At the age of sixteen, Martha Arendt, arranged for her to spend two terms studying in Berlin, where the family had friends. Hannah lived in a student residence and took classes in Latin and Greek at the university, where she was introduced to theology by Romano Guardini, a Christian existentialist, who introduced her to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers. (8)

In 1924 Hannah went to University of Marburg where she studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger. He was thirty-five years old and married to Elfride Heidegger when they met: "He was an exceptionally brilliant man but, in his professional and private life, a cautious one... He was also, it would seem, rather vain and self-conscious: he was short, and always insisted on sitting down when he was photographed, so that this would be less apparent." (9)

Hannah attended her first Heidegger lecture in November 1924. He argued that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had taken philosophy in the wrong direction and "turned away from awe-filled contemplation of the actual existence of things toward an abstract metaphysics of ideas and ideal types". This "pre-Christian belief in eternal ideal types and the unity of the universe made him especially attractive eight hundred years later to St. Augustine, who sought to establish an intellectual basis for Christian thought." (10)

Heidegger preferred the pre-Socratics because their thought focused on actual existence. He went on to argue that the decline of civilisation from the earliest heights of pre-Socratic thought had been accelerated by Christianity, which distracted one from the essential fact of existence by directing attention to an afterlife. Hannah later claimed that it was his early lectures that convinced her that he was "the hidden king of thinking". (11)

Heidegger quoted Cato the Elder as saying: "Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself". The central characteristic of this type of thinking is the presence of a second internal voice to hear and test ideas: responding, revising, or rejecting. "The second voice reacts to what the first reacts to what the first proposes, if indeed the two can be told apart definitely. It is the twin-one duality of the mind that makes it possible for the self to reflect on itself, to assess its ideas, even to judge itself." (12)

After one lecture at the beginning of February 1925, Heidegger approached Hannah Arendt and suggested she came to see him in his office. He asked about the lectures and about the philosophers she had been reading. A few days later they began an affair. "He (Heidegger) responded to Hannah's youth, her beauty and her mind. Many years later he declared to her that it was she who had inspired his thought in these years of the mid-1920s... They were lovers for several months... and they would meet in the attic room where she lodged." (13)

Heidegger wrote: "You are my pupil and I your teacher, but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us. I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and I shall grow with you." In another letter he said: "Love is rich beyond all other possible human experiences... because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves... Love transforms gratitude into loyalty to ourselves and unconditional faith in the other... Nothing like it has ever happened to me." (14)

What we know about the first months of their love affair comes mostly from Heidegger's letters to Arendt, which she saved. For whatever reasons, he did not save her letters. Heidegger made it clear that he would never leave his wife, Elfride Heidegger, and their two children. "There are shadows only where there is also sun." Hannah accepted this and agreed to keep the relationship a secret. (15) According to Mary McCarthy, her love affair with Heidegger was the most important that she had in her life. (16) Although she accepted that it was a man of weak character and a "notorious liar". (17)

Arendt later justified her relationship with a married man with children. She believed that the love between them deserved to be preserved and nurtured independently of any social convention or competing obligation. Although his wife was an intelligent woman she could "not participate in his deepest thought or be the companion that he needed to overcome his alienation from the world." Hannah "did not expect their love to last forever, neither could she deny it or feel in any way ashamed". However, as Daniel Maier-Katkin has pointed out: "It was naive... not to see that a deceitful and adulterous husband might also be untrustworthy and undependable as a lover." (18)

Other students who Heidegger had a major influence over included Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse. Like Arendt, they were all "non-Jewish Jews". Heidegger was considered to be an excellent teacher: "Heidegger's impact as a teacher and mentor was, according to most extant accounts, inordinately profound. Few scholars who experienced his mesmerizing lectures and seminars remained untransformed. By the same token, students who fell under his powerful philosophical shadow often had difficulty extricating themselves and establishing an independent intellectual identity - a dilemma that even his most gifted students were forced to confront. Needless to say, such problems were compounded in the case of his extraordinarily talented Jewish students, men and women who often first experienced their Jewish identity in the crosshairs of German anti-Semitism." (18a)

Elfride Heidegger was not very well liked, indeed was deeply resented in some circles. Although she had some Jewish friends, Elfride was openly anti-Semitic in the sense that she did not want German culture to be influenced by what she considered to be "alien" ideas and aesthetics. She was a traditionalist who loved to go on walks while singing popular folk songs. She disliked the pluralism and modernism of the Weimar Republic and was an early supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. (19)

One day the Heidegger family and a group of philosophy students went for a hike and a picnic lunch in the Black Forest. They held an athletic competition and one of the students, Günther Stern, was an easy winner. Elfride was very impressed with this young man who she already knew to be a very fine musician, as well as a talented student in philosophy and literature. At the end of the day Elfride told Stern that he was an exceptional specimen of humanity and that such a young man ought to be a member of the Nazi Party. He replied that as he was Jewish he did not think the party would have a place for him. (20)

Jorg Heidegger was born in January 1919. The following year Elfride became pregnant but Martin was not the father as he had been working abroad at the time of conception. Elfride's physician and childhood friend, Friedel Caesar, was the real father. Heidegger seems not to have been disturbed by Elfride's extramarital pregnancy. It is possible that they had an open marriage. He wrote to her that he understood her love for Friedel. "In the end, they concealed this indiscretion from the world, continuing as husband and wife... Thus they remained, or seemed to remain, within the community of traditional values, and to avoid the stigma of adultery in her case and of having been a cuckold in his." (21)

In the summer of 1925, Hannah relationship with Martin Heidegger began to weaken. In a letter to him she explained the way she was feeling. Derwent May explained: "After her happy childhood, she says that she had become dull and self-preoccupied for a long time. noticing things but not responding to them with any feeling, and finding a protection for herself in this state of mind. Heidegger had released her from this spell, so that the world had become full of colour and fascination and mystery for her again." (22)

Hannah Arendt left University of Marburg and moved to the University of Freiburg, where she studied under Edmund Husserl, a man who had inspired Heidegger's philosophy. Husserl was very impressed with Heidegger recent work and wrote to Erich Jaensch saying. "He is without doubt the most important figure among the rising generation of philosophers... predestined to be a philosopher of great stature, a leader far beyond the confusions and frailties of the present age." (23)

Arendt wrote that Heidegger recognised before anyone else that philosophy was almost dead. It had been formulated into schools of thought and compartmentalized into such disciplines such as logic, ethics, and epistemology, and was not so much taught as "finished off by abysmal boredom." Heidegger did not participate in the "endless chatter about philosophy," rehearsing the teachings of others. He read all the earlier thinkers, and he read them, Arendt said, better than anyone ever had, and perhaps better than anyone ever will again. "His intention was not merely to comprehend or absorb the lessons taught by others, but to interrogate the masters, to think with and against them." (24)

On 9th January, 1926, Arendt visited Heidegger and complained that she felt forgotten. In a letter to Arendt he tried to explain his position: "It is not from indifference, not because external circumstance intruded between us, but because I had to forget and will forget you whenever I withdraw into the final stages of my work. This is not a matter of hours or days, but a process that develops over weeks and months and then subsides. And this withdrawal from everything human and breaking off of all connections is, with regard to creative work, the most magnificent human experience... but with regard to concrete situations, it is the most repugnant thing one can encounter. One's heart is ripped from one's body." (25)

The book Heidegger was working on with Hannah, Being and Time, was published in 1927. Heidegger approached philosophy in a different way. His work was deeply influenced by Charles Darwin that had provided an alternative to Genesis's account of creation and Albert Einstein had reconceptualized the material universe. The ascent of industrialized technology had elevated reason above faith in Western culture. "The various sciences broke away from philosophy, which had for centuries been their home; and all that seemed to be left behind was metaphysics.... Metaphysics came to signify the capacity of the mind to penetrate beyond the physical realm into an extended universe of intangibles filled with questions about the existence of God, the soul, what we are doing when we are thinking, or whether we can be certain that the world as it appears to us is the same as the world as it actually exists." (26)

