Hannah Arendt did not become a public figure until she was over forty. The achievement that lifted her into the public consciousness was a nearly five-hundred-page political theory treatise on totalitarian politics, written in the thick prose by which great ideas must often be transmitted. It might therefore be easy to forget she began her thinking life as a dreamy young woman who wrote reams of poetry and floridly described herself as “overcome by fear of reality, the meaningless, baseless, empty fear whose blind gaze turns everything into nothing, the fear which is madness, joylessness, distress, annihilation.”
But that is indeed what Hannah Arendt wrote to her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, while home from university in the spring of 1925. They were sleeping together, an affair of great intensity and, as it turned out, historical consequence for both of them. When she wrote this autobiographical document, voiced in the “protective third person,” the affair was barely a year old. She called it “Die Schatten,” or “The Shadows,” a title plainly meant to signal depression. In her early twenties, Hannah Arendt was really very concerned that she might never amount to anything:
More likely she will continue to pursue her life in idle experiments and a curiosity without rights or foundation, until finally the long and eagerly awaited end takes her unawares, putting an arbitrary stop to her useless activity.
The pointlessness of life and the abruptness of ends were things that came up a lot in Arendt’s life—much as they had in West’s and Parker’s. Arendt was born to a bourgeois intellectual family in the Prussian city of Königsberg, her mother a strong-willed homemaker with a talent for the piano and her father an electrical engineer who also considered himself an amateur scholar of the Greeks and Romans, keeping his nose buried in books.
Arendt did not know her father very long. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis as a young man, before he married. By the time his daughter was three his condition was deteriorating rapidly. The details of his descent are awful: He’d collapse on family walks in the park, overcome by the ataxia associated with late-stage syphilis. By the time Arendt was five, he had to be institutionalized. He would die about two years later, in 1913, after growing so ill he no longer recognized his daughter when she visited. After he died, Arendt rarely spoke of him. The biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl wrote that Arendt told friends her memories of her father’s illness were limited to the sound of her mother playing piano, which had soothed her ailing father at night.
Arendt’s mother simply had to get on with things. She would be remarried when Arendt was a teenager, to an established businessman. Materially, life was as good as it could be for a widowed Jewish woman and her daughter living in post–World War I Germany. The country was careening through its Weimar period, the era of severe inflation, artistic experimentation, and Hitler’s rise to power. But life at home was not difficult. Arendt always insisted her mother protected her from any anti-Semitism she encountered. If anti-Semitic remarks were ever made in the classroom, the young Arendt came home and told her mother. Martha Arendt would write the teachers a scolding letter, and the problem would cease. No doubt this explained why Arendt never believed that anti-Semitism was, as she put it in Origins of Totalitarianism, “eternal.”
Notwithstanding what she’d report to Heidegger in “The Shadows,” to others the young Arendt was already relentlessly self-confident. She smart-mouthed teachers at school, because she could learn as much studying at home as she could under their tutelage, and it pleased her to let them know it. Once, insulted by one of her teacher’s remarks—the content of which is lost to history—she organized a boycott against him and got herself expelled. She ended up largely having to tutor herself through her qualifying exams for university.
In her late adolescence, Arendt got interested in philosophy and specifically in the writings of the ruminative Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was one of the first great articulators of our concept of angst, of the sense that something is profoundly off-kilter with oneself and with the world. Arendt, in any event, picked up on it. It was during this period that she wrote a lot of poems, bad ones, the proof of a deeply romantic heart in someone who would later be accused of being too cold, too logical, by those who didn’t read her carefully:
Ah, death is in life, I know, I know.
So let me, floating days, give you my hand.
You will not lose me. As a sign I leave behind,
For you, this page and the flame.
Hearing from an ex-boyfriend about the brilliant lectures given by a Professor Heidegger at the University of Marburg, Arendt enrolled there too, promptly signing up for Heidegger’s class. It was 1924. She was eighteen. Heidegger was thirty-five, and married, with two sons.
It is difficult to do credit to Heidegger’s complex philosophical ideas in short order, but his approach to philosophy was marked by his shaking off of prior thinkers’ devotion to cold, hard logic. He was a man who thought, as Daniel Maier-Katkin once wrote, that “human experience and understanding both lie closer to the realm of feeling and mood that inheres in poetry (an idea with strong appeal to Arendt).” Heidegger took that attitude right into his pedagogical approach. By everyone’s account, his lectures were performances, soliloquies designed for more than the straight delivery of information. Of the talk around campus, Arendt would later write:
The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.
After she spent several months learning to think, Heidegger approached Arendt after class one day in February 1925. He asked what she had been reading. She told him. Her answers were apparently so charming they elicited an immediate love note: “I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you.” It began there.
