Hannah Arendt : The Collapse Between The Public and The Private

 

As Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher waited in Montauban, France in the summer of 1940 to receive emergency exit papers they did not give into anxiety or despair. They found bicycles and explored the beautiful French countryside during the day and delighted in the detective novels of Georges Simenon at night. In the words of Helen Wolff: ‘Hannah, in her high-spirited way, made of this anguishing experience a kind of gift of time.’ It was ‘a hiatus within a life of work and duties’.

 
Which is not how one might be inclined to act when their life is in peril. What enabled Arendt to make a gift of time during such an anguishing experience?
 
It wasn’t hope.
 
Arendt was never given to hopeful thinking. As early as 1929, she saw what was happening in Germany, and lost friendships because of it. She despised what she called ‘opportunistic politics’, which ‘leaves behind it a chaos of contradictory interests and apparently hopeless conflicts’. And she turned away from any notion of messianism that might offer redemption in the future. After the war, in a letter to the American philosopher Glenn Gray, she wrote that the only book she recommends to all her students is Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Written by the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, the devastating memoir details life under Stalin’s regime and the struggle to stay alive. (In Russian, nadezhda means hope.) Arendt called it ‘one of the real documents’ of the 20th century.
 
Many discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine, and speak to a desire for catharsis. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph over evil and deliver a happy ending. For some, discussions of hope are attached to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Some people uphold hope as a form of liberal faith in progress, while for others still hope expresses faith in God and life after death.
 
Arendt breaks with these narratives. Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times. She rejects notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. She does not even believe in the soul, as she writes in one love letter to her husband. The political theorist George Kateb once remarked that her work is ‘offensive to a democratic soul’. When she was awarded an honorary degree at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1966, the president said: ‘Your writings challenge the mind, disturb the conscience, and depress the spirit of your readers; yet out of your wisdom and firm belief in mankind’s inner strength comes a sure hope.’
 
I imagine Arendt might have responded: ‘“Sure hope” for what exactly?’
 
 
Arendt never offers a systematic account of hope, but she returns to hope throughout her work. She begins her essay ‘What Is Freedom?’ by declaring: ‘To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless enterprise.’ In her essay ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, she writes: ‘In hope, the soul overleaps reality, as in fear it shrinks back from it.’ And her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) begins with a discussion of hope: ‘Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight.’
 
Arendt’s most devastating account of hope appears in her essay ‘The Destruction of Six Million’ (1964) published by Jewish World. Arendt was asked to answer two questions. The first was why the world remained silent as Hitler slaughtered the Jewish people, and whether or not Nazism had its roots in European humanism. The second was about the sources of helplessness among the Jewish people.
 
To the first question, Arendt responded that ‘the world did not keep silent; but apart from not keeping silent, the world did nothing.’ People had the audacity to express feelings of horror, shock and indignation, while doing nothing. This was not a failure of European humanism, she argued, which was unprepared for the emergence of totalitarianism, but of European liberalism, socialism not excluded. Listening to Beethoven and translating German into classical Greek was not what caused the intelligentsia to go along with the Nazification of social, cultural, academic and political institutions. It was an ‘unwillingness to face realities’ and it was a desire ‘to escape into some fool’s paradise of firmly held ideological convictions when confronted with facts’.
 
To the second question, Arendt wrote that: ‘The Jewish masses inside Nazi-occupied Europe were objectively helpless.’ She turns to the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen (1946) to discuss the ways in which hope had been used to destroy the very humanity of people. Borowski was only a teenager when Hitler invaded Poland and he was later captured by the Nazis and then sent to Auschwitz and Dachau. Reflecting back on his imprisonment in Auschwitz, he wrote:
 
“Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.””
 
Borowski killed himself shortly after writing these lines.
 
It was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.

 
In many of her early essays from the 1930s and ’40s, Arendt takes aim at the ethical implications of what can happen when one cleaves to hope during moments of crisis. She was especially critical of how the Nazis had used hope to implicate concentration-camp inmates in their crimes by making them behave like murderers towards one another. In her biweekly column ‘This Means You!’ written for Aufbau, a weekly newspaper for German Jewish immigrants founded in New York in 1934, Arendt argues that fear and hope are ‘the two archenemies of Jewish politics’. In an editorial titled ‘Days of Change’, she gives an account of the battle for the Warsaw ghetto, discussing how hope had been used against the Jewish people:
 
‘’It began on July 22, 1942. It was on that day that the chairman of the ‘Jewish Council’, the engineer [Adam] Czerniaków, committed suicide because the Gestapo had demanded that he supply six to ten thousand people a day for deportation. There were a half million Jews in the ghetto, and the Gestapo was afraid of armed or passive resistance. Nothing of the sort happened. Twenty to forty thousand Jews volunteered for deportation, ignoring flyers distributed by the Polish underground movement warning against it. The population was ‘caught between fear and feverish hope’. Some hoped that ‘evacuation’ meant only resettlement, others that such measures would not affect them. Some feared that resistance would mean certain death; others feared that resistance would be followed by a mass execution of the ghetto; and since Jewish opinion in general was against resistance and preferred illusions, the few who wanted to fight shied away from assuming that responsibility. The Germans made meticulous use of both hope and fear.”
 