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were inventive philosophers in the nineteenth century thinking outside of the mainstream. These two became increasingly important over time, but neither was well known or widely read in their own lifetimes or in the early years of the twentieth century. Anthony Grayling argues that Heidegger's work was important in the development of what became known as existentialism: "Commentators on existentialism find its roots in the writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger... Existentialism... is a concomitant of an atheist view that whatever meaning attaches to human existence is found in it or imposed on it by human beings themselves, for one premise of atheism is that no purpose is established for mankind from outside... The four values which individuals... can impose on the meaninglessness of existence to give it value: namely love, freedom, human dignity, and creativity." (27)

Interestingly, the word "love" appears only once in all 500 pages of the book. Heidegger asks a series of questions: "What is existence?" "What is time?" "What is a thing?" "What is a work of art: Is it only the canvas and oils, or does something less tangible also exist there?" But he never questioned the meaning or existence of love. He appeared obsessed with death, "which carries us out of this world, that he failed to notice that it is love which connects us to it." (28) Karl Jaspers commented that because love was absent from Being and Time, the book's style was unlovable. (29)

The anchoring concepts of Being and Time are "being" and "disclosure". These are discussed in existentialist terms. Disclosure is effected by anxiety. It has been pointed out that "anxiety is not fear, which is always fear of something particular, but rather is an indefinite and general mood of dread or anguish." We are thrown into the world without any answers available to the question, "Why am I here, why am I here now?" Heidegger suggests that we deal with this question by the "process of looking at the things around us to find possibilities for escaping our dread." (30) Heidegger also pointed out that the fact of death establishes the meaning of what has been." (30a)

Within a few years, this book was recognized as a truly epoch-making work of 20th century philosophy. It earned Heidegger, in the fall of 1927, full professorship at Marburg, and one year later, after Husserl’s retirement from teaching, the chair of philosophy at University of Freiburg. (31) It catapulted Heidegger to a position of international intellectual visibility and provided the philosophical impetus for a number of later programmes and ideas in the contemporary European tradition, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. (32)

Hannah Arendt moved to the University of Heidelberg where she became friends with a group of intellectuals that included: Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Benno von Wiese, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Frankenstein, Erich Neumann, Hugo Friedrich, Erwin Loewenson, Hans Jonas and Kurt Blumenfeld, the president of the German Zionist Federation. Jonas said that Hannah had a "genius for friendship". Arendt soon began an affair with Loewenson, a young writer from Berlin. (33)

Arendt also had a sexual relationship with Von Wiese, "who was tall, thin, fair-haired, refined, aristocratic, brilliant, and although only a few years older than Hannah, was already professorial and a respected figure in the field of literary history." They were together for two years, "but in the end he claimed to need a wife more dedicated to domesticity." It has also been claimed that he might have been unwilling to marry a Jewish woman. (34)

The most important person she came to know in Heidelberg was Karl Jaspers, who taught her philosophy. He shared with Heidegger the fundamental existentialist convictions. He had been influenced by the works of Karl Marx and "saw modern technology as rendering men mindless and mechanical, utterly alienated from all sense of their Being, as it incorporated them into its own mindless systems." Arendt never considered him so profound a thinker as Heidegger, but preferred his outlook on life. Jaspers was excited by the freedom given to man by finding himself in an empty universe. "The fact that there was no authority, no ultimate truth, provided men with the adventure of finding their own truth - and the further adventure of reaching out to other men to share their thought and discoveries." Jaspers taught his students: "Think for yourself, but in your thinking place yourself also in the situation of every other man." (35)

Hannah Arendt occasionally met Martin Heidegger but in April 1928 he told her because of his fame he would not be able to visit her again. A few days later she wrote to him about their relationship: "I have been anxious the last few days, suddenly overcome by an almost bafflingly urgent fear... I love you as I did on the first day - you know that, and I have always known it... The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought. It requires a long life in its entirety... I would lose my right to live if I lost my love for you, but I would lose this love and its reality if I shirked the responsibility to be constant it forces on me." (36)

Under Jasper's supervision, Arendt worked on her doctoral dissertation, which she had decided would be a study of the idea of love in the thought of Augustine of Hippo in The Confessions (397-398 AD), Arendt admitted, "that for her, every thought had something to do with personal experience, that every thought was a glance backward, an afterthought, a reflection on early matters or events." (37) In 1929 Arendt published The Concept of Love in Augustine. "It is an austere, systematic study, relating Augustine's different concepts of love to the human experience of time." (38)

Arendt argued that Augustine believed that: "Happiness springs into existence when the gap between lover and beloved has been closed; then desire yields to satisfaction and calm quietude. Love is each human being's possibility of gaining happiness. Once we have the object of our desire, however, we begin to feel threatened by the possibility of its loss.. Fear of loss corresponds to the desire to have. The great paradox is that since all things of the world are temporary, love threatens to leave us in a perpetual state of fear and mourning... If man most craves freedom from fear, he will turn away from love of worldly things that can only be lost, and will embrace the eternal Being that exists outside of past, present, and future, the Being from which we come and toward which we are propelled, each at the still point of a turning universe... For Augustine, love carries man beyond the realm of fear and time into a transcendent union in which each present moment is experienced in the presence of the timeless eternal." (39)

In January 1929, Hannah Arendt met Günther Stern, whom she had not seen since 1925. Within a month they were living together and in September they were married. A few days before the wedding, Arendt wrote to Heidegger telling him that the continuity of love between the two of them was still the most meaningful thing in her life: "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... I would indeed so like to know - almost tormentingly so, how you are doing, what you are working on, and how Freiburg is treating you." (40)

Arendt began work on her second book, a biography of the German writer, Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833). A close friend, Anne Mendelssohn, had purchased for her the complete correspondence of Varnhagen in several leather-bound volumes from a bankrupt bookseller. Anne told Hannah that she would find a kindred spirit, an unspoiled, unconventional, intelligent woman, interested in people, passionate and vulnerable. Anne was right and even though she had been dead for nearly a hundred years, Hannah described her as her "closest friend". (41)

Varnhagen, like, Arendt, was a Jewish woman who passionately loved men, who did not return her love. Her words where she expressed her love for Don Raphael d'Urquijo, could have been used by Arendt to describe her feelings for Heidegger: "This man, this creature wielded the greatest magic over me, still wields it. I... gave him my whole heart. And once the heart is given, only love and worthiness can give it back; otherwise it is gone from you... In short, so long as I cannot love someone more intensely, the part of myself necessary for happiness remains in his power." (42)

In the 1790s one of the salons run by women in Berlin was in Varnhagen's spacious apartment. People in attendance were likely to be nobles, authors, musicians, diplomats, high civil servants, scientists, military leaders and master artisans. Regular visitors to Varnhagen's home included the explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, the philosopher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia and prominent authors, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ludwig Tieck. Varnhagen had a series of love affairs with various aristocrats, including the Swedish Ambassador Karl Gustave von Brinckmann, the diplomat Friedrich von Gentz and Count Karl von Finckenstein of Prussia. (43)

Hannah Arendt made it clear in her book that Rahel Varnhagen attempted to use her sexuality to escape from the stigma of being a Jew. In her love affairs and her eventual marriage to the writer, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, she hoped to transcend Jewish identity and establish herself in good society. Although she converted to Christianity, she found this was unavailable to her because in "good society" she remained a Jew. For many years she took this to be the great misfortune of her life. In her last years, Rahel began to appreciate her position of marginality. (44)

