Drug Addict (Simile)
“Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without, and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict.” (80)
Vice, according to Arendt, is the flipside of crime. When what was a crime becomes a vice, it is no longer subject to the choice of men but is imposed on them. The purpose of this simile is to indicate that when something is a vice, it is no longer considered subject to the will of the individual. This is worse than making something a crime. Though it is certainly not desirable for Jewishness or homosexuality to be considered a crime, it is better than them being seen as inherent, unchangeable and uncontrollable properties of an individual, thus robbing him of his individual freedom. This flies in the face of the way people today might talk about sexuality as something with which a person is “born." Arendt refuses to reduce sexuality to a determined biological identity, a move she thinks is dangerous because it creates groups that can then be persecuted without consequence, since everyone’s fate is predetermined, biologically or otherwise.
Dragonslayer (Metaphor)
Dragonslayer is frequently used as an epithet for early colonial leaders and explorers. These men, unlike those who came after them and made up such groups as the Boers, saw themselves as choosing to serve the higher cause of humanity through their individual actions. Arendt describes their heroism as a “sense of sacrifice” for “backwards populations” and a “sense of duty” to the glory of Britain (211). Though often the reality was not so heroic or pretty, these men at least thought they were doing something heroic, whereas imperialism created only cynicism in its subjects. The use of the fantastical term “dragonslayer” not only prefigures the cynicism with which one will be forced to look back upon these men, but also their fantastic quality: we are unable to return to the age of dragonslayers after the rise of imperialism, for we live in a new world.
Explosion (Simile)
“The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass.” (267)
Arendt likens the first World War to an explosion because it blasted open the "European comity of nations" beyond repair (267). Rhetorically, the turn of phrase is an attempt to impress upon the reader the novelty and shock of the situation. In the wake of fascism and two world wars, how is a reader supposed to understand the feelings of a world that had experienced neither? As Arendt notes, the key difference between the world war and an explosion is that the former never seemed to stop. In a sense, her reader is living in the continued explosion set off on August 4th, 1914. Arendt wants to remind the reader that the world was not always that way.
Pavlov's Dog (Metaphor)
"The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also to serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov's dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal." (438)
The metaphor of Pavlov's dog is used to describe the destruction of spontaneity and freedom caused by the concentration camps. A being eats because it wants to and spontaneously decides to; Pavlov's dog, like a machine, eats when it is told. The concentration camp, by controlling every aspect of human existence, turns humans into machines. The executioner can make prisoners walk into a gas chamber to their death at the veritable press of a button.
Hell (Metaphor)
"Just as the popularized features of Marx's classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messianic Age, so the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell. The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell." (446-447)
When Arendt calls the concentration camps Hell, she is not merely referring to the extremity of suffering the same way one might say, while lost in the desert, that it is Hell on earth. By removing the concept of Last Judgment, which is the only thing that gives Hell any comprehensibility, Arendt suggests something worse than Hell. For Arendt Hell becomes not only a signifier of the horrors and torment of the camps, but in its twisted and perverted form suggests the "discomfiture to common sense" that the torment of completely innocent people causes.
For an artistic example of the medieval picture of Hell, see Giotto's The Last Judgment ca. 1267-1337.