Caught between fear and ‘feverish hope’, the inmates in the ghetto were paralysed. The truth of ‘resettlement’ and the world’s silence led to a kind of fatalism. Only when they gave up hope and let go of fear, Arendt argues, did they realise that ‘armed resistance was the only moral and political way out’.

For Arendt, the emergence of totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century meant that one could no longer count on common sense or human decency, moral norms or ethical imperatives. The law mandated mass murder and could not be looked to for guidance on how to act. The tradition of Western political thought broke, and Plato’s axiom – that it is better to suffer harm than to do harm – was reversed. The most basic human experiences, such as love, loss, desire, fear, hope and loneliness, were instrumentalised by fascist propaganda to sway the masses. But Arendt could not be swayed. And in the darkest hour of her life, as she contemplated suicide in an internment camp, she decided she loved life too much to give it up. She did not hope for rescue or redemption. She understood herself to be caught in between the ‘no-longer’ and the ‘not-yet’, in between past and future.
 
Before Arendt was forced to abandon her academic career and flee Nazi Germany in 1933, she published her dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine. Written before the war at the University of Heidelberg under the direction of the existential philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers, Arendt offers a secular reading of Augustine’s conceptions of love. In Augustine’s concept of caritas, or neighbourly love, Arendt found a way of being toward the world and the root of political action and human freedom where love of the world has the power to create new beginnings. Arendt’s secular reading of Augustine reconciles his understanding of a Christian hope for life after death with her own understanding of worldliness. Whereas Augustine sought immortality in the afterlife, Arendt argues that there is only immortality in a person’s political actions on this earth. All that remains after we die are the stories others will tell about what we have done
 
In the mid-1950s and early ’60s in New York, as Arendt was preparing that manuscript for English publication, she edited the text and inserted the language of natality, in conversation with the idea of new beginnings. Coining natality as a concept, Arendt found the principle of new beginnings, the root of political action, and the possibility of freedom.
 
An uncommon word, and certainly more feminine and clunkier-sounding than hope, natality possesses the ability to save humanity. Whereas hope is a passive desire for some future outcome, the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in the fact of natality. Breaking with the tradition of Western political thought, which centred death and mortality from Plato’s Republic through to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Arendt turns towards new beginnings, not to make any metaphysical argument about the nature of being, but in order to save the principle of humanity itself. Natality is the condition for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous and it is unpredictable. Natality means we always have the ability to break with the current situation and begin something new. But what that is cannot be said.

 
Hope might not be able to save us when the chips are down, but natality can. And in this way, Arendt did not give up faith in the world of human affairs, she tried to find a concept in modernity that could sustain it. In The Human Condition (1958), she writes:
 
‘’The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.”
 
Faith and hope in human affairs can come only from the fact that each new person born into the world has the ability to create something new, to act, and so to set in motion a chain of events, the outcome of which cannot be predicted. In this way, faith and hope are not articles of belief for Arendt, but action. Action is ‘the one miracle-working faculty of man’. Here it is tempting to take natality, one of Arendt’s most discussed concepts, and slide into the language of hope, but one would be better equipped using ‘to begin’ as a synonym.
 
Arendt’s refusal of hope is informed by her study of early Greek political thought, which reckoned hope alongside fear and evil. In the ‘Melian Dialogue’ (431 BCE), Thucydides writes:
 
“Hope, danger’s comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined.”
 
For Thucydides, hope is a salve, an indulgence, a danger, and a cause of loss. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BCE), which is central to Arendt’s discussion of hope in The Human Condition, he argues that it is only hope that was left in Pandora’s box after all the other evils escaped: ‘Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.’ Which is to say, one can glimpse hope only once evil has escaped into the world. (A more generous reading might be, we can hope to have hope, but only because we are surrounded by evil.)
 
 
Hope augments our vision, turning us away from the world before us, but natality is a political disposition and it is the possibility of political action. Arendt argued that hope overcame man, because it turned people away from what was unfolding right in front of them. Whereas natality forces one to be present in the moment. Conceptually, natality can be understood as the flipside of hope:
 
Hope is dehumanising because it turns people away from this world.
Hope is a desire for some predetermined future outcome.
Hope takes us out of the present moment.
Hope is passive.
Hope exists alongside evil.
Natality is the principle of humanity.
Natality is the promise of new beginnings.
Natality is present in the Now.
Natality is the root of action.
Natality is the miracle of birth.

Arendt’s refusal of hope does not leave one in despair. It’s difficult to imagine a more uplifting concept than natality. But whereas hope is something we have, natality is something we do. As a secular article of faith, natality places the responsibility for action firmly in our hands, it is the possibility each of us contains, inherent in our birth. Perhaps the best example of this is found in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which begins by condemning hope and fear and ends with this passage from Augustine, which inspired Arendt’s concept of natality:
 
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – ‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”
 
Arendt is not hopeful that the elements of totalitarianism will fade from our world. She warns that totalitarian solutions will exist whenever it seems impossible to alleviate social, political and economic misery. But it is natality that she leaves us with, it is the possibility of action in hopeless situations. It is what allowed her to make a gift of time during such an anguishing experience. From gaining the sympathies of a Gestapo guard through her gift for storytelling, to having the courage to walk out of an internment camp with forged papers, to journeying across France alone on foot in search of her husband, Arendt acted courageously time and again when she was faced with the opportunity to turn toward reckless hope or despair.
 