This view is reflected in her deathbed declaration recorded by her husband: "What a history! A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. With real rapture I think of these origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand side by side with the latest developments. The greatest distances in time and space are bridged. 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." (45)

Hannah Arendt argued that her study of Rahel Varnhagen had shown that while Jews in Germany had been invited into citizenship as equal human beings, there had never been a place for them in "good" society and that "pariah" is the natural state of a Jew in the Diaspora. Arendt later wrote: "For the formation of a social history of the Jews within nineteenth-century European society, it was, however, decisive that to a certain extent every Jew in every generation had somehow at some time to decide whether he would remain a pariah and stay out of society altogether, or become a parvenu and conform to society on the demoralizing condition that he hides his origin." (46)

While studying the life of Varnhagen that Arendt developed her views towards anti-Semitism. "Writing about Rahel's experience at the beginning of German-Jewish emancipation while observing the looming end of enlightenment in her own immersed her in the Jewish question. Her identity as a Jew arose not out of religious conviction or desire for affiliation, but from an embrace of the role of self-conscious pariah. That the Jews were becoming more than ever a hated and despised minority strengthened Arendt's ties." (47)

The position of Jews in society had changed profoundly between Varnhagen's time at the beginning of the 19th century and Arendt's at the beginning of the 20th century. Jews, often atheistic Jews, had made a major contribution to western culture. This included Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Felix Frankfurter, Isaiah Berlin, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Franz Kafka, Max Reinhardt, Theordor Herzl, Stefan Zweig, Anna Seghers, etc. For example, a third of all Nobel prizes won by Germans had been awarded to Jews. (48)

In the General Election that took place in September 1930, the Nazi Party increased its number of representatives in parliament from 14 to 107. The behaviour of the Nazis became more violent. On one occasion 167 Nazis beat up 57 members of the German Communist Party in the Reichstag. They were then physically thrown out of the building. The stormtroopers also carried out terrible acts of violence against socialists and communists. In one incident in Silesia, a young member of the KPD had his eyes poked out with a billiard cue and was then stabbed to death in front of his mother. Four members of the SA were convicted of the rime. Many people were shocked when Hitler sent a letter of support for the four men and promised to do what he could to get them released. (49)

Hannah Arendt became more interested in politics. Unlike her parents, she had not been active in the German Social Democratic Party. The number of political assassinations perpetrated by right-wing extremists grew rapidly. Arendt responded to the increase in anti-Semitism by saying "if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew, not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever." (50)

According to Arendt: "In a society on the whole hostile to the Jews - and that situation obtained in all countries in which Jews live, down to twentieth century - it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to anti-Semitism also... And if one really assimilates, taking all the consequences of denial of one's own origin and cutting oneself off from those who have not or have not yet done it, one becomes a scoundrel." (51)

Many of Arendt's friends were Zionists, but she refused to join the movement as she disapproved of their impulse to withdraw into a culture of their own. "Arendt... resented the politics of Jewish leadership, which, having always feared the anti-Semitism of the mob, preferred to play ball with anyone in power rather than forging alliances with other people at the bottom. She rejected the underlying (sometimes unspoken) postulate of the Zionist call for a homeland as antagonistic to pluralism in so far as it proposed a benign ethnic cleansing... The judgment Arendt made was that Jews should not look only for a solution to their own problems, but rather that they should show solidarity with all oppressed people to look for solutions that would promote justice everywhere." (52)

On 4th January, 1933, Adolf Hitler had a meeting with Franz von Papen and decided to work together for a government. It was decided that Hitler would be Chancellor and Von Papen's associates would hold important ministries. "They also agreed to eliminate Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews from political life. Hitler promised to renounce the socialist part of the program, while Von Papen pledged that he would obtain further subsidies from the industrialists for Hitler's use... On 30th January, 1933, with great reluctance, Von Hindenburg named Hitler as Chancellor." (53)

Hannah Arendt had watched these events with great concern but it was the Reichstag Fire on 27th February, 1933, after which Hitler ordered the arrests of leading members of the German Communist Party (KPD) and Social Democratic Party (SDP), that convinced her to leave Nazi Germany: "The burning of the Reichstag, and the illegal arrests that followed the same night. The so-called protective custody... This was an immediate shock for me, and from that moment on I felt responsible. That is, I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander." (54)

Arendt's husband, Günther Stern, immediately fled to Paris. She stayed with the idea of helping in some way. Arendt eventually decided to help the German Zionist Federation in collecting materials that would show the extent of anti-Semitism in all aspects of German society. Her research involved risk as the new government had already passed a law that criminalized criticism of the state. Her activities were detected and she was arrested in the spring of 1933 and held at police headquarters for eight days. (55)

Hannah Arendt was able to develop a good relationship with the man who arrested her: "I got out after eight days because I made friends with the official who arrested me. He was a charming fellow! He'd been promoted from the criminal police to a political division... Unfortunately, I had to lie to him. I couldn't let the organization be exposed. I told him tall tales, and he kept saying, 'I got you in here. I shall get you out again. Don't get a lawyer! Jews don't have any money now. Save your money!' Meanwhile the organization had gotten me a lawyer. .. And I sent the lawyer away. Because this man who arrested me had such an open, decent face. I relied on him and thought that here was a much better chance than with some lawyer who himself was afraid." (56)

As soon as Hannah was released she crossed into Czechoslovakia by night and then traveled on to Paris where she rejoined her husband. Although they lived together Hannah wanted a divorce. Stern felt otherwise and she chose not to walk out on him. (57) She later told Heinrich Blücher: "I wanted to dissolve my marriage three years ago - for reasons which I will perhaps tell you someday. My only option. I felt, was passive resistance, termination of all matrimonial duties. It seemed to me that that was my right; but nothing else. Separation would have been the most natural outcome for the other party. Which the other party, however, never thought necessary to opt for." (58)

Hannah became friends with several Jewish intellectuals. This included Alexandre Koyre who explained history as a series of dramatic - even cataclysmic - disruptions and discontinuities; not steady evolution or progress, but suddenly something new growing on the ruins of what had been established, which too will run its course and disappear, making room for something different and unpredictable. This explained the rise of fascism, Koyre argued, not, as the Nazis claimed, a fulfillment of destiny and directionality in history. (59)

Raymond Aron was a committed socialist who had been disillusioned with the developments in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. He argued that just as religion is the opium of the masses, ideology is the opium of the intellectuals. Whereas some intellectuals were willing to defend Stalinism, others, such as Martin Heidegger, were willing to justify Hitler's racial policy. Aron was among the first to see that Stalin was no better than Hitler. (60) Arendt was sympathetic to Aron's anti-Stalinism; and his early recognition of fundamental similarities in the new political systems that had emerged in the twentieth century influenced the development of her thinking about totalitarianism. (61)

Another important influence was the philosopher, Walter Benjamin. He was attracted to Marxism because of its "messianic identification with the oppressed and its promise of justice". Arendt loved "both his character of his thinking and the beauty of his language and recognised him as a polymath genius, an erudite literary stylist who dabbled in philosophy, history, theology, textual interpretation, and literary and cultural criticism, producing minor masterpieces wherever he went." (62) Arendt saw in Benjamin a mixture of "merit, great gifts, clumsiness, and misfortune." (63)

Benjamin was a collector of books, observations, quotations and ideas. He approached the past as a vast and growing pile of broken fragments of earlier and other experience, which he wanted to collect, catalogue, and organize in the hope of resurrecting dead moments of past existence to gain understanding. In the 1930s he produced more than 15,000 handwritten index cards filled with phrases copied from old newspapers and magazines and cross-indexed on a wide variety of subjects. (64)

