, an Arendt scholar
and editor.
Hermele argues that Jaspers’s claim in
his letter of December 13, 1963, that the
phrase “the banality of evil” was suggested
by Heinrich Blücher—a mutual friend, L.
Alcopley, had told him so—needs to be
corrected. Arendt’s December 29 letter to
Jaspers, clearly written in response to the
one by him dated December 13, is full of
reactions to Jaspers’s distress about Golo
Mann’s critical review of Eichmann in Jeru-
salem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, as
well as the Kennedy assassination and the
controversy around Rolf Hochhuth’s play
The Deputy. Arendt writes, “The subtitle
does not originate with Blücher. Blücher
had remarked years ago, ‘Evil is a super-
ficial phenomenon’—and that occurred to
me again in Jerusalem and I arrived at the
title” (my translation).
Arendt was responsible for the wording
of her subtitle, but the discussion regard-
ing the phenomenon of evil and its banalitystarted when Jaspers sent her two copies of
his book Die Schuldfrage (The Question of
German Guilt). In response to her reaction
to his book, Jaspers objects to her claim
that what the Nazis did could not be com-
prehended as a “crime” and cautions her
that when we can no longer apply ordinary
moral and legal categories to certain deeds,
they risk taking on a satanic greatness, as
in discussions about the “demonic” element
in Hitler.
And as Hermele rightly points out, Jas-
pers continues, “It seems to me that we have
to see these things in their total banality [in
ihrer ganzen Banalität], in their prosaic
triviality.”^2 When, seventeen years later,
Jaspers attributes the phrase to Blücher,
he clearly appears to have forgotten his let-
ter, and concludes, “I think it’s a wonder-
ful inspiration and right on the mark as the
book’s subtitle. The point is that this evil,
not evil per se, is banal.”^3
The conclusion to be drawn from these
exchanges is that the phrase “the banalityof evil” was, at different times, used by
Jaspers, Arendt, and Blücher himself to
characterize the mentality and personality
of the Nazis. They had reached a shared un-
derstanding of this phenomenon. Although
I was aware of Jaspers’s letter of October
19–23, 1946, I chose not to dwell upon it in
my essay, because it would have been too
difficult to discuss it with the subtlety this
matter required in a review of books de-
voted to different topics.
Whatever its origins, this phrase does not
resolve the puzzle of how we can dissociate
the doer from the deed, motivation from the
act on the basis of which it was committed.
The normal human inclination is to think
that crimes that defy human understanding
could only be committed by monsters or de-
mons. We have painfully learned that this
is not the case—that ordinary, banal indi-
viduals can commit monstrous deeds under
certain circumstances. For this reason, the
phrase disturbed many when it was first used
and will continue to do so, insofar as it unset-
tles some deeply held human intuitions.THE INIMITABLE HARDWICKTo the Editors:I am writing to respond to Merve Emre’s
review of my biography of Elizabeth Hard-
wick [“The Act of Persuasion,” NYR, April
21]. I am a journalist- turned- biographer;
A Splendid Intelligence is my fourth book
in that genre. Writing a biography, as op-
posed to a work of literary criticism, always
involves a certain degree of humility: one is
in service to the facts and the chronology—
especially so when, as in this case, there is
no previous Life.
My concern was not to address the coterie
enthralled by Hardwick’s style, but rather
to introduce her and her work to a much
broader readership. She did not only write
about literature, after all, even though lit-
erary critics generally overlook her obser-
vations about other topics. (Oddly, Emredoesn’t perceive Hardwick’s keen eye- level
reporting, hardly a matter only of high-
flown “ideas and symbols.”) I do mention
aspects of her inimitable style—there were
never any imitators or followers—but I am
more concerned with the substance of what
she wrote, because that is what will gain her
the wider readership she deserves.
Throughout the book I incorporated
brief excerpts from her writing—personal
letters as well as published material—to
acquaint the reader with her innermost
thoughts at difficult times, as well as with
the range of her interests and opinions. It
is a truism that authors draw on their life in
their work; I would have been remiss not to
indicate many of the parallels.
It amused me to quote examples of her
scorn for biography, even though she wrote
a marvelous, idiosyncratic life of Herman
Melville. Biographies necessarily reveal the
ways even the most brilliant and accom-
plished subjects embody the contradictions
and confusions of the rest of humanity. This
can be disconcerting to worshipers at the
shrine.
It should be clear from the context that
the “glamour, fantasy, and illicit pleasure”
I mention in describing downtown Lexing-
ton, Kentucky, of the 1930s (not “fin- de-
siècle,” as Emre has it) was the view held by
residents at the time, including a youthful
Hardwick.
Finally, Hardwick was married to Rob-
ert Lowell for one third of her long life.
It would be impossible to write a compre-
hensive biography that did not deal with
the fraught circumstances of that marriage.
Relegating it to footnotes, as Emre sug-
gests (perhaps not quite seriously), would
represent a grievous injustice to her, and to
biography.Cathy Curtis
Los Angeles, CaliforniaTO THE READERTo the Editors:In lieu of a rebuttal, I would like to submit
the following poem in response to Ange
Mlinko’s review of my Baudelaire transla-
tions [“His Nemesis Was Stupidity,” NYR,
April 7]:THE CONSOLATION OF BITTERNESSWhen I know well the cards I’ve got will lose,
and somebody I’ve hated, taking hold
of all the chips, will leave me grief and booze,
when I feel mean and desperate and old,when I can see quite clearly nothing’s flawless
but, up close, there are pocks and flecks and
tatters,
and there’s no hope, no happiness, no solace
for fools who work at anything that matters,when I’m convinced that there are no safe
havens,
no loves, no pals, and nowhere left to turn,
and now’s high time to talk of rats and ravens
and whether I’d prefer a grave or urn,then the asthmatic burr in me that sings
from cussèd spite blesses the mess of things.Aaron Poochigian
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Nothing in this publication may be reproduced with-
out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of
the next issue will be May 26, 2022.(^1) See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “An Unpub-
lished Letter from Hannah Arendt to Karl
Jaspers,” Hannah Arendt Newsletter, Vol. 1,
No. 1 (April 1999).
(^2) Jaspers to Arendt, October 19–23, 1946;
Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspon-
dence, 1926–1969 (Harcourt Brace Jova-
novich, 1992), p. 62.
(^3) Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspon-
dence, 1926–1969, p. 542.
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