Arendt and Heidegger often couched their affair in the abstract, as was to be expected of those who trafficked all their lives in ideas. Their manner of writing about loving each other lent them not just high drama, but the appearance of a kind of high-mindedness. Unlike the love letters West and Wells exchanged, theirs included little baby talk, no pet names. Instead, Heidegger, whose side of the correspondence was the only one that survived, would write things like:
The demonic struck me. The silent prayer of your beloved hands and your shining brow enveloped it in womanly transfiguration. Nothing like it has ever happened to me.
Womanly transfiguration notwithstanding, the demon was fickle. Just three months after the affair began, Heidegger backed off. Suddenly his tone in letters was remote. He pleads the demands of his work. He also makes florid claims of future commitment at a time when he can return his attentions to the world. In short, he behaved like any man who’d realized he’d made a mistake with a woman much his junior, but who in his guilt still didn’t want to foreclose the possibility of future sex.
To be fair to Heidegger, he wasn’t exactly lying. In a small shed his wife had built for him on their country estate, he was indeed toiling away at what would become his breakthrough masterwork, Being and Time. But when he brushed off Arendt, he was two years from the end of the project, and still planned to teach that fall. In any event, the result was that Arendt spent the summer alone.
When both teacher and student returned to Marburg in the fall of 1925, Heidegger kept avoiding Arendt. He had started to outright stand her up by the spring of 1926. Frustrated, Arendt then began the long process—it would last all her life—of giving Heidegger up. She left Marburg. She began to study with a different philosopher, Karl Jaspers. She did keep speaking to Heidegger, but she could mostly reach him only by letter, sending him mournful missives. There would be brief assignations in small-town train stations, but nothing that sustained itself beyond the time allotted for the visit.
Brief and unsatisfying though it clearly was, the affair would be a signature event in both lives. Heidegger’s influence on Arendt was obviously formative, and in that sense it was enormous. But she took something more like inspiration than marching orders from him, carving her own path in the subject matter and scope of her work. He stayed in philosophy; she moved on to political theory. He stayed in Germany; she left. By the time they finally met again after World War II, she was on the verge of becoming a famous thinker in her own right, and the ideas that had made her reputation, particularly those concerning Germany’s actions in World War II, were developed outside his comment or control.
Their experiences of Germany could not, in any event, have been more starkly different. Not long after his affair with Arendt ended, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. There have been many subsequent debates about how sincere Heidegger could possibly have been about this affiliation, but he undeniably had some amount of sympathy for the movement. The romanticism of the Nazi vision of the world—one in which races were locked in combat, in which good resided in the Volk—aligned, catastrophically, with his.
He didn’t just quietly accept the Nazis; he actively worked with them. Almost as soon as he joined the party, Heidegger began leading an effort to remove Jews from the universities, even signing the letter that removed his own mentor, Edmund Husserl, from the ranks of the professorship. (For this, Arendt would call Heidegger a “potential murderer.”) This made him a leading figure of what the Nazis called the Gleichschaltung, sometimes translated as “collaboration,” the process by which most Germans, be they members of civic organizations or intellectuals, were brought in line with Nazi priorities.
Later, speaking of the Gleichschaltung abstractly, Arendt simply said, “The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did.” The depth of her relationship with Heidegger did not become public knowledge until after her death. But she must have been thinking of him. Under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg, Arendt wrote a dissertation titled Love and Saint Augustine. It may have been another sign of her frustration with Heidegger that what interested her there was not romantic love but neighborly love. She finished this dense and challenging piece of work in early 1929. It was a few months before the Wall Street stock market crashed, setting off the Great Depression and destabilizing the loans that had been holding Germany to the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler would earn his popularity from the spoils of economic disaster, but just then—the moment Arendt got her doctorate—he was not yet fully ascendant.
Arendt was, by then, living in Berlin. The city was full of young graduates trying to figure out what to do with themselves in a country that was still reeling from what many considered the insult of the Treaty of Versailles. Like everyone else in Weimar, Arendt went to the glittering parties that belied the glum mood of the time. One fateful gathering was held at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. It was a leftist fund-raiser in the form of a masquerade ball. Arendt was dressed as an “Arab harem girl.” One longs for a description of what such a costume might have looked like in 1929, but evidently it did the trick. She saw a classmate with whom she’d long ago lost touch, a man named Gunther Stern. They reconnected.
