The Origins of Totalitarianism

Well, this was eons in the reading for me. I somehow managed to get through two degrees in Modern German history and the Holocaust without ever reading this, and now 10+ years after finishing my masters, I finally did it. And honestly I feel like I would never have gotten through the whole thing without the deep foundation of knowledge my degrees gave me.

This book is DENSE. I feel like this is an understatement. Arendt's writing is long, ponderous, and she is fond of tangents and footnotes. I rewound my audiobook many times just to truly grasp what some of these sentences were getting at. Arendt's mind is also very philosophical. There is a lot of intellectual analysis in this book, trying to get at why humanity works the way it does. She makes strong attempts at divining out the reasoning behind the processes that led to the actions of the Nazis (and the Soviets in Russia, though this book was clearly initially written about the Nazis specifically and then later expanded to include Stalin's Russia). It's clear why her writing was long considered required reading for people in my field.

However, now that I've read it, I can also see why I never encountered it in my own studies, half a century after she wrote it. It's outdated. Arendt's grasp on the non-European parts of the world is sketchy and sometimes relies on stereotype and misconception. And there are more than a few places where Arendt's assertions imply at least a modicum of blame on the part of the victims of the atrocities. Without a doubt she has a solid and compelling case when looking at the events of WWII through a macro lens but when it comes to the micro, her views don't really stand the test of time the way her broader arguments do. So it doesn't surprise me whatsoever that more modern studies of the era have supplanted this book in classrooms and curricula.

I will say that I'm glad I read it. It's a valuable book to have read. But it's good to have perspective about what time does to people's views and how it can age a text, because this is a clear example of effective and important writing that is still eroding a bit as time wears against it. The root of it is good. The chaff's falling away.