An Uncertain Movement: Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations

An Uncertain Movement:Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations Jana Schmidt (bio) ". . . but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical political opinion" (Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees") What is a Political Refugee? "[I]nnocence . . . was their greatest misfortune" (Origins 295), writes Hannah Arendt about a new class of refugees, "the rightless," which emerged in the early twentieth century, first from the repercussions of the 1920s minority treaties, which first sought to guarantee the rights of minorities within existing states, and, later, from the shockwaves of racist persecution and global warfare. "Innocence, in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark of [the refugees'] rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political status" (295). As her introduction of the notions of innocence and responsibility into the discourse of rights indicates, being rightless means no abstract deprivation to Arendt but foremost of all a loss of place in a political and phenomenological sense, that is, as the guaranteed access to a space in which to appear to others. Rendering people innocent in this sense—"innocencing" them—is a violent form of disentanglement that yields no shared humanity because it destroys the possibility of taking a position. Though herself a political refugee at the time of her initial thinking on mass displacement—in 1940 when, after having escaped an internment camp at Gurs, she was hiding in the south of France [End Page 297] and first writing on the minority treaties (Young-Bruehl 157)—the political theorist also lived under the threat of this innocence. The distinctly negative connotation of innocence in The Origins of Totalitarianism stems from the cutting observation, gathered first-hand, that "the perfect innocence of the victim" (Origins 5) preceded, or was part and parcel of, the process of victimization itself. Thus, although Origins of Totalitarianism distinguishes between the relatively privileged political refugees, who have committed crimes of speech or action against the state, and the vast new mass of the rightless, the status of so-called political refugees like Arendt herself is complicated by the logic of totalitarianism, which produces "inhuman innocence" (8) even in those it persecutes as 'guilty.' Likewise, it collapses entire groups of people into "objective enemies" (424), that is, into "criminals without a crime" (xxxiii) who are guilty simply for hindering the movement of nature or history. In this respect, totalitarian terror itself is 'innocent' because it merely "executes on the spot" (Diprose and Ziarek 149) the verdict on those who, through no fault other than their life, must make way. Perhaps this is why the category of innocence is never innocent for Arendt. Her framing of innocence as a "misfortune" for the rightless is informed by a deep suspicion of the viability of innocence as either a humanitarian strategy—for instance in appeals that seek to establish the dignity of refugees on the basis of their guiltlessness—or a political identity. To say that the refugees' innocence is also their worst fortune is ironic because it turns a virtuous condition of wholeness—the state of being unharmed—into an accident. Arendt's polemical tone vis-à-vis those among the "Hitler-persecuted people" ("We Refugees" 264) who tried to present themselves as innocent, which is most apparent in her essay "We Refugees," reveals why being a refugee is a political fact no matter what: The category of refugeedom cannot be affirmed innocently. This means that political refugees can "keep their identity" ("We Refugees" 274) only if this identity unsettles all other political identities and concepts.1 The refugee herself can only have an ironic relationship to the category of political refugeedom.2 That the political activist is someone who, in a sense, has already left, existing at a distance to the nation even prior to his or her forced emigration, is directly stated by Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Arendt during the French years, in a text from 1939: "[W]e should not forget that he who [End Page 298] fights for the exploited class is an emigrant in his own country" (233). Not coincidentally, Benjamin is here writing about the paradigmatic refugee writer of the twentieth century, the playwright Bertolt Brecht. The...