He seduced her, he later wrote in a memoir, by telling her that “loving is that act by which something a posteriori—the by-chance-encountered other—is transformed into an a priori of one’s own life.” For some other woman, this might have seemed pretentious. For Arendt, it was apparent proof that their connection could be intellectual as well as emotional. By September she’d marry Stern. Still, when she wrote to Heidegger to announce the marriage, it was in the key of defeat. She was settling, she reassured Heidegger, for the comfort, however imperfect, of a home:
Do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today.
Heidegger hadn’t quite made his Nazi leanings public when she wrote that letter.
The comfort of marriage did prove useful. It gave Arendt the space to work more intensely on a new project. It was a book that did not exactly take her inner life as its subject. Yet it was the closest she’d ever come to writing a memoir. A friend, finding the eighteenth-century letters and diaries of a Jewish salonnière at a rare bookseller’s, had passed them on to Arendt. The life of Rahel Varnhagen soon became an obsession for Arendt. She began work on a biography, a book that would ultimately become half a statement of personal philosophy and half an homage to a woman she considered a role model. In this, she was nearly unique among thinking women of her era. Most were afraid to admit any clear debt to women.
Varnhagen was born in Berlin in 1771, the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Though she did not have much of a formal education, Varnhagen was interested in ideas from the time she was very young. As an adult she surrounded herself with the great artists and thinkers of her era, mostly the German romantics. Her salon made her a key figure in German intellectual history. Part of what drew Arendt to Varnhagen so passionately was that like her, Varnhagen was Jewish and deeply assimilated. But Varnhagen was somewhat ambivalent about being Jewish. In light of that, Arendt found Varnhagen’s alleged deathbed words, recorded by her husband, unforgettable:
The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life— having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.
Arendt was so affected by that sentence she began her own book with it. The project had a mediumistic quality almost from the beginning. Arendt freely called Varnhagen her “best friend.” Her approach to the book, she wrote when she was finally able to publish it some twenty-five years later in 1958, was “an angle unusual in biographical literature.” In fact, Arendt described her aims as almost metaphysical:
It was never my intention to write a book about Rahel; about her personality, which might lend itself to various interpretations according to the psychological standards and categories that the author introduces from the outside … What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it.
The claim to be able to tell Varnhagen’s story “as she herself might have told it” is, as the Arendt scholar Seyla Benhabib once put it, “astonishing.” You can spend a whole life in someone’s archives, and yet find it impossible to get a full grasp of her inner life. Arendt must have known this and even experienced it as she tried to write Rahel’s life from her perspective. For one thing, it’s simply impossible to speak in the voice of someone who has been dead for a century or more. But the emotional attraction she felt to Varnhagen’s life eclipsed the rational considerations. She had found a mistress she wanted to apprentice herself to, and writing the book was a way of doing it.
What Arendt found most intriguing about Varnhagen was that Varnhagen had found a way to make being different a kind of boon. This Arendt connected particularly to Varnhagen’s identity as a Jew. Varnhagen’s husband had tried to transcend his Jewishness by acquiring more and more social status. For Varnhagen, this had never worked. She could not, she thought, erase the mark. So she embraced it. If her Jewishness had set Varnhagen apart from German society, Arendt concluded, it had also given her a certain individuality of perspective that ultimately proved to have its own kind of value. Seeing things differently was not just a matter of perspective; sometimes to see things differently was to see them more clearly.
Varnhagen, Arendt tells us, was thus a kind of “pariah.” She didn’t mean this in the negative sense we now attach to it. That gets clearer when in her later work Arendt salts the term with an adjective: “conscious pariah.” A conscious pariah knows she is different, and knows she may never, at least in the eyes of others, properly escape it. But she is also aware of what her individuality gives her. Among those things is an instinctual sort of empathy, a sensitivity to the suffering of others that comes from having known it yourself:
This sensitivity is a morbid exaggeration of the dignity of every human being, a passionate comprehension unknown to the privileged. It is this passionate empathy which constitutes the humaneness of the pariah. In a society based upon privilege, pride of birth and arrogance of title, the pariah instinctively discovers human dignity in general long before reason has made it the foundation of morality.
While Arendt mostly limited her use of the term “pariah” to apply to the distinction of Jewishness, she hinted that she knew there was a wider application for the model. It seems no accident that Arendt chose a woman as a role model for the pariah here, though Arendt would have denied it made much difference. She would probably have said that Varnhagen’s status as a Jew was far stronger a connection than the woman thing. Yet a lot of what Arendt discovered about Varnhagen could extend by analogy, and on some level she knew it. In an introduction she penned when she finally published her life of Varnhagen in the 1950s, she wrote:
The modern reader will scarcely fail to observe at once that Rahel was neither beautiful nor attractive; that all the men with whom she had any kind of love relationship were younger than she herself; that she possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality; and finally, that she was a typically “romantic” personality, and that the Woman Problem, that is the discrepancy between what men expected of women “in general” and what women could give or wanted in their turn, was already established by the conditions of the era and represented a gap that virtually could not be closed.
