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change anything, except in a marginal way in these refugees' lonely
and quite miserable lives in southern France . They were grateful to
be remembered by what they called "Spanish ." "Today Spanish came
to see us." This was very much in Hannah Arendt's vein, and what
appealed to her especially about "Spanish" was the fantastically low
operating costs. Less than twenty-five percent, if I'm not mistaken,
went towards administration . And this pleased her, not only as a
former social worker- Youth Aliyah- but in her political nature.
One of her great fears and detestations was bureaucracy, which she
called the "rule of nobody," as contrasted with the rule of the few rep–
resented by oligarchy or the rule of one represented by autocracy. She
considered bureaucracy a more dangerous phenomenon than these
others, because creeping and impossible to fix responsibility on, and
also perhaps because it is less well diagnosed , being omnipresent.
In any case, she was somewhat inactive politically, above all
when her physical participation is compared to the hyperactive state
of her mind. For her, the reading of a newspaper was a political ex–
perience of a galvanic kind, calling forth violent reactions of eye,
hand, entire body, nods of confirmation, sudden chuckles , gasps. To
her, a newspaper was a political document, to be interpreted, read
between the lines, thrown aside as devoid of interest once the mar–
row had been swiftly extracted. She never let old newspapers pile up
as I do .
I do not know how active politically she had been in Europe
before the Nazi occupation of France drove her here . Certainly she
and her mother while still in Germany had engaged in sufficient anti–
Nazi activity to have the daughter held in jail for a time. In France,
as foreigners, no doubt they did less or were less overt. What is inter–
esting about her career of political involvement in this country is that
she was fully engaged shortly after her arrival , joining the
Aujbau
group in New York and not only writing in that German-language
Jewish newspaper on political issues, hotly debated ones , like the
proposal for a Jewish army , but going regularly to meetings , where
she supported her views- something she was never to do again , even
in an academic forum , and perhaps had never done before.
Possibly the war and Hitler were sufficient reason for this frenzy
of commitment in a new country . But Hitler had been present all
along, very much so since 1932, and war had seemed clearly fore–
ordained at least from the Saar time, from the Sudeten time, the An–
schluss, without enlisting the passions of the young Hannah Arendt
in what amounted (with the
Au.fbau
group) to an activist campaign of
