Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Writer and political philosopher. Forced to leave Germany in 1933, she eventually made her way to the United States, where she settled in 1941. The two works which established her reputation as one of the leading thinkers of her day were The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958). Following Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel, she also wrote a groundbreaking study of this archetypal ‘desk killer’, investigating his psychology and the inter-relationship between bureaucracy and genocide in his ‘career’ – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her work was fearless, ‘thinking without a banister’ as she put it; she would never compromise on her fundamental beliefs, however difficult this was for others, or for herself - ‘Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus’ was her intellectual credo: Let truth be told – though the world may perish.
Susan Griffin (1943–)
Writer and activist. She grew up in California, becoming a passionate ecologist early in life, inspired by the landscape of the High Sierras and the Pacific coast. She has described her work as ‘drawing connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and tracing the causes of war to denial in both private and public life’. Regarded as a pioneer of ecofeminism – her book Women and Nature (1978) became a key work in this field. Among her prolific output of writing – plays, poetry and essays, perhaps one work stands out – A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1993) is an astonishing book which interweaves political and historical analysis with the intimacy of personal testimony. It focuses on violence, trauma and silence, and how denial runs though individual lives, families and societies. ‘We forget that we are history… I was born and brought up in a nation that participated in the bombing of Dresden, and in the civilisation that planned the extermination of a whole people’.
Raul Hilberg (1926–2007)
Historian. Forced to flee Vienna in 1939, Hilberg and his family settled in New York. After army service in World War II he studied political science at Columbia University, and became engrossed by the subject that became known as ‘the Holocaust’ (though he himself never liked this term) – particularly the role of the perpetrators. This was the subject of his doctoral thesis, which, after many subsequent years of research, was finally published in 1961 (in three volumes) as The Destruction of the European Jews. More than any other historian before, or since, Hilberg’s work sets out in painstaking detail the process of how the Holocaust happened – the precise role of each cog in the machine of extermination, the numerous agencies involved, the names of the perpetrators, including the armies of invisible bureaucrats and desk killers, who played such a central role in the genocide.
Derek Jarman (1942–1994)
Filmmaker, artist, writer and activist. After studying fine art at the Slade in London, he originally worked in stage design, moving to filmmaking in the 1970s. Sebastiane, The Angelic Conversation, The Garden and Blue are all works of staggering originality and power, combining visual beauty with radical representations of gay sexuality and anger at social injustice. He was also a fine writer, his vivid journals published as Modern Nature and Kicking the Pricks, a visual artist and, in the last years of his life, he created a remarkable garden in the shingle surrounding his cottage at Dungeness in Kent. But his outspoken activism and campaigning, as an HIV positive gay man living in times of extreme homophobia, was a constant throughout his life – an inspirational example to so many at the time, and to generations who have followed.
Jan Karski (1914–2000)
Polish resistance fighter and academic. Working as a talented young diplomat, with a masters in law and diplomatic science, Karski’s life changed forever with the outbreak of World War II. He became a key figure in the Polish underground resistance, demonstrating remarkable courage on many missions. In summer 1942 he’s smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and the Izbica transit camp, where he witnesses first-hand the genocide of the Jews; when he finally manages to get to Britain (and later America) he attempts to ‘shake the conscience of the world’ by relating the reality of what he’s seen, so that action can be taken. But, despite meetings with the most senior government officials, including President Roosevelt himself, no military action is forthcoming. After the war he became a Professor of history at Georgetown University. Later on, he contributed to Lanzmann’s film Shoah, which ends with his unforgettable testimony.
Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018)
Filmmaker, journalist and anti-colonial activist. He joined the French resistance as an eighteen year old, leading a Communist cell. After the war he studied philosophy in Germany, but also began working as a journalist. In the early 1950s he became a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, and a partner of Simone de Beauvoir, and edited Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes for many years. He was also a committed activist, particularly against France’s colonial war in Algeria; he became very close to the revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon in 1961, and helped to promote his work in France. In the 1970s he moved into documentary filmmaking – his greatest achievement unquestionably being the film Shoah – a nine-and-a-half-hour work of mesmerising power, consisting of interviews with survivors, perpetrators and witnesses of the Holocaust – which Lanzmann created between 1974 and 1985.
Primo Levi (1919–1987)
Writer and chemist. Grew up in Torino, where he studied chemistry at university. In 1943 Levi joined a small group of Italian partisans, working against German forces in the mountains, but they were captured, and Levi was sent to the camp at Fossoli and then on to Auschwitz in early 1944. He spent a year there, working as a slave labourer at Monowitz-Buna, an experience he wrote about immediately after the war in his searing masterpiece, If This Is a Man – which took many years to find a global readership. His chemist’s precision combined with the deepest understanding of humanity and morality created an incomparable body of work, including The Periodic Table (1975) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986). It has been said of Levi, rightly I think, that he is one of the very few writers ‘with whom it is possible to sustain a lasting friendship… [who] offers us explicit recipes for being human’.
Sven Lindqvist (1932–2019)
Writer and traveller, born in Stockholm in 1932. He travelled extensively through Asia, Africa and Latin America, and was the author of over thirty books, including Exterminate All the Brutes (Granta, 1998), A History of Bombing (Granta, 2001), Desert Divers (Granta, 2002), Bench Press (Granta, 2003), Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One’s Land (Granta, 2007), Saharan Journey (Granta, 2012) and The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu (Granta, 2012). I can still recall the visceral impact of reading Exerminate All the Brutes for the first time – a terrifying journey into the psychology of European colonisation of Africa. And most of Lindqvist’s powerful argument that ‘Europe’s destruction of the “inferior races” of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler’s destruction of six million Jews in Europe’. Indeed Hitler explicitly regarded such genocides as providing a kind of blueprint for his own ambitions: ‘What Hitler wished to create when he sought Lebensraum in the East was a continental equivalent of the British Empire. It was in the British and other Western European peoples that he found the models…’