The statements are wondrous, in the history of Hannah Arendt’s relationship with feminism. Arendt had no interest in the movement or its rhetoric. Her professional alliances were mostly with men. She never worried much about whether she belonged among her mostly male intellectual peers. She did not feel that patriarchy was a serious problem. In fact, asked about women’s emancipation late in her life, she said the “Woman Problem” was never much of a problem for her. “I have always thought that there are certain occupations that are improper for women, that do not become them,” she told an interviewer.
It just doesn’t look good when a woman gives orders. She should try not to get into such a situation if she wants to remain feminine. Whether I am right about this or not I do not know … The problem itself played no role for me personally. To put it very simply, I have always done what I liked to do.
This sort of self-contradictory answer gave little room to retroactively anoint Arendt as a quiet crusader for women or even an advocate for equality of the sexes, per se.
And yet she thought one should do what one wants to do. Instead of writing a biography of, for example, Kierkegaard, she began her public career with an obsession about another woman. One who was “neither beautiful nor attractive,” but who was nonetheless possessed of “extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality.” And one whose outsider status was not a difficulty to be overcome but something to be dug into, mined for strength. It’s possible, as some scholars have speculated, that the reason any kind of discrimination against women seemed invisible to her is that in her lifetime her Jewishness had simply been a far more explicit target. Hostility to women was far more diffuse than the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews.
Arendt was still working on the book on Varnhagen when, in 1933, the Reichstag—the seat of the German parliament—burned down. It was arson, a crime whose perpetrator is still in some dispute, though a young Communist was arrested and tried as the immediate culprit and the German left was blamed for the resulting chaos.
Hitler had been sworn in as chancellor only a month or so before the fire. The tumult gave him the excuse to assume emergency powers. Gunther Stern, Arendt’s husband, who had deep roots with anti-Nazi dissidents, left for Paris immediately. Arendt stayed.
It was not that the danger of the regime was lost on her. In fact, she said the fire was an “immediate shock,” one that no longer left her with the impression she could remain a “bystander.” The fact that former friends and allies were gradually falling under Nazi influence must have been clear to her before then, though. The fall before, after hearing rumors, she had written to Heidegger asking about his new politics. Specifically her concerns were about the rumor that he had become anti-Semitic, news she gathered from her husband and his friends. His reply was, to say the least, petulant. It listed all the Jewish students he had recently helped, then added:
Whoever wants to call this “raging anti-Semitism” is welcome to do so. Beyond that, I am now just as much an anti-Semite in University issues as I was ten years ago in Marburg … To say absolutely nothing about my personal relationships with many Jews.
And above all it cannot touch my relationship to you.
But it had touched the relationship. This is the last letter that passed between them for over a decade.
Some months after the Reichstag fire, Arendt agreed to help surreptitiously collect anti-Semitic statements from pamphlets held by the library that also housed Varnhagen’s papers. The statements were then going to be used by friends in Zionist organizing abroad. But within days Arendt was discovered and reported to authorities. She was arrested, along with her mother, and spent a few nights in a holding cell. Her arresting officer liked her, even flirted with her: “What am I supposed to do with you?” Eventually, he let her go. She was very lucky. In the interrogation she just lied. She had not revealed who she’d been working with.
But after that incident it became clear she couldn’t stay in Germany. At first, Arendt and her mother went to Prague. Martha Arendt went from there to Königsberg, and Arendt went to Paris. She brought the manuscript on Varnhagen with her. But a cloud came with her. The depth of the Nazi catastrophe was becoming apparent to her. In Berlin, the intellectuals she’d known were starting to cooperate with the Nazi regime. Heidegger had taken up his work as a university rector, wore a swastika pin, and even briefly tried to meet Hitler. She knew all about it.
So Arendt left thinking to herself, “I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business.” Her plan to estrange herself from intellectualism did not, as we know, pan out. But the betrayal left a permanent mark. No longer could she see a traditional life of the mind as salvation. Even great minds were susceptible to poor judgment. They could abandon common sense very quickly.
“I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything,” she told an interviewer a couple of years before she died. She was saying that she thought it was a bad thing. “Today I would say they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened.” Intellectuals—like Heidegger—weren’t actively making a strategic choice when they joined the Nazi Party. They weren’t doing it just to survive. They rationalized it, aligning themselves with the ideas of the party because it was anathema for them to be associated with a cause in which they did not fervently believe. And in so doing, they became Nazis themselves.
