Political Understanding and Experience of Totalitarism in Hannah Arendt´s Political Thought

Abstract

This article has the purpose of analyzing Hannah Arendt’s perspective on the problem of the originality and incomprehensibility of horror in totalitarian regimes, by using Primo Levi´s testimonies in If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. Arendt regards that concentration and extermination camps as the central institutions of the totalitarian regimes, whereby the humanity of the victims is destroyed through practices of terror destroying not only their bodies, but also their spirits. Therefore, the testimonies of survivors turn into key pieces to understand the essence and the ideals of these political systems. This is why memory enters the political scene to elucidate the truth of these sort political happenings, and states a series of problems when its research status is intended to be defined.