While in Paris she worked first as a secretary in a Zionist organization, and then as an assistant to Baroness Germaine de Rothschild, the daughter of Édouard de Rothschild, overseeing contributions to Jewish charities. Hannah got on well with the baroness but was fairly hostile to the rest of her illustrious family. The Rothschild were the main force behind the Consistoire de Paris, the major philanthropic enterprise supported by rich French Jews. They and other Jewish leaders were hostile to immigrants, fearing that those from the East would provoke anti-Semitism with their Old World dress and manners, and that left-wing German-Jewish politics would inflame right-wing anti-Semitism in France. (65)

In the winter of 1932, Arendt wrote to Martin Heidegger saying that there were rumours circulating that he was becoming a Nazi and an anti-Semite. He replied rejecting this claim but in reality he was collaborating in secret with Nazi professors and sympathizers to destabilize the elected rector at Freiburg, Wilhelm von Möllendorff, a member of the German Social Democratic Party, who had refused to dismiss Jews working at the university. Heidegger suggested that if he was elected rector, he would join the party and sack Jewish members of staff. (66)

Under pressure from the German government, Von Möllendorff, resigned and on 21st April 1933, Heidegger was elected as rector of University of Freiburg by the faculty, and on 1st May he joined the Nazi Party. If not an anti-Semite, he was certainly an opportunist. He also campaigned for Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations in the plebiscite of November 1933. (67) Over the next year he carried out some of the Nazi educational reforms with what has been described as "enthusiasm". (68)

The Nazi Party made good use of Heidegger. "There were pictures of him in the newspapers: Heidegger, the leading German philosopher, with a Hitler-style mustache, wearing a brown tunic with a high collar and a Nazi Party pin with eagle, globe, and swastika. It might have been laughable in a Charlie Chaplin sort of way were it not for his international prominence as an intellectual... Most significantly, as rector, Heidegger signed all of the letters dismissing Jewish faculty at the University of Freiburg, including the letter to his friend, mentor, steadfast champion, and enthusiastic supporter, the world-famous emeritus professor of philosophy, Edmund Husserl, a baptized Austrian Jew, professing Lutheran, and German patriot whose enthusiastic support over the years prepared the path for Martin's elevation to his chair in philosophy." (69)

Rudiger Safranski, the author of Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1999) argues that Heidegger was not anti-Semitic "in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism". Karl Jaspers said that Heidegger was not openly anti-Semitic, but crude anti-Semitism went against his "conscience and taste". However, in the 1930s, he appeared to be insensitive to the suffering of many of his Jewish friends and colleagues, but that Heidegger was not anti-Semitic "in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism." (70)

Heidegger abolished the Faculty Senate and instituted a dictatorial system of governance. He wrote letters that effectively destroyed the academic careers of dissident graduate students and young faculty members. He went so far as to recommend that the famous chemist Hermann Staudinger (who was not a Jew or active in left-wing politics) be removed from his position as professor because of his pacifist and anti-nationalist beliefs in the First World War. The Ministry of Culture agreed with this decision, but the Nazi government, "afraid of worldwide repercussions" allowed Staudinger to retain his position. (71)

For many years Heidegger was a regular visitor to the home of Karl Jaspers and his Jewish wife, Gertrud Jaspers. The final time that Heidegger visited their home, in 1933, Gertrude spoke directly to him about the hospitality he had accepted in her house over many years, and about how awful and frightening she found the Nazis with whom he had associated himself. Gertrude began to cry and Heidegger commented: "Sometimes crying helps to make you feel better." Heidegger left, never saying goodbye. (72)

Walter Eucken, an economist who worked with Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, who later joined the German Resistance group led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Dohnányi, Friedrich Olbricht, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Claus von Stauffenberg, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Carl Goerdeler, Julius Leber, Ulrich Hassell, Hans Oster, Peter von Wartenburg, Hans Dohnányi, Erwin Rommel, Franz Halder, Klaus Bonhoeffer, Hans Gisevius, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Ludwig Beck and Erwin von Witzleben. Eucken believed that Heidegger saw himself as the natural philosophical and intellectual leader of the Reich and hoped to shape and define Nazi philosophy for the coming millennium. (73)

Despite the fact that Hitler was willing to make use of Heidegger's support, he much preferred the the ideas of Alfred Rosenberg, who had first developed his anti-Semitic views during the First World War when while in Russia in 1917 he first saw a copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. According to Konrad Heiden: "To Rosenberg it was a sign from heaven. Both the place and the hour were significant. Moscow, 1917.... The globe was afire. The Tsar's empire was crumbling. Perhaps there would never again be peace. Perhaps this book would tell him why. The demon, who had incited the nations against each other, had spoken. Perhaps he, Alfred Rosenberg, understood him better than others, for in his own soul he could feel more strongly than others the mesh woven by hatred and love between the nations.... Surely one of the most astounding, far-reaching, and bloody conspiracies of all time was bound to that hour. He who could read would go far." (74)

The book claimed that the First Zionist Congress in 1897 was a gathering of Jewish conspirators. In his book, Die Spur de Juden in Wandel der Zeiten (1920) he pointed to "Bolshevik Jewry" as the moving force behind the Russian Revolution. "Over the next two years he published no fewer than four other books in which he denounced the Jews as wanting in morals, as the founders and perpetuators of the criminal Freemason societies, and as a people of decisive influence in Russia who were plotting to overthrow governments throughout the world by means of Zionism." (75)

Daniel Maier-Katkin has argued that Alfred Rosenberg's philosophy that so appealed to Hitler "revolved around the ideas that God had not created individuals but separate races, that only the race has a soul, that Aryan culture is based on a higher innate moral sensibility and more energetic will to power, and the higher races must rule over and not interbreed with the lower races in order to preserve their superior physical and spiritual heredity." (76)

In November 1923, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as editor of the Volkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer). It was an anti-socialist and anti-Jewish newspaper. For example,one headline was "Clean Out the Jews Once and for All." The article urged a "final solution" of the Jewish problem by "sweeping out the Jewish vermin with an iron broom." The newspaper also campaigned for the concentration camps to house Germany's Jewish population. (77)

Under the editorship of Rosenberg the newspaper became increasingly anti-Semitic. Rosenberg saw English capitalists, as long as they were not Jews, as the Aryan rulers of "coloured sub-humanity". He argued in July 1930 that "German master-men must systematically and peaceably share Aryan world domination... England's task is the protection of the white race in Africa and West Asia; Germany's task is to safeguard Germanic Europe against the chaotic Mongolian flood and to hold down France, which has already become an advance guard of Africa... None of the three states can solve the task of destiny alone." (78)

In the summer of 1933, Heidegger began his campaign to become chair at the University of Berlin and the leadership of the Prussian Academy of University Lecturers. However, he had several enemies within the Nazi Party, including Erich Rudolf Jaensch, who taught philosophy at the University of Marburg and Ernst Krieck, who was a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Jaensch and Krieck wrote to Rosenberg saying that Heidegger's appointment would be "catastrophic" as he was a man who had helped to maintain the old system, especially its "Jewish cliques". Heidegger was described as the "quintessential decadent archetypal representative of the age of decay." (79)

Heidegger traveled to Berlin hoping to see Hitler but his approach was rejected. It now became clear that his enemies in the party had blocked him. In April 1934, Heidegger resigned as rector at the University of Freiburg. He later claimed that he stepped down because Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Education, ordered him to replace the deans of the law and medical schools with party members whom he considered unqualified, but it is more likely he resigned because he realized that he was not trusted by Hitler. (80)

Hannah Arendt wrote some years later, that fascism in Germany did not allow for free initiative in any field of life. It was, she thought, a sign of Heidegger's naivety that he ever thought the Nazis would have a place of leadership for a man who thought independently and whose thought was too complicated for them to understand. "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best guarantee of their loyalty." (81)