Eventually, with the help of Varian Fry, Arendt and Blücher were able to secure exit papers. They rode their bicycles from Montauban to Marseille, and rented a hotel room to wait for word to come from the US consulate. Then, one morning, a message was sent up to their room requesting that Blücher report to the front desk. But Arendt knew the call was a trick, and that the police were not too far behind. Playing innocent, Blücher went downstairs to the lobby, left his key, and walked out of the front door before anyone could stop him. When the hotel clerk came over to Arendt asking where her husband was, she staged a loud scene, shouting that he was already at the prefecture’s office. She told the clerk that he was responsible for whatever happened to her husband. She waited for some time to pass then went to meet Blücher at a café where he was safely hiding. Together they immediately left Marseille. Between June and December 1941, the US Department of State tightened its entry policy. And of the 1,137 names submitted, only 238 people received emergency exit visas. Arendt and Blücher were fortunate enough to be among them.
 
Arendt was 34 years old when she arrived at Ellis Island on the SS Guiné on 22 May 1941. She had $25 in her pocket and didn’t speak English. She had fled two world wars, been arrested by the Gestapo, and escaped an internment camp. Her life was just beginning.
 
When Hope is a Hindrance. By Samantha Rose Hill. Aeon, October 4, 2021.

Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the same year she received American citizenship. She had begun working on the book in 1941 and finished it in 1949. It is an epic work that stretches nearly six hundred pages, offering an account of the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. When she began working on Origins, Hitler was dead but Stalin was alive, and because Arendt was writing in the moment, the shape of the manuscript changed over time, as new information became available about what had happened in Europe and what was happening in the Soviet Union.

 
Origins was the first extensive account of the rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism. It was published during the era of McCarthyism in America. The American and European right read the book as a testament against the dangers of communism and totalitarianism, and the American and European left criticized Arendt for collapsing Marxism with Stalinism, arguing that Stalinism was a perversion of Marxism.
 
 At the heart of Origins is the chapter on “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie” in the second section on “Imperialism.” There Arendt discusses the collapse between the public and private realms of life, which were preceded by the liberation of private economic interests into the public political realm, what today we might call the privatization of politics. Where once businessmen were concerned with their families and private lives, enjoying a life of consumption, they now entered into the public sphere, bringing their business models with them. In this section on “Imperialism,” Arendt details how private business interests increasingly took over the functions of the state, because they needed new markets in order that they could continue to grow: “Businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.” In order to reach new markets they needed the support of the government to step outside the nation-state borders. As a result, businessmen slowly replaced politicians, and matters of private economy became matters of the state. But the principle of unfettered growth that drove private interests was incompatible with the need for stable political institutions. Arendt turns to Thomas Hobbes as a theorist of power to think about the principle of expansion for expansion’s sake, which elevates private economic interests to the level of politics. Ultimately this leads to the socialization of the private and public realms, leveling class difference, while destroying stable political institutions by doing away with the public sphere.
 
For Arendt this meant that totalitarianism makes political action impossible because it destroys the possibility for spontaneous action between people. If the power to act comes from “acting in concert”—that is, with one another—then isolated individuals are powerless by definition. Totalitarian government rules by terror, isolating people from one another, while turning each individual in his or her lonely isolation against all others. The world becomes a wilderness, as Arendt describes it, where neither experience nor thought are possible. One way totalitarianism turns people into isolated, lonely individuals is through the systematic blurring of reality and fiction. And this blurring relies upon the inability to see or think discerningly when people are confronted with ideologies that rely upon spreading fear:
 
       “Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

 
Drawing from Martin Luther, Arendt highlights how loneliness leads one down thought paths to the worst possible outcomes, following chains of logic that are rooted not in reality but in the imagination. She writes, “Under the conditions of loneliness, therefore, the self-evident is no longer just a means of the intellect and begins to be productive, to develop its own lines of ‘thought.’ ” The notorious extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this “thinking everything to the worst,” in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions. The loss of meaning in the modern world is characterized by the underlying conditions of homelessness, rootlessness, and loneliness. In the final pages of Origins Arendt identifies loneliness as the underlying cause of all totalitarian movements. Loneliness, she writes, is the common ground of terror. Whereas isolation “concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole.” Tyranny destroys the public realm of life by isolating individuals and destroying their capacity for political action, but totalitarianism also insists on destroying private life as well. Totalitarianism “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”
 
The German word Arendt uses for loneliness is Verlassenheit, which means a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. In this loneliness, one is unable to realize one’s full capacity for action as a human being, and one is unable to make new beginnings. Totalitarianism destroys the space between people by ruining their ability to think and their relationships with themselves. One becomes isolated in one’s thought, unable to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. And in this, loneliness is dangerous because it destroys the space of solitude, which is a necessary condition for thinking.
 