When she arrived in Paris in 1933, Arendt broke not just with her home country but with her professional career in philosophy. She barely published a word during the eight years she spent in France, completing the Varnhagen manuscript only because friends urged her to. Instead she worked. She took a post as an administrator for various charitable efforts aimed at helping the increasing numbers of emigrant Jews gathering in Paris. Something about the relatively bureaucratic procedures of pencil pushing was comforting, achievable, and lacked potential for the same disappointments her “life of the mind” had previously held.
Arendt briefly reunited with Gunther Stern in Paris, but he had gotten himself lost in the writing of an enormously complicated novel (one he would never quite manage to publish), and the marriage soon crumbled. By 1936, she’d met another man—Heinrich Blücher, a gregarious German Communist whose roots in the movement were deep enough that in Paris he lived under a fake name.
It’s tempting to romanticize Blücher’s evidently staggering projection of masculinity, and many an Arendt biographer has succumbed. Blücher was a larger man than Stern or Heidegger. He also had a loud voice and a ready laugh, and he was a man of the world because of his long involvement with politics. But he could also joust intellectually with Arendt, something she demanded in a partner. He expounded strong views on philosophy and history in his letters as well as ordinary dinner conversation. In one memorable letter to Arendt, he begins with consolations and observations about the death of her mother and then ratchets himself up to a full-scale polemic against the allegiances philosophers have to abstract truth:
Marx simply wanted to spread out the heaven of being over the whole earth, as did all those lesser ideologues too. And thus we are all on the verge of choking to death in clouds of blood and smoke … Kierkegaard used the fallen blocks to build a narrow cave in which he locked his moral self together with a God of a monstrous nature. To that one can only say: Well, good luck, and thanks a lot.
As his brash prose style suggests, Blücher was not an academic like Heidegger or Stern. He had done a lot of reading but he was entirely self-taught. Though he had literary ambitions, he never wrote a book himself. He complained of lifelong writer’s block, which apparently didn’t apply to his letter writing. He lived his life as a rejection of the gentility of academic intellectual life, and this seemed to appeal to Arendt. In a letter she’d write to Karl Jaspers ten years after meeting Blücher, she credited her husband (the pair married in 1940, in part so that Blücher could get papers to leave Europe) with having brought her to “see politically and think historically.” She liked that he lived and worked in the concrete world, a place that Heidegger, certainly, had little interest in.
A friend, the poet Randall Jarrell, called them a “dual monarchy.” The point was less their imperiousness—though they could be imperious—than the fact that the Blücher-Arendts drew considerable strength in their relationship from their discussions. Neither seemed to be the master or mistress of the other, although Arendt was frequently the breadwinner in their years in America. The marriage operated on a kind of natural equality, a balance generally untroubled by Blücher’s occasional infidelities.
Being in Paris around other writers and thinkers turned out to be good for her. It was easier to think in concert, Arendt came to find. She had befriended fellow German refugee Walter Benjamin, then a rather unsuccessful critic who was having trouble getting published. Editors quarreled with him, and he only reluctantly gave in to their demands. Benjamin was a classically romantic figure, having come from a prosperous family that found any overt displays of professional ambition quite vulgar. Though his father largely refused to support him, he insisted on a career that naturally led him to penury. As Arendt put it, reflecting on Benjamin’s choice to be an homme de lettres:
Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: Not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line.
Benjamin was among the friends who insisted that Arendt finish her Varnhagen manuscript. “The book made a great impression on me,” he wrote to their friend Gershom Scholem, recommending the manuscript in 1939. “It swims with powerful strokes against the current of edifying and apologetic Judaic studies.” She, too, was interested in helping him do his own work. To Scholem, she wrote, “I am very worried about Benji. I tried to procure something for him here and failed miserably. Yet I am more than ever convinced of the importance of securing him a living for his further work.”
Benjamin was always more of a mystic than Arendt. His connections to the real world were extraordinarily tenuous. But in his aloofness, she later wrote, she found a kind of political principle worth sustaining. She distinguished his homme de lettres mode of living from that of the “intellectuals” she had come to disdain:
Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society.
In the Europe of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the state was a thing worth keeping one’s distance from. Anti-Semitic propaganda rose to a fever pitch in France, and the whole country, pressured by the Nazis to the east, began to fall apart. In late 1939 Blücher was sent to an internment camp in the south of France and only freed months later by an influential friend. In 1940, Arendt herself was sent to a camp in Gurs, near the French border with Spain, where she remained for a month before France surrendered to Germany and internment camps for Jews like Gurs were disbanded. The couple were eventually reunited and obtained a visa to the United States, arriving in New York in May 1941.