Martin Heidegger remained a supporter of Hitler. In the summer of 1936, he visited Rome wearing a swastika pin on his jacket. He told his former student Karl Löwith, who was living in exile, that fascism was the right course for Germany, if one could "hold out long enough". He made it clear that he had not abandoned his ideology, his commitment to German rebirth, nor even his confidence in Hitler's leadership. Although he did not play a major role in Nazi Germany there is no evidence that he ever uttered a word of resistance. (82)

In 1936, Günther Stern left for New York City and they were formally divorced in August 1937. Hannah Arendt never wrote much in direct, personal terms about her own experiences in Paris. However, she did write a great deal about what she called "Europe's greatest immigration-reception area". She wrote about the desperate feeling of the stateless person at having no rights at all, of being outside the pale of the law. (83)

Hannah Arendt fell in love with Heinrich Blücher in the spring of 1936. "Arendt was twenty-nine, Blücher thirty-seven... They fell in love almost at first sight. Both were still formally married but separated from their spouses.... Blücher came from a poor, non-Jewish Berlin working-class background. He was an autodidact who had gone to night school but never graduated... Their attraction was at once intellectual and erotic. Blücher was an autodidact but a highly learned one.... Arendt was fascinated by his intellect. Their relationship now ripened in an atmosphere of intense eroticism." (84)

Arendt's biographer, Daniel Maier-Katkin, has argued: "He (Blücher) was excitable and full of enthusiasms, but still the type who can keep his head when all about are losing theirs. If you were on a lifeboat in a storm in shark-infested water, Blücher would be the companion you would want to have. Tempest-tossed in a dangerous world, Hannah felt safe and secure with Blücher. It would be hard to imagine a steadier or more courageous man, or one more different than Martin Heidegger." (85)

Hannah found herself being able to speak to him about feelings and fears she had never been able to acknowledge before. She also found herself learning a great deal from him. "He had a sense of history and politics that went far beyond the concerns of her Zionist friends. Later she was to acknowledge with unreserved gratitude the enormous influence on her own political thinking of this clever, untutored German who had learned his politics the hard way. And he told his friends that he had at last found the person he needed." (86)

Hannah eventually agreed that she loved Blücher. "I can only truly exist in love. And that is why I was so frightened that I might simply get lost. And so I made myself independent. And about the love of others who branded me as coldhearted, I always thought: if you only knew how dangerous love would be for me. Then when I met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid... It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the 'love of my life' and a oneness with myself. And yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other. But finally I also know what happiness is." (87)

Blücher was a former member of the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party (KPD). He had taken part in the failed German Revolution and saw its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht murdered with the tacit approval of Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the President of Germany. He became disillusioned with the rule of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and in 1928 left the KPD. (88)

Dwight Macdonald would later describe Blücher's political identity as a "true, hopeless anarchist." Blücher remained friends with left-wing radicals but became increasingly preoccupied with the arts. Blücher became a close friends with Robert Gilbert, a Jewish artist (real name Robert Winterfeld) had fled from Nazi Germany in 1933. Gilbert, a left-wing songwriter, filmmaker, social critic and entertainer, introduced Blücher to Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. (89)

In September, 1939, Blücher and all male German immigrants in France were deemed potential dangers to French security and were interred in camps in the provinces. He wrote to Arendt that: "As you can imagine, there are quite a few people here who think of nothing but their own personal destiny." However, because he had a loving partner he was able to cope with being in an internment camp: "I love you with all my heart... My beauty, what a gift of happiness it is to have this feeling, and to know that it will last a whole lifetime and will not change except to grow stronger." (90)

Blücher was eventually released and the couple married on 16th January, 1940. At the beginning of May, with the French government expecting a German invasion, ordered that all Germans except the old, the young, and mothers of children report as enemy aliens to internment camps, the men at Stadion Buffalo and the women at the Velodrome d'Hiver. Arendt observed: "Contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings - the kind that are put into concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends." (91)

The German Army invaded on 10th May, 1940, Arendt rightly predicted would soon be turned over to the Germans. She therefore decided to escape from the camp. Those that remained were later deported to Auschwitz. She walked for over 200 miles to Montauban, a meeting point for escapees. Blücher also escaped from his camp during a German air-raid. They were hidden by the parents of Daniel Cohn-Bendit until friends in United States managed to obtain emergency visas for the couple. (92)

Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher arrived in New York City by boat from Lisbon in May 1941. A refugee organization arranged for her to spend two months with an American family in Massachusetts. "The couple who took her in were very high-minded and puritanical; the wife allowed no smoking or drinking in the house... Yet Hannah was impressed by the couple, especially their intense feeling for the democratic political rights and responsibilities of American citizens" (93)

Her first task was to learn English. Within a year it was good enough to become a part-time lecturer in European history at Brooklyn College. She also wrote a biweekly column in the German language newspaper, Aufbau (other contributors included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig). Blücher worked for a while shoveling chemicals in a New Jersey factory, and then as a research assistant for the Committee for National Morale, an organization whose goal was at first to encourage the United States to enter the Second World War. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor it became an openly anti-fascist group. (94)

Arendt became interested in the political career of Bernard Lazare, the a French literary critic and political journalist. became friends with Theodore Herzl, the founder and leader of the Zionist movement. (95) He became a leading supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French General Staff, who was accused and convicted of espionage for Germany. He argued that Dreyfus was innocent and had been convicted as part of an anti-Semitism campaign. In the first pamphlet on the case, Lazare revealed the illegality of the trial and refuted the accusation point by point and demanded the sentence be overturned. The pamphlet was sent to 3,500 public figures. (96)

Lazare did not get enough support from Zionists and in a article, Job's Dungheap: Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution, published after his death, he attacked wealthy Jews in France for not giving enough support for recently arrived Jewish immigrants: "It isn't enough for them to reject any solidarity with their foreign-born brethren; they have also to go charging them with all the evils which their own cowardice engenders. They are not content with more jingoist than the native Frenchmen; like all emancipated Jews everywhere, they have also of their own volition broken all ties of solidarity. Indeed, they go far that for the three dozen or so men in France who are ready to defend one of their martyred brethren you can find some thousands ready to stand guard over Devil's Island, alongside the most rabid patriots of the country." (97)

In an article published in 1942, Arendt wrote about the conflict between Theodore Herzl and Bernard Lazare. She pointed out that Lazare had been hostile to the Jewish leadership and eventually withdrew from the Zionist movement because he found it patronizing towards ordinary Jews, who were excluded from the councils of policy. Arendt agreed with Lazare that anti-Semitism as an isolated example of hatred of one people, but as part of a broader pattern of racial and ethnic hatred associated with a larger collapse of moral values in Europe. Arendt also agreed with Lazare about the Zionists approach to the poor. (98)

Arendt believed if there is a divide in the world at all, it was not between one ethnic or national group and one another, but between people who are drawn to diversity and people who are repulsed by it. "Herzl had hoped for the support of anti-Semites who, wanting an ethnic cleansing of Europe, would help Jews make their way to Palestine. Arendt, on the other hand, like Lazare, who thought the core of the matter was that the Jews were poor, downtrodden, and demoralized, hoped to find real allies among all oppressed groups to oppose every form of racism, fascism, and imperialism. (99)

Lazare felt that wealthy Jews, who were excluded from the councils of policy. He felt that wealthy Jews offered charity in exchange for political control of the community, and that this meant that poor Jews, the bulk of the people, were oppressed from within as well as without: "I want no longer to have against me not only the wealthy of my people who exploit me and sell me, but also the rich and poor of other peoples who oppress and torture me in the name of my rich." (100)

