The World of Hannah Arendt
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

Hannah Arendt with her grandfather, Max Arendt, undated. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust.

Portion of Print Page 448 from the Eichmann in Jerusalem typescript for the version published in the New Yorker, 1963. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).

To enter the world of Hannah Arendt is to encounter the political and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the convulsions of two world wars, revolutions and civil wars, and events worse than war in which human lives were uprooted and destroyed on a scale never seen before. She lived through what she called "dark times" whose history reads like a tale of horrors in which everything taken for granted turns into its opposite. The sudden unreliability of her native land and the unanticipated peril of having been born a Jew were the conditions under which Arendt first thought politically, a task for which she was neither inclined by nature nor prepared by education. Insecurity and vulnerability are the general conditions, as she came to realize, in which an urgently experienced need to think is political, though not, to be sure, in a conventional sense. For the traditional view of politics, which may be summarized as the perceived usefulness of government in securing the people's private interests, is in times of crisis precisely what has failed. In her determination to think through the darkness of the twentieth century Arendt discerned a radically different meaning of politics, whose source was the original clearing, in the midst of a plurality of human beings living, speaking, and interacting with one another, of a public space that was brought into existence not for utility but for the sake of human freedom.

There is abundant evidence that Arendt's understanding of what it means to think politically has struck a responsive chord in the contemporary world. In recent years increasing numbers of people have turned to her as a guide they trust in their need to understand for themselves and realize in their own lives the courage it takes to be free. One result of this current interest in Arendt is that, because of constant handling, important components of the literary estate that she bequeathed to the Library of Congress have become fragile and almost illegible. The Arendt collection comprises family papers and personal documents; extensive correspondence with individuals and organizations; notes, background information, transcripts, and court rulings pertaining to the trial of Adolf Eichmann; reviews of her book Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and articles and letters that reflect the bitter, emotional controversy generated by that work; reviews and manuscript drafts of most of her books; and numerous typed and handwritten notes, poems, articles, speeches, lectures, and essays. The earliest of Arendt's writings in the collection dates from 1925 when she was nineteen, and the latest from 1975, the year she died; by far the greater part of them comes from the period after her emigration to the United States in 1941 as World War II raged in Europe. Now, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress has digitized her papers, which in itself may be considered a political as well as a philanthropic act, at once preserving her legacy and through electronic media making it accessible to a far wider reading public than was previously possible.