In the meantime, Walter Benjamin had also seen the writing on the wall. He arranged to travel to Lisbon to catch a ship to the United States in the fall of 1940. Benjamin had to go through Spain to get to Lisbon. But when he arrived at the Spanish border with a small group of other refugees who had been living in Marseille, they were informed that just that day the border had been closed to people like them who were “sans nationalité.” This meant they would likely end up in a camp. Overnight, Benjamin overdosed on morphine. Before losing consciousness, he gave his companions a note that said he saw no other way out.
Arendt was one of the first friends to hear of what followed, evidence of what she would later, in a long, elegiac essay, call his “bad luck”:
One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.
This was an intellectualized lament for Benjamin’s fate, a laying of ideas onto the tragedy, an attitude that might suggest a certain emotional distance. But Arendt was not distant from what had happened to Benjamin. On her way out of France, Arendt made a special point of stopping and trying to find her friend’s grave. She found only the cemetery, which, she wrote to Scholem:
faces a small bay directly overlooking the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life.
Just before Benjamin left Marseille he’d given her and Blücher a collection of his manuscripts, hoping that if he couldn’t make it to New York himself she could deliver them to his friends there. One of them, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the Arendt-Blüchers read aloud to each other on the ship to America. “Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.” The piece continued:
The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.
But by the time they were on that boat to America, it was already clear that the war raging across Europe would leave very little chance at redemption. Most of what had formed them, including the Germany they had known, was simply gone.
In New York, things were difficult. The Arendt-Blüchers (and later Arendt’s mother) lived together in a couple of dilapidated rooms in a rooming house. They shared the kitchen with other residents. Blücher took a series of odd jobs, the first of which saw him take on a kind of factory work he had never performed before. Arendt went first to a home in Massachusetts to learn English, then began again to earn money by writing, primarily for a small German-language newspaper called Aufbau and other periodicals aimed at émigré Jews. She sent Benjamin’s papers to his friend Theodor Adorno, who was also in New York. But nothing immediately came of it. There seemed to be no plans to publish them.
The articles Arendt wrote in those years are halfway between academic treatises and modern newspaper editorials. Most of them betray a certain stiffness of pen and deadening repetition of theme. Reading them in order, one starts to feel harangued rather than moved. But one piece stands out, a 1943 item written for the Menorah Journal, titled “We Refugees.” It was originally published in English, which may explain the simple register in which it was written; at that point, Arendt had known the language only two years.
But the boiled, stripped-down tone her third language forced upon her suited her elegiac yet polemical purpose: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’” Arendt described a population so beaten down by their experience in Europe that they have suppressed it. The atmosphere, she writes, makes refugees wander around in a daze, unable to speak honestly about what troubled them because no one wants to hear about the “hell” they encountered:
Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
Never afraid to venture into the uncomfortable subject, Arendt was also critical of the prevalence of suicide among refugees—not so much of the people who chose it as the mode in which it was rendered. “Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing,” she wrote. “They seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems.” This, she felt, was inadequate because the logic of the suicide had been provided by the political catastrophe of the Nazis, and even by American anti-Semitism: “In Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are ‘enemy aliens.’”
This essay, written when Arendt was thirty-seven years old, was the first sign that she had any gift for outright polemic. It had taken her that long to convince herself of the uses of writing for the public. Her essay wraps up by calling on Jews to become “conscious pariahs”—Rahel Varnhagen is invoked, along with several other examples that Arendt would flesh out in later essays: Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka, “or even Charlie Chaplin”—because it is the only way out of the deadening, suicide-inducing denial of their situation.
Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of gentiles.
Articles like that brought Arendt to the attention of wider leftist publishing circles in New York. The one most key to all her later activities was the small, prematurely dusty collection of ex-Communists and literary critics who circled around a journal known as the Partisan Review.
For most people the name of that magazine is obscure, its influence unknown. But to a small and influential set of Americans, most of them living or born in the middle of the twentieth century, the Partisan Review came to be emblematic of everything desirable and glamorous about intellectual life in New York. It was a relaunch of an older magazine, one that had been associated with the Communist John Reed clubs. The men at the helm of the second edition—Philip Rahv and William Phillips—had been rebel editors of the first.
The Communist Party of America, in those years, was splitting into factions. One faction believed that allegiance to the Soviet Union must be maintained at all costs for the Communist experiment to succeed. The other took a more skeptical view, particularly of Stalin and his cult of personality. Rahv and Phillips fell into the latter camp. It was not that they had abandoned their leftist principles; it was only that they were unwilling to follow dogmatic party lines. They were—you could say—conscious pariahs of the Communist movement. Since Arendt’s concerns already lay with an analysis of Fascism and its roots, she fit right in.