 Shortly after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt accepted a position as a visiting professor at Princeton University, where she was the first female faculty hire. The following year, with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, she began working on her second book, intended to be called Totalitarian Elements of Marxism, which was framed as a follow-up to The Origins of Totalitarianism. She thought the most serious gap in Origins was the lack of conceptual analysis around Bolshevism, and she wanted to take a closer look at the ideologies and methods of totalitarian regimes and the legacy of Marxism. With a fellowship from the foundation, Arendt spent March to August 1952 in Europe, conducting research in various libraries, while visiting with her friends Anne Weil and Alfred Kazin. Unofficially she continued working for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, lecturing in various cities, and taking time for a holiday in St. Moritz with the philosopher Karl Jaspers and his wife. She was so moved by the beauty of the natural colors and architecture that she wrote a poem to her husband Heinrich Blücher marveling at the scenery:
 
“Drive through France
 
Earth writes poetry field after field,
braiding trees alongside,
letting us weave our way,
around the lands in the world.
 
Blossoms rejoice in the wind,
Grass shoots out into soft supple beds,
Sky turns blue and greets with lightness,
Sun spins into soft chains.
 
People go unlost –
Earth, sky, light and woods –
Reborn every spring
Playfully in the play of omnipotence.”
 
When Arendt returned to the United States she began teaching and lecturing on Marx in the middle of the McCarthy trials. The chilling intellectual atmosphere did not temper Arendt’s work on Marx, though. At the height of the zealous anticommunist movement, she published an article titled “The Ex-Communists” in which she drew a distinction between ex-communists who switch ideologies but not ways of being in the world and former communists who understood one could not separate methods and aims. It was no small feat of courage to publish something so bold at the height of McCarthyism, as the attorney general threatened to investigate and deport “alien citizens” for being subversive. But Arendt was never one to shy away from controversy or bow to ideological demands.
 
It was not until 1956, at the end of the McCarthy era, that the U.S. government opened a file on Arendt at the behest of a concerned father who thought his daughter was being influenced by her teaching:
 
    “Mr. X advised he felt that hannah arendt was very dangerous to the best interests of this country in view of the fact she is a professor who travels around the United States instructing at numerous colleges as a visiting professor. He stated his daughter changed her thinking completely after taking courses from hannah arendt at the University of California, Berkeley, California, in 1955, and feels that it was her influence which had influenced his daughter to go to Europe to study under Professor paul ricoeur.
 
The fbi determined that the nonspecific complaint did not warrant an active investigation.”

 
Arendt received an invitation to give the Christian Gauss seminars on “Criticism” at Princeton University in autumn 1953, making her the first woman to do so. The faculty and students were delighted to have a female professor for a change, but she was annoyed that she was treated as the “token woman,” as she expressed to her friend the Zionist organizer Kurt Blumenfeld: “At the closing ceremony, and ever so slightly tipsy, I enlightened these dignified gentlemen about what an exception Jew is, and tried to make clear to them that I have necessarily found myself here an exception woman.” Arendt had no interest in being the “exception woman,” just as she had no interest in being the “exception Jew.” When Princeton University offered her the rank of full professor a few years later in 1959, she threatened to decline because the New York Times stressed the fact that she would be the “first woman.” Arendt wanted to be acknowledged for her thinking, not for character traits that were mere facts of her existence, and she held firm on this line over the course of her career. When she was interviewed about her appointment, she told an interviewer, “I am not disturbed at all about being a woman professor, because I am quite used to being a woman.”
 
 Excerpt from  Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill, Reaktion Books, 2021.
 
Not Belonging to the World. By Samatha Rose Hill. Lapham’s Quarterly  , October 14, 2021.

Libraries, as Hannah Arendt well knew, can be dangerous places. In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo one afternoon leaving the Prussian State Library on her way to meet her mother for lunch. Her friend, Kurt Blumenfeld, had asked her to collect anti-Semitic statements from newspapers, journals, and speeches for the German Zionist Organization. At the time, this was an illegal activity the Nazis called “horror propaganda.”
 
The collection of materials was to be sent to foreign press offices and world leaders, to show how dire the situation in Germany had grown, and used at the 18th Zionist Congress that summer in Prague. For several weeks, Arendt sat in the library sifting through newspaper articles and statements from all kinds of professional clubs and organizations. And then, one afternoon, as she was leaving, she was arrested. A librarian had reported her unusual reading activity to the Gestapo: What use does an academic have with so many newspapers?
 
Arendt was detained for eight days before being released by pure luck, as she would later say, knowing full well what was happening to other people who had been arrested, disappeared in cellars, murdered, and transported to camps. The night of her release, she gathered her friends and drank until the early hours of the morning. As the sun began to rise, she and her mother Martha fled, taking little with them.
 
Among her belongings was a folder that contained her birth certificate, her diploma from the University of Heidelberg, a self-portrait titled The Shadows, a copy of Love and Saint Augustine, the manuscript for Rahel Varnhagen, which was to be her habilitation (second book for a teaching position in Germany), marriage documents, and 21 poems she wrote between 1923 and 1926. She held on to these private artifacts of her experience and inner life during nearly eight years of exile in Paris before escaping to the United States, which are now neatly tucked away in Container 79, Folder “Miscellany: Poems and Stories, 1925-1942 and Undated” in the United States Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
 
Etymologically, an archive “houses.” It is a kind of dwelling space. When I first entered Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress in 2010, I felt like I was trespassing into somebody’s home. I kept waiting for somebody to come and take the folders away from me. There was a sense of transgression in touching those private things, which spend their time away from public sight. It is no wonder that our modern conception of pornography was born in archives, in those windowless backrooms where the illicit treasures of Pompeii were held.
 