Hannah Arendt first heard about the extermination of the Jews in Europe in 1943: "We didn't believe this because militarily it was unnecessary and uncalled for. My husband is a former military historian; he understands something about these matters. He said don't be gullible; don't take these stories at face value. They can't go that far! And then a half year we believed it after all, because we had proof... It was really as if an abyss had opened... This ought not to have happened. And I don't mean just the number of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on - I don't need to go into that. This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can." (101)

However, she explained that if one took seriously what Adolf Hitler had said before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Holocaust could have been predicted. Arendt quoted Hitler as making an announcement to the Reichstag in January, 1939: "I want today once again to make a prophecy: In case the Jewish financiers... succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the result will be... the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." (102) Arendt adds that "translated into non-totalitarian language, this meant: I intend to make war and I intend to kill the Jews of Europe." (103)

In 1946, Karl Jaspers sent Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher a copy of his book The Question of German Guilt. Blücher was not impressed: "A Christianized/pietistic/hypocritical nationalizing piece of twaddle... allowing Germans to continue occupying themselves exclusively with themselves for the noble purpose of self-illumination... serving the purpose of extirpating responsibility... This has always been the function of guilt, beginning with original sin... Jasper's whole ethical purification-babble leads him to solidarity with the German National Community and even with the National Socialists, instead of solidarity with those who have been degraded. It seems that... he wishes to redeem the German people.... The Germans don't have to deliver themselves from guilt, but from disgrace. I don't give a damn if they'll roast in hell someday or not, as long as they're prepared to do something to dry the tears of the degraded and the humiliated... Then we could at least say that they have accepted the responsibility and made good, may the Lord spare their souls." (104)

Arendt told Jaspers that he had overlooked the fact that taking responsibility consists of more than accepting defeat and its consequences, or spiritual purification; the highest priority was not introspection, but action on behalf of victims. "We understand very well that you want to leave here and go to Palestine, but, quite apart from that, you should know that you have every right of citizenship here, that you can count on our total support and that mindful of what Germans have inflicted on the Jewish people, we will, in a future German republic, constitutionally renounce anti-Semitism."

She added: "The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate. This is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems... I don't know how we will ever get out of it, for the Germans are now burdened with thousands or tens of thousands of people who cannot be adequately punished within the legal system; and we Jews are burdened with millions of innocents, by reason of which every Jew alive today can see himself as innocence personified." (105)

In October 1944, the Zionist Organization of America, the largest and most influential section of the World Zionist Organization, partially in outrage over what had been done to European Jewry and partially in recognition of worldwide shock and sympathy, adopted a resolution calling for a "free and democratic Jewish commonwealth to embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished". Arendt complained that there was no mention of the Arabs already living on the land, not even a guarantee that they would receive assurances of minority rights. (106)

Hannah Arendt objected to the "ancient idea of a chosen people with a promised land as a justification for the resolution of conflicts not on the basis of politics, but of theological assertions about claims of God-given superiority, which she saw as a form of racism". She rejected the idea of Theodore Herzl of transporting "the people without a country to the country without a people" on the basis that the million or so Palestinian Arabs were people and that it did not matter whether they were formally constituted as a people in a nation or state. (107)

Arendt predicted that if a Jewish state was to be successful it would need the support of one of the major powers: "The Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big far away powers, will appear as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the anti-Semitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of foreign big powers in the region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences." (108)

At the end of the Second World War the British government found itself in intense conflict with the Jewish community over Jewish immigration limits into Palestine. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees sought a new life far from their destroyed communities in Europe. Jewish organizations attempted to bring these refugees to Palestine but many were turned away or rounded up and placed in detention camps because of pressure from Arabs living in the territory. (109)

On 22 July 1946, Irgun attacked the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. A total of 91 people of were killed (41 Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17 Palestinian Jews, 2 Armenians, 1 Russian, 1 Greek and 1 Egyptian) and 46 were injured. The attack initially had the approval of the Haganah, the main paramilitary organization of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. It was claimed the bombing was in response to a series of widespread raids conducted by the British authorities. It has been claimed by Bruce Hoffman, the author of Inside Terrorism (1999) that it was one of the "most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century." (110)

The Jewish insurgency continued and after three Irgun fighters had been sentenced to death for terrorist activities, two British sergeants were captured, held hostage, and it was claimed they would be killed if their men were executed. When the British carried out the executions, the Irgun responded by killing the two hostages and hanging their bodies from eucalyptus trees, booby-trapping one of them with a mine which injured a British officer as he cut the body down. The hangings caused widespread outrage in Britain and were a major factor in the consensus forming in Britain that it was time to evacuate Palestine. (111)

Hannah Arendt condemned the Palestine terrorists, and their ambition to extend future Jewish territory east of the River Jordon. "It was the same kind of Jewish nationalism, with the same disregard for Arab rights, that she had dissociated herself from in Germany in the 1930s - and she did not hesitate to call the terrorists and those who supported them 'Jewish Fascists'.... While American Zionists... were calling for the British to hand Palestine completely over to the Jews, she was developing the argument that Palestine should be a nation in which Jews and Arabs were equal citizens, and should become a member of the kind of British Commonwealth which seemed to her likely to develop after the war, with India a similar kind of dominion member." (112)

In September 1947, the British cabinet decided to evacuate Palestine. According to Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, four major factors led to the decision to evacuate Palestine: the inflexibility of Jewish and Arab negotiators who were unwilling to compromise on their core positions over the question of a Jewish state in Palestine, the economic pressure that stationing a large garrison in Palestine to deal with the Jewish insurgency and the possibility of a wider Jewish rebellion and the possibility of an Arab rebellion put on a British economy already strained by the Second World War. (113)

On 14th May 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared "the establishment of a Jewish state" to be known as Israel. The following day, the armies of four Arab countries - Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq, launched the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Soon afterwards Yemen, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Sudan joined the war. The purpose of the invasion was to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state at inception, and some of the Arab leaders talked about driving the Jews into the sea. (114)

In an article written in May 1948, Arendt argued that Israel's early victories demonstrated military superiority; but time and numbers, she cautioned were inevitably against the Jews. It was possible to win many battles and still lose the war: "The victorious Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities... The nation no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries... would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors." (115)

In 1949, Israel signed separate armistices with Egypt on 24th February, Lebanon on 23rd March, Transjordan on 3rd April, and Syria on 20th July. Israel controlled territories of about one-third more than was allocated to the Jewish State under the UN partition proposal. After the armistices, Israel had control over 78% of the territory comprising former Mandatory Palestine. Arendt commented "like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people." (116)

In 1946 Hannah Arendt wrote an essay on the development of existentialism, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard and including the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, John-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. She explained how Kierkegaard's point of departure is the individual's sense of subjectivity and of being lost and alone in a world in which nothing is certain but death: "Death is the event in which I am definitely alone, an individual cut off from everyday life. Thinking about death becomes an 'act' because in it man makes himself subjective and separates himself from the world and everyday life with other men... On this premise rests not only the modern preoccupation with the inner life but also fanatical determination, which also begins with Kierkegaard, to take the moment seriously, for it is the moment alone that guarantees existence." (117)

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger spells out our "average everyday" attitude towards death. The first thing that he emphasizes is that, although we all know, in one sense, that we are going to die, there is another sense in which we are not fully aware of that fact. (118) As Heidegger points out, "death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximally not yet present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat." (119)

Arendt argued that Jaspers had used the fact of death as a starting point for a life-affirming philosophy in which man's existence is not simply a matter of Being, but rather a form of human freedom. For Jaspers "man achieves reality only to the extent that he acts out of his own freedom rooted in spontaneity and "connects through communication with the freedom of others." She compared Jaspers with Heidegger, who interpreted death as proof of man's "nothingness". She suggests that this approach to philosophy is connected to his support for Adolf Hitler. (120)

