You might think that Germans would know something about Hannah Arendt. With the possible exception of Albert Einstein, no Jewish intellectual who was forced to flee Nazi Germany is more honoured. Her portrait graces postage stamps, schools, institutes, journals, and even a train line has been named after her. A major exhibition “Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century” took place at the German Historical Museum in 2020. And it’s hard to find a politician whose speechwriter has never slipped in an Arendt quotation.
You might think so, but you’d be wrong. Masha Gessen was scheduled to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize in Bremen, north-west Germany on 16 December. Gessen is a distinguished and courageous writer whose work has largely focused on Russia and Ukraine but is prepared to call out repression where they see it. After they did so about Germany and Israel in a New Yorker article published on 9 December, the Green Party’s Böll Foundation, which organises the prize, pulled its support. The reason? Gessen’s statements about the Near East conflict – particularly the claim that conditions in Gaza are comparable to those in Nazi-constructed ghettos in eastern Europe – disqualify them in Germany in a way that would discredit everyone who would participate in the prize ceremony, above all the German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt. After quite a lot of turmoil Gessen did receive the prize, albeit in a smaller format, but the stain on Germany’s public culture will remain.
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