But the Partisan Review, as it developed, became better known as a journal of arts and letters than as a journal of politics. Arendt’s first contribution, published in the fall of 1944, was an essay on Kafka. Arendt was not the only woman on the masthead—she was joined by the short story writer Jean Stafford, and the poet Elizabeth Bishop—but she was the only one who was writing dense intellectual pieces.
Her early pieces had all the flaws attendant to writing in a second language—she had had to abandon her “Stradivarius,” Blücher wrote to her once, for a “beer fiddle.” This was made all the clearer by the work she did for the Nation, one of the leading magazines of the American left at the time. The editor there was Randall Jarrell, the friend who would help Arendt make her work easier for Americans to read. Evidence of his influence was almost immediate: In 1946, for both the Nation and the Partisan Review, she would write essays on existentialism. But only the one edited by Jarrell had the appealing lead: “A lecture on philosophy provokes a riot, with hundreds crowding in and thousands turned away.” He’d become one of the friends she turned to most frequently to do what she called “Englishing” her work.
As for existentialism, Arendt had known Jean-Paul Sartre a little in Paris. She pronounced herself impressed by Sartre’s La Nausée and Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. But she had the same concerns about them as she now had about all intellectuals, and their tendency, “symbolically speaking, [to] stick to their hotel rooms and their cafés.” She worried too about their paralyzing retreat into absurdity. If they didn’t get out in the world and act, she worried:
The nihilistic elements, which are obvious in spite of all protests to the contrary, are not the consequences of new insights but of some very old ideas.
Arendt had by then begun work on her own omnibus of “new insights,” the book that would become The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was publishing her analyses of anti-Semitism and the plight of stateless people in the Partisan Review and a small constellation of other American leftist journals throughout the 1940s. As early as 1945, she’d persuaded an editor at Houghton Mifflin that the entire analysis deserved to be turned into a book. But it would take her another five years to finish.
The tripartite, unwieldy text she produced is difficult to describe succinctly. It has, as her biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl observed, no gentle introduction that might situate the reader. In the preface to the first edition Arendt began with a broadside against simplistic interpretations of history: “The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.” She also resisted an easy, causal relationship between good and evil, though of course she believed that totalitarianism was by any measure evil:
And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
The expansive, meandering quality of the book was the result of its long gestation. The means of its production were, alongside experience and research, many rambling late-night conversations with Heinrich Blücher. Throughout much of its writing he had been depressed and unemployed; his English was not good enough for clerical work and he had no PhD that might have allowed him to teach. He spent hours instead in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library, while Arendt went to her day job as an editor at Schocken Books, a publishing house founded by refugees from Nazi Germany. The products of those labors—his knowledge of history and her analysis—were then turned over in the couple’s minds late into the evening. The book and its insights were ultimately hers, but his help was invaluable.
The linchpin of Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was the concentration camp, which she described as the ultimate instrument of the “radical evil” of totalitarianism. It was the site of the main Nazi experiment: the total domination of humanity. The terror of the camps succeeded in reducing each person to a “bundle of reactions,” one person interchangeable with the next. This Arendt connected with the feeling many people had that they were, in some sense, “superfluous.” Their lives and their deaths didn’t matter, at least not so much as political ideologies mattered.
Ideology was another of Arendt’s insights. So much of totalitarianism depended on the simplistic promises of ideology, she wrote, its ability to reassure those feeling adrift that the past and the future could be explained by a simple set of laws. It was, in fact, the simplistic reassurances of ideology—even those promises it could never keep—that made it so powerful. Their promise of solutions meant that totalitarian politics would be a continual threat, in Arendt’s analysis:
Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.
The reviews of the book, when it was finally published in 1951, were effusive. They praised not just Arendt’s analysis but her erudition in delivering it. (The text had had “Englishing” from the critic Alfred Kazin, and another friend named Rose Feitelson.) Many of them focused on the way Arendt drew a connection between Nazi totalitarian strategies and the Soviets. The subtitle of the Los Angeles Times review was “Nazi and Bolshevik Varieties Rated as ‘Essentially Identical Systems.’” In fact, she had never used that phrase in Origins at all, only highlighted the similarities between the strategies of movement elites. Arendt was married to an ex-Communist. Many of her new friends in New York were current and former Communists. It was Stalinism and the Soviet form of totalitarianism that worried her, not Communism itself.
