The Jewish Writings

Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative paints a broad picture of the personal traits and professional achievements in the work of an extremely complex iconographic figure in twentieth-century intellectual life. Writing about Hannah Arendt is an exercise in the biographic intersecting with the academic. It is an effort to bring together contexts of work with contents of thought. This volume was written in response to continuing interest in her work and also to the bitter and sometimes emotional attacks of her toughest critics. Horowitz emphasizes her unique contributions to political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt has been described in many ways. She has been called a feminist, a dedicated worker for and writer about Jewish causes, a German advocate of its highest aspirations and assumed superiority to just about any other linguistic and national tradition, and a person whose very name is identified with anti-Nazism. Irving Louis Horowitz conveys the passion Hannah Arendt’s scholarship has elicited as well as the diversity of her writings.

Hannah Arendt’s career is a lesson in the life of the human mind. Her reflections on our political universe are both interesting and compelling. Those who identify themselves firmly within a single tradition or culture may escape the problem of relativism, but they also suffer the problem of absolutism. This long-standing tension between traditions, cultures, and systems is what Horowitz has taken from Arendt’s writings. Her sense of nuance has made her a compelling figure in twentieth-century ideas and a controversial voice well into the twenty-first century.

It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a Family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Manns characteristic detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, although according to Manns wife this achievement would not have occurred without the publication of The Magic Mountain.

Manns objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between businessman and artists worlds, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhals Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Manns objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere.

The exploration of decadence in the novel can be attributed to the profound influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on Thomas Mann during his youth. The three generations of the family depicted in the book experience a continuous economical, physical, and spiritual decline, with true happiness becoming increasingly unavailable to all the members of the family. The characters who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the family firm meet unfortunate ends, just as those who do not.

The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Manns hometown of Lübeck that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the dirty laundry of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the authors own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the money aristocracy, although merchandizing is a central topic.