In another article published in September, 1946, she attacked German intellectuals such as Heidegger, who went out of the way to aid the Nazis. This included the concentration camps and the extermination camps: "Last came the death factories - and they all died together, the young and the old, the weak and the strong, the sick and the healthy; not as people, not as men and women, children and adults, boys and girls, not as good and bad, beautiful and ugly - but brought down to the lowest common denominator of organic life itself." She went on to say: "Heidegger "whose enthusiasm for the Third Reich was matched only by his glaring ignorance of what he was talking about." (121)

In 1948 Hannah Arendt spent two months in New Hampshire. While she was away Heinrich Blücher began an affair with "a vivacious and sensuous young Jewess of Russian descent". Hannah was very unhappy that the affair was known to some of their friends and felt publicly humiliated. However she was "a Weimar Berliner in social mores, she did not define faithfulness narrowly, maritally". Arendt later wrote: "To be sure, in this world there is no eternal love, or ordinary faithfulness. There is nothing but the intensity of the moment, that is, passion, which is even a bit more perishable than man himself." . (122)

During this period she formed a close friendship with Hilde Frankel, the secretary and adored mistress of the theologian Paul Tillich. Hannah described Frankel as "gifted with erotic genius" and with her enjoyed an intimacy "like none she had ever known with a woman". In a letter she wrote to Frankel she expressed her gratitude for the relationship: "Not only for the relaxation which comes from an intimacy like none I have ever known with a woman, but also for the unforgettable good fortune of our nearness, a good fortune of our nearness, a good fortune which is all the greater because you are not an intellectual (a hateful word) and therefore are a confirmation of my very self and of my true beliefs." (123)

In 1951 Hannah Arendt published her major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, a "grand synthesis of a decade of thinking about the destruction of the world and civilization into which she had been born". It was dedicated to Heinrich Blücher, who had been her principal thinking partner in this effort, and assisted with the research. Raymond Aron was impressed "by the strength and subtlety of its analyses" and helped establish her prominence as a political thinker and public intellectual. The review in the New York Times said it was "the work of one who has thought as well as suffered". (124)

The book was over a quarter of a million words. In the first two sections of her book, Anti-Semitism and Imperialism, Arendt ranges far and wide through the history in the last 200 to 300 years, identifying events that might be thought to have played that kind of part in the eventual emergence of totalitarianism (the subject of the third section). "Hannah Arendt sets the scene with the nation-states of Europe as they developed at the end of the feudal era. Here was a world of legitimate and limited conflicts: within each nation, conflicts between class and class and between party and party; in Europe as a whole, conflicts between one nation and another." (125)

In the introduction of the book, Hannah Arendt points out that their is a difference between Anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred: "Anti-Semitism, a secular nineteenth-century ideology - which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870's - and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same; and even the extent to which the former derives its arguments and emotional appeal from the latter is open to question. The notion of an unbroken continuity of persecutions, expulsions, and massacres from the end of the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, the modern era, and down to our own time, frequently embellished by the idea that modern Anti-Semitism is no more than a secularized version of popular medieval superstitions, is no less fallacious than the corresponding anti-semitic notion of a Jewish secret society that has ruled, or aspired to rule, the world since antiquity." (126)

Arendt argues that there were several reasons why Anti-Semitism became an important force in the 19th century. "Of all European peoples, the Jews had been the only one without a state of their own and had been, precisely for this reason, so eager and so suitable for alliances with governments and states as such, no matter what these governments or states might represent. On the other hand, the Jews had no political tradition or experience, and were as little aware of the tension between society and state as they were on the obvious risks and power-possibilities of their new role." (127)

Arendt used the example of the S M von Rothschild, a banking enterprise established in 1820 by Amschel Mayer Rothschild in Frankfurt. Branches were established by Salomon Mayer Rothschild (Vienna), Nathan Mayer Rothschild (London), Calmann Mayer Rothschild (Naples) and Jakob Mayer Rothschild (Paris). According to Niall Ferguson, the author, The House of Rothschild (1999), during the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world, as well as in modern world history. (128)

Arendt explained: "The history of the relationship between Jews and governments is rich in examples of how quickly Jewish bankers switched their allegiance from one government to the next even after revolutionary changes. It took the French Rothschilds in 1848 hardly twenty-four hours to transfer their services from the government of Louis Philippe to the new short-lived French Republic and again to Napoleon III. The same process repeated itself, at a slightly slower pace, after the downfall of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic." (129)

Arendt gives the example of Karl Lueger, the leader of the Christian Social Party (CSP) and the mayor of Vienna. Lueger criticised the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) in Austria, the largest political party. Its leader was Victor Adler, and Lueger attacked him for his Jewish origins and his Marxism. Lueger advocated an early form of "fascism". This included a radical German nationalism (meaning the primacy and superiority of all things German), social reform, anti-socialism and anti-semitism. In one speech Lueger commented that the "Jewish problem" would be solved, and a service to the world achieved, if all Jews were placed on a large ship to be sunk on the high seas. (130)

These speeches by Lueger upset Franz Joseph, the Emperor of the Austria–Hungary Empire, who in 1867 had granted the Jewish population equal rights, saying "the civil rights and the country's policy is not contingent in the people's religion". The persecution of Jews under Tsar Alexander III resulted in large-scale emigration from Russia and by 1890 over 100,000 Jews lived in Vienna. This amounted to 12.1% of the total population of the city. Migration from Russia grew even faster after the forced expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891. (131)

After the 1895 elections for the Vienna's City Council the Christian Social Party, with the support of the Catholic Church, won two thirds of the seats. Lueger was selected to became mayor of Vienna but this was overruled by Emperor Franz Joseph who disliked his anti-semitism. The Christian Social Party retained a large majority in the council, and re-elected Lueger as mayor three more times, only to have Franz Joseph refuse to confirm him each time. He was elected mayor for a fifth time in 1897, and after the personal intercession by Pope Leo XIII, his election was finally sanctioned later that year. Konrad Heiden has pointed out that without the "all-powerful Catholic Church" Lueger could never have achieved power." (132)

Controversially, Arendt refused to exempt the Jews in Europe from political responsibility for what happened in Nazi Germany: "She rejected the idea that eternal anti-Semitism was simply a fact of history, and argued that a degree of responsibility for the persistence of anti-Semitism lies with the leaders of Jewish communities - the privileged parvenus with wealth and access to power who had governed their impoverished brethren through economic power and philanthropy, consistently aligning themselves with the wrong and ultimately losing side in national and European politics. They preferred monarchies to republics because they instinctively mistrusted the mob. They did not understand, Arendt argued, that over time, as various classes of society came into conflict with the state, ordinary people became anti-Semitic because the Jewish leadership invariably aligned their communities with whoever was in power. She did not offer this as a justification for what happened, but as part of an effort to understand how it could have happened." (133)

The book included a critique of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and the totalitarian political system they had established. The term "totalitario" was coined by Giovanni Gentile, the Italian political theorist who had helped establish the corporate state under Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. He used the word to refer to the totalizing structure, goals, and ideology of a state directed at the mobilization of entire populations and control of all aspects of social life including business, labour, religion and politics. (134)

Arendt suggests that totalitarian dictators need to develop a special relationship with the masses. Hitler, for example, exercised a "magic spell" over his listeners. This fascination, what the German historian, Gerhard Ritter, has described as "the strange magnetism that radiated from Hitler in such a compelling manner" rested "on the fanatical belief of this man in himself." She adds: "The hair-raising arbitrariness of such fanaticism holds great fascination for society because for the duration of the social gathering it is freed from the chaos of opinions that it constantly generates." (135)

Fascist dictators aim and succeed in organizing masses, not classes. "Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls." (136)

Ardent pointed out that it was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany "that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been 'spoiled' by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction." (137)

Hitler knew how to exploit feelings of nationalism: "Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons... The most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather than from the masses. Hitler's biography reads like a textbook example in this respect." (138)