The acclaim was so loud and clamorous that Arendt became a household name and Origins sold very well. Even Vogue, not a magazine generally given to covering intellectual affairs, had listed her as an item “People Are Talking About” in mid-1951:
The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, who has written a freshly conceived, monumental but extraordinarily readable book in which she wrote, “What is remarkable in the totalitarian organizations is that they could adopt so many organizational devices of secret societies without ever trying to keep their own goal a secret.”
The use of that somewhat random quotation, which by no mean encapsulates the arguments of The Origins of Totalitarianism, was a good harbinger of what Arendt was about to become: an icon whose ideas were, for many of her admirers, secondary to the figure she cut in public life. To other women in her orbit, she had done something incredible. She not only had achieved equal footing with all the men who styled themselves public intellectuals, but had vaulted past them to put their ideas about the war—all their painstakingly dense articles about the function of human history—in the shadow of her towering analysis. She hadn’t just joined the constellation of intellectuals who had settled in New York in that era. She had become the polestar, a person others flocked to. Some forty years after the book was published, a journalist named Janet Malcolm would write of being “flatteringly mistaken … for someone who might have been invited to Hannah Arendt’s parties in the fifties.”
Not everyone liked Arendt’s new status. Many men, notably, reacted badly. Arendt belonged to the so-called New York intellectuals, a name not used until long after many of its members were dead. The name refers to a cluster of writers and thinkers who gathered in Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s, who befriended and dated and married each other, and a majority of whom were incorrigible gossips. They built their own legends by writing incessantly to and about each other.
Still, we have no record of exactly what their first impressions of Arendt were. We do know that the poet Delmore Schwartz, who hung around the set, called her “that Weimar Republic flapper.” The critic Lionel Abel was said to call her “Hannah Arrogant” behind her back. Even Alfred Kazin, who wrote that she was “vital to my life,” added that he had “submitted patiently to an intellectual loneliness that came out as arrogance.”
These men were no shrinking violets; they were all self-possessed, even prone to grand pronouncements. The degree to which they mistook intelligence for arrogance is no doubt impossible to parse, posthumously. But it would become a problem for Arendt in a way that it never did for Parker, who rarely touched serious subjects like war, history, and politics, and in any event stopped producing much criticism after the 1930s. It also became a problem for Arendt in a way it never did for West, who perhaps was less proximate to the narcissistic competitions the New York intellectuals liked to enter. Men with brilliant, world-encompassing ideas do not seem subject to the same accusations of egotism.
At least at this early stage, only a few people were put off by Arendt’s brilliance and even fewer were willing to say so in print. More prominent were men who could rightly be called fanatics. The literary critic Dwight Macdonald was positively reverent in a review of Origins for a small leftist magazine called the New Leader. He first likened Arendt to Simone Weil, the philosopher-mystic who left behind aphoristic writings on religion and politics. Then, perhaps sensing that Arendt was more worldly than Weil, he went in for a still more ambitious comparison:
The theoretical analysis of totalitarianism here impressed me more than any political theory I’ve read since 1935, when I first read Marx. It gave me the same contradictory sensations of familiarity (“Of course, just what I’ve been thinking about for years”) and shocked discovery (“Can this possibly be true?”) that Marx’s description of capitalism did.
This was not too far off the mark. Origins has ascended to classic status, a must read for historians and political scientists. Thick and somewhat opaque as it was, the way Arendt described the rise of Fascism in the wake of popular discontent is now widely accepted as the truth. She differed from Marx in that she saw no revolutionary solution to the problem she set out. Having become much more sensible, grounded, and jaded in her old age, having watched so many friends fall prey to currents of stupidity and violence, she shrank from simplistic resolutions. She had learned to rely only on herself, and her friends.
She would make a new friend, too, from the publication of Origins. One of the Partisan Review set wrote to Arendt not long after publication, describing it in potboiler terms:
I’ve read your book, absorbed, for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line at the grocery store. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought of, at the very least, a decade, and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is.
Interestingly enough, and perhaps as a sign of respect, the letter writer went on to offer “one larger criticism,” suggesting that in her enthusiasm for her own ideas Arendt had not sufficiently accounted for the role of chance, of luck, in constructing the institutions of totalitarianism. “I don’t think I express this very well, and I haven’t the book to consult, having already lent it,” the letter writer continued chattily, first veering off to criticize an obtuse reviewer as “terribly stupid,” then adding postscripts inviting Arendt and Blücher for lunch and raising the question of anti-Semitism in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Dostoyevsky.
The author of this simultaneously nervous and self-assured letter was the critic Mary McCarthy. Arendt and McCarthy had known each other since 1944, having met—and quarreled—at one of the never-ending Partisan Review parties.