Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906…75) is forever associated with her perplexity over the banality of evil in which seemingly ordinary people can reduce the systematic destruction of millions to a routine no more troubling to them than the slaughter of fish to a fishmonger. The "unlearning" of Knott's title is the break with culture and tradition imposed on Arendt by exile, the philosopher's need to express herself in a new language and to find a new perspective on history. Arendt struggled with ideas of forgiveness and explored new ways of putting distance between herself and horror, a distance the author associates with laughter. Knott, the founder and editor of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, addresses the same audience as Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film Hannah Arendt. Both miss the other side of Arendt—the search for a central tradition with which to grasp the human condition that attracted her to Karl Jaspers and lay behind her 1996 thesis "Love and St. Augustine," which is absent from the bibliography.