Historically, the archive has negotiated the line between public and private life, deciding which materials should be available for public access. And for a long time, they were reserved for the few who could afford such pleasures. (Many still are.)
 
In The Human Condition, Arendt talks about the need to separate the private life of the home from the public realm of human affairs. One needs a space for appearance in the world, and one needs a space to retreat from the glare of public light to be alone with themselves. The archive complicates Arendt’s distinction. As a dwelling, it is a private space that can be accessed by the public, sometimes.
 
As institutions archives become part of a national mythology, helping to make the narratives we live by. Archives keep the records. For Foucault, archives transformed a collection of texts into a set of relations. Tracing the root of archive to the Greek arkheion, Derrida shows how archive refers to the arkhē of the commandment. Archons were the lawgivers, citizens who possessed the public authority to make laws, and they kept their official documents at home. Archives were established by the powerful to guard their social and political positions in society. One need look no further than the librarian who reported Hannah Arendt for reading too many newspapers to begin to think about the relationship between archives, libraries, and the state.
 
While there is much to lament about the ways in which digital technology has transformed our daily lives, one benefit has been the opening of previously privately held collections: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Walter Benjamin’s Papers, The Nietzsche Project. And now, for the first time, Hannah Arendt’s archive is fully available for public use by anybody who has a computer.
 
Since 2001, Hannah Arendt’s papers have only been partially available digitally, and fully available in three locations worldwide: The Library of Congress in Washington, DC (where most of the physical papers and documents are held), the New School for Social Research in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. The papers include over 25,000 items, about 75,000 digital images, and contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial proceedings, notes, notecards, teaching material, syllabuses, and family papers. You can even look at an echocardiogram of Arendt’s heart.
 
When I first visited Arendt’s archive, I worked my way through her papers alphabetically, following the finding guide the aide at the desk handed me when I walked in. In “Correspondence Folder A-B” I read her letters with W.H. Auden about friendship and forgiveness, her fight with Theodor Adorno about the publication of Walter Benjamin’s papers, which Arendt had carried across the Atlantic when she escaped Nazi Europe, and I read Walter’s Benjamin final letters to Hannah Arendt, which included a hand drawn map of Lourdes, and Benjamin’s last work, written on a stack of colorful newspaper bands, titled, Theses on the Philosophy of History. 
 
There are fights with publishers, letters of recommendation for graduate students, stacks of notecards for lectures, legal documents from lawsuits, day planners with shopping lists, and birthday cards. In Hannah Arendt’s papers, you will find two essays she wrote in German for Walter Benjamin. The drafts of her response to Gershom Scholem after he told her she had no love of Israel, which judging by her hand edits she struggled to write.
 
You can read a card from Thomas Mann, previously unpublished. There are four drafts of The Life of the Mind, course lectures on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx. You can look at her drafts of “Truth and Politics” and “Lying in Politics.” You can see her mother Martha Cohn’s papers from Nazi Germany and a Kinderbuch (a record of Arendt’s childhood). Among these files you will also find a record of friendships, stories untold. Arendt’s correspondence with Randall Jarrell, Roger Gilbert, Uwe Johnson, Robert Lowell, Ralph Mannheim, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, and Paul Tillich. With the opening of Arendt’s archive there is no shortage of new stories than can be told. “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive,” Derrida wrote.
 
 Before Arendt began doing political work for the World Zionist Organization in the Prussian State Library, she was researching her book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess—a work that was interrupted by the Second World War, arrest, and internment. Editing the book after the war, Arendt said that in Rahel she had found her “closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years.” I’ve often thought that when Hannah Arendt bequeathed her papers to the Library of Congress she imagined somebody might find a best friend in her someday.
 
Private Lives, Public Faces: On What’s Revealed by Hannah Arendt’s Archives. By Samantha Rose Hill, LitHub, June 8, 2021. 

Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century. After World War II, she became one of the most prominent – and controversial – public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as "The Origins of Totalitarianism", "The Human Condition", and "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".

 
In this conversation with Chiara Ricciardone, Samantha Rose Hill discusses themes from her forthcoming biography of Hannah Arendt, as well as what Arendt’s writing and biography can teach us about engaging in the work of political thinking.
 
Samantha Rose Hill is the author of two forthcoming books: "Hannah Arendt" (Reaktion Books) and "Hannah Arendt’s Poems". She is currently writing a book on loneliness for Yale University Press. You can find her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, OpenDemocracy, Theory & Event, Contemporary Political Theory, and The South Atlantic Quarterly.
 
Chiara Ricciardone is a writer and political philosopher. She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley and co-founded the Activist Graduate School. She is also U.S. Commissioning Editor for this journal. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, two young kids, and one expressive cat.
 
