Hannah Arendt - They fell into the trap of their own ideas

The personal problem wasn't something that our enemies did but what our friends did. What happened back then in that wave of self-synchronization which was pretty voluntary... at least not yet under the pressure of the terror. Above all however, it lied in the sudden abandonment.
It was as if an empty space formed around you ... I lived in an intellectual milieu. But I also knew other people. And I could find that among intellectuals that was the rule, so to speak ... but not among the others ... .and that issue I could never forget. And I left Germany with one insight, as I thought then, always exaggerating a bit of course, Never again ! ... I'll never again touch any intellectual matter. I don't want anything to do with this society. Of course I wasn't of the opinion that German Jews, or German-Jewish intellectuals, if they had been in a different situation than they were in, would have behaved significantly differently. I didn't think so... I thought it had something to do with this occupation. I'm speaking in the past tense. I know more about it now than I did then.
Gunther Gauss: I wanted to ask you, do you still believe that? Arendt: Well you know ... No longer with this intensity. But... that it's in the nature of all this stuff, that you can, so to speak, 'come up' with something ... That someone tuned in because he had to take care of his wife and child ... nobody ever held that against him. What was really awful about it was that they really believed in it ... for a short while, some for a very short while, So they came up up with ideas about Hitler...and some incredibly interesting ideas ... Quite fantastically interesting and complicated ideas ...
ideas floating high above the ordinary level ... I found that grotesque ... That is, they fell into the trap of their own ideas, I would say today.
From "Günter Gaus im Gespräch mit Hannah Arendt (1964)":
• Günter Gaus im Gespräc...
(my translations)
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