Introduction

In an early (1948) essay, Hannah Arendt writes of the ‘factual territory’ onto which the crimes of the Nazi regime have driven Germans and Jews (EU: 212–16). Auschwitz opened up an abyss, on the one side of which stood the Germans in their complicity, which the Nazis ‘consciously planned and realised’. On the other side stood the Jewish people in the ‘blind hatred, created in the gas chambers’. In order to resist being drawn into this abyss of eternal hatred and perpetual guilt, she insists, both peoples must refuse to accept the facts of the world created by Nazi crimes as ‘necessary and indestructible’. As Mary Dietz (2000:94) discusses, the theme of this factual territory is ‘conspicuously absent’ and therefore ‘saturatingly present’ in Arendt’s affirmation of politics as the highest activity of human beings in The Human Condition. In contrast to the holes of oblivion into which the victims of the Nazis were made to disappear, Arendt presents the good polity as a space of appearance. With her idealised image of the ancient Athenian polis, Arendt presents a ‘healing illusion and a disruptive countermemory’, according to which we might ‘reach over the historical abyss created by Auschwitz, and break the mastery of the Holocaust’ (Dietz 2000:100). It is in this spirit of interpretation that I draw on Arendt’s work in this book to develop a political conception of reconciliation.