Hannah Arendt and Political Thinking: Samantha Rose Hill with Chiara Ricciardone. The Philosopher, June 29, 2021.
 

A few years ago, I trekked, biked, and rode trains and buses through Weimar, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Todtnauberg, Basel, and, finally, Sils Maria. I was in Germany and Switzerland, with a servile sort of eros, to gape and touch and stroll through the universities and apartments at which some of our grandest modern philosophers had once lived: Goethe, Hegel, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Arendt. Locals and students expressed little surprise when they learned I was poking around the Hegel Haus or peeking inside classrooms at Freiburg where Edmund Husserl taught phenomenology. The manager of a prim restaurant inside Todtnauberg’s nicest hotel excitedly interrupted my dinner of white fish and potatoes to show me the photographs on his office walls of his father together with Martin Heidegger; then he poured me a few glasses of Spätburgunder on the house.

 
Curiously, the only name of the lot that elicited more confusion than ratification — also the only woman and the only one to have persistently rebuffed the ascription of “philosopher” — was Hannah Arendt. There was less consensus about her legacy and allure. “Why her?” asked a young woman at the University of Freiburg who had spiritedly agreed to sneak me into Kollegiengebäude I, which hosted the philology, theology, and philosophy departments. “Was she one of the greats?”
 
It wasn’t that this student or the others hadn’t heard of Arendt — it was that they didn’t quite understand her position in the constellation of modern Western intellectuals. Arendt is one of the greats, I assured her. But I wondered then, as I do now: What kind of people are drawn to Hannah Arendt? (I’m not, to be clear, accounting for the controversy-chasers who’ve never read — carefully and thoughtfully read — a single one of her books.) The question is interesting because Arendt’s ideas are harder to distill into maxims of didactic bravado than those of, well, take your pick. She resisted clichés. “I hope I don’t shock you if I tell you that I’m not sure I’m a liberal,” Arendt said to Roger Errera in a 1973 interview for French public television. “I really don’t have any creed in this sense. I have no exact political philosophy which I could sum up with one ‘ism.’”
 
“She did not want to find a master key or universal solvent,” her friend Mary McCarthy tendered in her 1976 obituary. Instead, McCarthy wrote, Arendt pursued fastidious distinctions that testified “to a sort of typical awe-struck modesty before the world’s abundance and intense particularity.”
 
Arendt’s fans, her avid readers, who take solace in her disciplined and intrepid scholarship, tend to share this taste for agnosticism. They find an impertinent sort of exhilaration in dispassionately thinking through their experiences, relying on terms and categories only insofar as they clarify and cohere, and reconsidering them as soon as they prescriptively reinforce presumptions. I call it impertinent because the comfortable majority, in late modernity, came to preside over the orthodoxies of the day — and those of us left disheartened by our own age’s contempt for gradations and second thoughts oft find ourselves pariahs at the party. This is a time, after all, when half-baked ideas and knee-jerk reactions, subject to a novel sort of mobocracy, can quickly make up national conversations.
 
“The experiences behind even the most worn-out concepts remain valid and must be recaptured and re-actualized if one wishes to escape certain generalizations that have proved pernicious,” Arendt wrote in a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1956, which resurfaced in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s sweeping 1982 biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.
 
Today, we have a new biography at hand. Hannah Arendt, by Samantha Rose Hill, is the latest in the “Critical Lives” series, which neatly (usually in under 250 pages) presents the life and work of “leading cultural figures of the modern period.” Previous titles include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Søren Kierkegaard, and Simone de Beauvoir.
 
Philosophers’ lives are, of course, irresistible. They tend to be bestrewn with dysfunction. Something about the gulf between the life of the mind and the life of the person leaves us marveling at the cost of luminescent thinking (or of practical drudgery, depending on your side). Nietzsche was lonely, spurned, star-crossed. Schopenhauer feuded with elderly women, comforted only by his poodles. Heidegger … well. But Arendt, while “a magnificent stage diva,” (McCarthy’s words) when compared to the theorists and scholars of the Frankfurt School, was extraordinarily disciplined. She was charmingly self-aware. “She was too reverential about the great thinkers to claim ‘originality’ in philosophy itself,” wrote Alfred Kazin, also her friend. “Her distinctive procedure, which she must have learned in German seminars, was to circle round and round the great names, performing a ‘critique’ in their name when she disowned a traditional position.”
 
In a 1964 interview for the German television series Zur Person, the host, after noting that Arendt was the first woman to be profiled on the show, asked Arendt if she considered her role as a female philosopher to be unusual or peculiar — and whether she wanted to achieve extensive influence with her work.
 

“I’m afraid I have to protest,” Arendt answered, cigarette in hand. “My profession, if one can speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted in the circle of philosophers.” (Certain philosophy professors did indeed view her as a journalist, while others enthusiastically offered her tenure.) Arendt continued with a lenient smile: “You ask about the effect my work has on others. If I may speak ironically, that’s a masculine question. Men always want to be influential. […] I want to understand.”
 
