We Refugees

5 ideas

1. Mr. Cohn, the serial patriot

   Arendt describes Mr. Cohn from Berlin, who was a 150 percent German patriot. After fleeing to Prague he became a devoted Czech patriot, then an equally ardent Austrian in Vienna, and finally, in Paris, a French patriot claiming Vercingetorix as his ancestor. Each new identity was adopted wholesale to secure acceptance, and each was undone by the next expulsion. His case shows that an assimilationist self swaps loyalties to match the host rather than holding a self of its own.

2. Conscious pariah versus assimilating parvenu

   The parvenu tries to escape outsider status by imitating and ingratiating himself with the majority, which requires constant self-denial and never wins full acceptance. The conscious pariah accepts outsider status openly and keeps the clear sight that exclusion gives. Arendt argues that refugees who keep their identity this way become the vanguard of their peoples, the first to see what the political order has become.

3. Forced optimism conceals despair until collapse

   Refugees told to forget their past and cheerfully become newcomers perform an optimism that suppresses mourning for lost home, work, language and murdered relatives. Because the despair cannot be spoken, it surfaces privately and abruptly. Arendt argues that the strikingly frequent suicides among these refugees were the quiet, unannounced act of exactly these optimists.

4. Statelessness creates a new kind of human

   Contemporary history produced people who are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends. Once stripped of citizenship, a person loses legal standing and the ordinary social recognition that goes with it, whatever their personal character. Being merely human, without a state, turns out to offer no protection at all.

5. Excluding the weakest collapses the whole community

   Arendt argues that the comity of European peoples fell apart when it allowed its weakest member, the Jews, to be excluded and persecuted. Tolerating the outlawing of one group dissolves the shared principle that protected everyone. The treatment of the most vulnerable member is therefore the test of whether a political community exists at all.

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