HA Journal text pages 12-10_Layout 1 12/11/12 1:44 PM Page 78
explains history (the historian proper) and the one who narrates it (the chronicler). The chronicler is the “witness” who does not explain, but simply narrates what happened and what did not happen. The historian proper, the one who interprets and explains history, relies on the chronicler as the one who establishes factual truth. This is why Benjamin argues that the chronicler stands at the summit of a materialist historiography. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Benjamin calls Herodotus the “first storyteller of the Greeks” because Herodotus “offers no explanations. His report is the driest.”39 Certainly, the chronicler could also be the judge and vice versa, but Benjamin cautions not to conflate the difference between the two. The notion of the historian as the chronicler who testifies to the events of history—its failures as well as its possibilities, its victors and its vanquished— is also at work in Arendt’s understanding of the witness who bears testimony to factual truth. As we saw above, Arendt follows Benjamin in turning to Herodotus as a chronicler who is willing to testify to what is. Moreover, this work of the historian as chronicler characterizes Arendt herself, a chronicler who speaks of the victor and the vanquished—those who carried out the Shoah, those who were complicitous, and those who were truly innocent. Arendt as chronicler creates the firestorm around the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. “Truth and Politics” is her explicit response to those who dammed her for speaking of the role of the Jewish leadership. In fact, we cannot understand Eichmann in Jerusalem unless we grasp Arendt’s debt to Benjamin, especially his reading of Herodotus; she is the chronicler who must collect and assemble all the stories that make up the event. To do otherwise, as she had stated much earlier to Voegelin regarding Origins, is not to write history but instead to offer an apologetics. Certainly Benjamin’s figures of the flaneur and the pearl diver, and Arendt’s profound interest in both, would have to be brought into this discussion of the “construction of history” and the establishing of factual truth. Suffice it to say here that for Arendt, following Benjamin, factual truth is neither a forensic nor a positivist notion. There is nothing simple or self-evident about it. Instead, the establishment of factual truth occurs at the site of the present, the site of the crystallizing historical event. This requires the laborious work of the historian, specifically the chronicler, who bears witness to the truth of what happened, and in doing so rescues the past and the present from the destruction of historical progress and establishes an enduring, immortal world. Let me conclude by returning to the problem of action and the question that is often posed to Arendt’s political thought: Just what is it that actors do in the public space? What do they talk about and what are their concerns?
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Truthtelling