I’m dwelling on her gender partly to further contrast her absence of disorder and angst with the chaos of so many of her male counterparts and predecessors. And let’s face it. She knew dark times better than most. I usually sidestep the oppression-point scales that implicitly girdle our present social discourses, but Arendt was indisputably well credentialed: she fled Nazi Germany and then an internment camp in France, and when she arrived as a Jewish refugee in New York at the age of 35, she barely spoke English. But all that aside, confident, professional female philosophers — I, at any rate, believe she was a philosopher — were, for obviously unjust reasons, rarities in the 1950s. And because she was so unconcerned with her gender (she nearly declined an offer to be the first tenured female professor at Princeton due to newspapers’ fixation on the “first” part), it was all the easier to revel in her beauty and glamour as the backdrop of an extraordinary mind.
 
Her friends, students, suitors, and biographers made frequent reference to her “womanly seductiveness,” in the words of Julia Kristeva. She “was to charm me and others, by no means unerotically,” Kazin wrote, recalling their first encounter. McCarthy reminisced about Arendt’s femininity, her eyes, her ankles and calves, and what she looked like when she was thinking: “She lay motionless on a sofa or a day bed, arms folded behind her head, eyes shut but occasionally opening to stare upward.”
 
Even her writing style is oddly seductive. Some, no doubt, are put off by what Young-Bruehl described as her “meandering English sentences” perilously elongated by conjunctions and dependent clauses that betrayed her German mother tongue. Others find them poetic. Either way, one is hard-pressed to find an Arendt scholar, biographer, or reviewer who doesn’t on occasion succumb to Arendtspeak. Some of her favorite words: “men,” “world,” “think,” “act,” “faculty,” “realm,” “public,” “social,” “plurality.” She also wielded a series of figurative idiosyncrasies with the endearing spiritedness of a new citizen with a new language: “as it were”; “precisely”; “so to speak”; “I am afraid”; “nothing less”; “when the chips are down.”
 
Samantha Rose Hill, professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and formerly the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, is plainly both a scholar and fan, and no less pervious to Arendtspeak. Hill, for instance, uses “think” as a transitive verb instead of its customary intransitive usage — e.g., Heidegger wanted to “think Being anew” — one of Arendt’s rhetorical trademarks. More significantly, Hill quickly cuts to the core of Arendt’s principal talent: the formulation of trenchant categories and definitions that, for all their certitude, take from the past only what is necessary, looking otherwise to the present and future. Arendt could be sweeping and specific all at once, making observations about entire centuries and occupations — “It was not in the Middle Ages but in modern thinking that philosophy came to play second and even third fiddle” — before homing in on the moments and books that underpinned her propositions.
 
“What separated and continues to separate Arendt’s work from others,” Hill writes, “is the ways in which she was able to make connections across bodies of literature that she read and memorized.” The breadth of her reading, Hill tells us, was enough to prompt even Jerome Kohn, New School professor and trustee of Arendt’s literary estate, to say, “The problem with Hannah Arendt was that she knew too much.”
 
There is something almost mythological about Arendt’s conceptual categories and distinctions. Even when they begin to sound clinical or quirky, they remain intoxicating because they serve, with a luminous sort of aplomb, as guideposts in a chaotic world.
 
“It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as ‘power,’ ‘strength,’ ‘force,’ ‘authority,’ and finally, ‘violence’ — all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena,” Arendt wrote in On Violence, before going on to carefully define each term.
 
At a lecture at Bard in 1968, she similarly reprimanded a student who referred to religion as an ideology:
 
    “”Look, all these terms we use here — ideology, imperialism, totalitarian, dictatorship, tyranny, etc. — all these words are used in a very loose way. You will hear that if some president of a university is in disagreement with a student, he is being accused of being totalitarian. But the most he could be was tyrannical — even if he wanted to, he simply couldn’t be totalitarian. So we use all these words in specific, well-defined ways because otherwise they apply to so many phenomena that they are like an umbrella, under which you can put everything, and you no longer know what you are actually talking about.”

Biography is a tricky art form, particularly when the subject stood at historic crossroads and produced works of resounding complexity. The truth is, given the information that was available at the time, Young-Bruehl’s For Love of the World missed practically nothing. Hill calls it “a momentous feat,” and she couldn’t have written her version without repeating and drawing from Young-Bruehl, whom she acknowledges as an indispensable source. Still, while Young-Bruehl’s 500-page book moves excitedly and fussily between summaries of Arendt’s ideas and personal tidbits, making quick consultations almost impossible, Hill sparingly and undramatically chooses her details (without, thankfully, passing over the gossip).
 
Hill’s strengths are threefold. She is evidently so used to explaining Arendt’s ideas to nervous freshmen that each chapter contains a SparkNotes-like summary of the major works written during the time period in question. They are concise and comprehensible.
 
Second, Hill was well situated to go diving for gems in Arendt’s papers, letters, and marginalia. For one thing, Bard College houses Arendt’s entire personal library — over 4,000 volumes. And since the publication of Young-Bruehl’s biography almost 40 years ago, much more of Arendt’s correspondence has come to light — books and books of it — including letters between her and her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, and also with Heidegger, Jaspers, and McCarthy. Hill was able to recompile and reselect from the growing pile with contemporary perspective — after all, while Arendt died quite recently by most measures, Hill was born after her death.

 
Lastly, Hill spares us the clichéd, tabloid-ish critiques that make up a sizable chunk of Arendtian lore (“she was a self-hating Jew”; “I can’t believe she loved Heidegger”; “she thought Eichmann’s crimes were banal”; and so on and so forth). Instead, Hill calmly — and quietly, but without truckling — applies her close readings of Arendt’s most controversial ideas to our own oftentimes taut and illiberal social atmosphere.
 
I ought to glide past the gems — the synopses and well-picked gossip — so I can talk a little more about these ideas. But there is some irresistible stuff, old and new, in the book: 19-year-old Arendt’s pet mouse; the FBI’s on-file description (“a small, rotund, stoop shouldered woman with a crew-like haircut, masculine voice, and marvelous mind”); her god-given mentors (Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers); Heidegger’s impression after their very first student-teacher meeting (“from now on you will belong in my life”); her astonishing social circle while exiled in Paris (Brecht, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan); the drama that ensued during Arendt and McCarthy’s second encounter (McCarthy said she felt sorry for Hitler; Arendt erupted); and my favorite, Arendt’s reaction after her taxi was hit by a truck in Central Park:
 
     “When I awoke […] and became conscious of what had happened, I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both eyes; then tried out my memory — very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English; then telephone numbers. Everything is alright.”
 
With the writing that followed her second major book, The Human Condition, Arendt started to draw controversy. It was inevitable. She was adamant about speaking without sentiment or ambiguity. She abjured both self-pity and tribalism, and she challenged the zeitgeist when she thought it was being swept away by presuppositions or incoherence. In her 1959 essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” she protested what she saw as the desegregation mandate’s instrumentalization of schoolchildren. It brought on the ire of many liberals, including Ralph Ellison. But the peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker, which culminated in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
 
Hill scarcely breaks a sweat defending Arendt on the Eichmann matter, which is still alive and kicking in parts of academe. Hill has obviously heard it all, knows where most strictures fail to hold water, and gives Arendt the last word:
 
     “To Arendt the most upsetting part of the literary show trial was that she was pronounced guilty for a book she had never written. Most of her critics had, she wrote, not even bothered to read it. They objected to her ironic tone, not its content. Worst of all, they were more interested in invalidating her than engaging with her arguments.”
 
Arendt’s own response to her friend, the Israeli philosopher Gershom Scholem, who accused her of having no “love for the Jewish people,” captures her abstention from groupthink:
 
     “How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective — not the German, French, or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else there might be in this price range of loyalties. The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love.”
 
When it comes to how this translates to contemporary matters of social and identity politics, however, Hill is a little more cautious. Any professor who teaches Arendt today — and shares her doughty independence — would have a hard time not implicating both camps in our present cultural schism: the red hats as well as the social justice enthusiasts. Arendt would have been appalled by the left’s — and accordingly, prevailing media’s — brandishing of identitarian simplifications and catchwords that bear little resemblance to “what we’re actually talking about.” She firmly believed in airing differences of opinion in public, while keeping private and social interests out of politics. Moreover, as Hill tells us, Arendt thought “the rhetoric of equality is dangerous to democratic political life, and she consistently argued that men would only ever be equal in the sense that they were unequal.”
 
At first, Hill tiptoes around these implications, feigning neutrality. In reviewing the heated scholarship surrounding Arendt and race, she begins quietly (“some view,” “those who argue,” etc.). But after 150 pages, Hill seems to realize her “cancellation” is an unlikely scenario. She becomes more explicit: “Any form of identity politics was a contradiction in terms for Arendt, who drew a sharp distinction between who a person is and what a person is. Nobody belongs to a political movement, Arendt argued, just because they are born black, Jewish or female.”

 
 
At the end of my dewy-eyed (and yes, slightly facile) philosopher’s trail, I found myself at the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria, where the ascetic priest had completed a number of his significant works. The village was a little too photogenic, a little too befitting of our tourism-savvy 21st century. I could reflexively film and photograph and broadcast, but internalizing the otherworldly space posed a peculiar sort of impasse. There were trappings of such alienation throughout my travels — when I felt more distant than ever from the great thinkers, even while standing in their footsteps.
 
“Our world today is not the world of the early and mid-twentieth century,” Hill reminds us. Indeed, the images and textures on my tour — the Philosophers’ Walk in Heidelberg, overlooking the campus where Arendt completed her dissertation; the Black Forest cabin in Todtnauberg where Heidegger wrote Being and Time; the Alpine meadows by which Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra — were stirring in their own ways, but they were neither recreations nor substitutes for thinking presently. Our overpopulated, stratified, and still clamorously connected world offers a throng of new matters to bravely and freshly contemplate — to understand without cannibalizing the past or recoiling from what Hill calls Arendt’s “radical openness” to the distinctions of the time.
 
In his posthumously published notebooks, Nietzsche mused that “a people which is becoming conscious of its dangers produces a genius.” Arendt would have found the plaudit applied to her silly and possibly “masculine.” All the same, her fierce, free clarity inspires. We inherit from her an exemplar par excellence. Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.”
 
The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”.  By Shaan Sachdev. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 7, 2021.
 

Website Samantha Rose Hill