Stalin gained power in a different way from Hitler. He had been a member of the Bolsheviks that had formed a revolutionary government in 1917. It was not until the death of Lenin that he could impose himself as a dictator. "All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin's way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an atomized and structureless mass, he had first to liquidate the remnants of power in the Soviets which, as the chief organ of national representation, still played a certain role and prevented absolute rule by the party hierarchy." (139)

In a time of crisis, to achieve totalitarian power, involves a temporary alliance between the mob and the elite. "What is more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society... This attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of totalitarian movements as their more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere, the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place... This breakdown, when the smugness of spurious respectability gave way to anarchic despair, seemed the first great opportunity for the elite as well as the mob. This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life." (140)

Propaganda is a vital aspect of totalitarian governments: "The terrible demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin's and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination." (141)

The finishing point in the narrative is the Nazi extermination camps. "Hannah Arendt portrays the terror and the genocide for which those camps were created as the necessary goal of the whole whirling, on-driving movement of Nazi totalitarianism. And she wants to ask: how did these unforeseeable and previously unimaginable horrors appear in man's history? Can we begin to understand this unspeakable outrage to all our once cherished conceptions of man's dignity - or at least of man's elementary rationality and common sense?" (142)

Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt soon after reading The Origins of Totalitarianism: "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 a novel is: i.e. that it says something on nearly every page that is novel, that one could not have anticipated from what went before but that one often recognized as inevitable and foreshadowed by the underlying plot of ideas." (143)

After the war Arendt and Heidegger resumed contact by letter. They did not meet again until February 1950. Although they enjoyed discussing a wide variety of topics, Elfride Heidegger was less friendly and on Martin's request she wrote to her about the affair. "Martin and I have probably sinned just as much against each other as against you. This is not an excuse... Please believe one thing: what was and surely still is between us was never personal... You never made a secret of your convictions, after all, nor do you today, not even to me. Now, as a result of those convictions, a conversation is almost impossible, because what the other might say is, after all, already characterized and (forgive me) categorized in advance." (144)

In a letter to Heinrich Blücher she explained what happened when she met Heidegger: "On top of everything, this morning I had an argument with his wife. For twenty-five years now, or from the time she somehow wormed the truth about us out of him, she has clearly made his life a hell on earth. And he, who always, at every opportunity, has been such a notorious liar, evidently (as was obvious from the aggravating conversation the three of us had) never, in all those twenty-five years, refuted that I had been the passion of his life. His wife, I'm afraid, for as long as I'm alive, is ready to drown any Jew in sight. Unfortunately she is absolutely horrendous." (145)

Over the next two years Arendt and Heidegger exchanged seventy letters. After their meeting in 1950 Heidegger wrote to her almost every day for the next few weeks, and urged her in the most earnest terms to come back to Freiburg for a second visit. In one letter he wrote: "You are right about reconciliation and revenge". Arendt later explained why she was unwilling to forgive Heidegger because of "the possibility that the one who is forgiven may interpret forgiveness as a release from moral culpability - which can perhaps be earned but not bestowed." Revenge "nevertheless preserves relationships because the person seeking vengeance always stays close (at least in a psychological sense) to the other, with no pretence of superiority - sharing perversely in the solidarity of sinners, wanting to do to the other what was done to him." (146)

In 1952 both Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher became American citizens. They became friends with a large number of left-wing intellectuals including Dwight MacDonald, Sidney Hook, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, Frederick Dupee, William Phillips, Harold Rosenberg, Daniel Bell, Delmore Schwartz, William Barrett, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin. Most of these figures were associated with the Partisan Review, a journal established by some members of the American Communist Party in 1934 as an alternative to the pro-Stalin New Masses, but by the 1950s was being secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. (147)

The couple became especially close to the poet, Randall Jarrell. He was a regular visitor to their house and he wrote to his wife that they were "a scream together", that sometimes they had "little cheerful mock quarrels and that they shared household duties such as washing dishes, and that "she kids him a little more than he kids her" and "they seem a very happy married couple". Jarrell characterized the relationship between Hannah and Heinrich as a "dual monarchy". (148)

After one of their weekends Jarrell wrote to Hannah that he found Heinrich awe-inspiring because encountering a perso9n even more enthusiastic than himself was like "the second fattest man in the world meeting the fattest." Jarrell committed suicide at the age of fifty-one. He was walking along a country road at night when he jumped in front of a car. Hannah said the last time she saw him, not long before his death, that the laughter in him was almost gone and he was almost ready to admit defeat. (149)

In July 1952, Heinrich Blücher was employed by Bard College, a progressive liberal arts school not far from New York City, as a tutor in the philosophy department. He also became active in opposition to Joseph McCarthy who was attempting to blacklist those working in the arts and education who were former members of the American Communist Party. Blücher failed to persuade the American Committee for Cultural Freedom to pass a resolution condemning what had become known as McCarthyism. (150)

Hannah Arendt, had for over 20 years opposed the totalitarian aspects of communist thought and Soviet practice, but she grew increasingly concerned as McCarthyism and the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee threatened to raise anti-communism into a full-fledged attack on traditional American conceptions of civil liberties. Her experiences in Nazi Germany when "the German intelligentsia in the 1930s left Arendt with little confidence that intellectuals would have the courage or foresight to stand up for fundamental values". (151)

In March 1953, Arendt published an article in Commonweal Magazine about the court-case where Whittaker Chambers was the main witness against Alger Hiss. Arendt observed that the ex-communists still had communism at the centre of their lives, opposing it now with the same dangerous zeal with which they had once embraced it. She argued that fighting totalitarianism with totalitarian methods, which people like Chambers knew would be disastrous. Arendt finished her article by arguing that any attempt to "make America more American" can only destroy it. (152)

This was a brave article as Congress had just passed the McCarran-Walter Act, that authorized the deportation of recently arrived immigrants who had been members of the communist party or fellow travellers. Heinrich Blücher was especially vulnerable as he had been a former member of the German Communist Party. Arendt was supported by Mary McCarthy who was also publicly outspoken against the dangers of extreme anti-communism and talked about giving up her writing career in order to go to law school and become an advocate for civil liberties in the courts. (153)

In June, 1953, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers about the political crisis in America. She praised Albert Einstein for taking a public position on McCarthyism, encouraging intellectuals to risk contempt of Congress rather than testify. "Politically that is the only correct thing to do; what makes it difficult on the practical level isn't the legal implications but the loss of one's job." She complained that Sidney Hook, a major figure in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, called Einstein's suggestion "ill considered and irresponsible". (154)

Some figures in the media, such as writers Freda Kirchway, George Seldes and I. F. Stone, and cartoonists, Herb Block and Daniel Fitzpatrick, continued to campaign against Joseph McCarthy. Other figures in the media, who had for a long time been opposed to McCarthyism but were frightened to speak out, now began to get the confidence to join the counter-attack. Edward Murrow, the experienced broadcaster, used his television programme, See It Now, on 9th March, 1954, to criticize McCarthy's methods. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." (155)

Harry S. Truman, the former president of the United States spoke out against McCarthyism: "It is now evident that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society." (156)

Popular newspaper columnists such as Walter Lippmann and Jack Anderson also became more open in their attacks on McCarthy. Lippmann wrote in the The Washington Post: "McCarthy's influence has grown as the President has appeased him. His power will cease to grow and will diminish when he is resisted, and it has been shown to our people that those to whom we look for leadership and to preserve our institutions are not afraid of him." (157)

The senate investigations into the United States Army were televised and this helped to expose the tactics of Joseph McCarthy. Leading politicians in both parties, had been embarrassed by McCarthy's performance and on 2nd December, 1954, a censure motion condemned his conduct by 67 votes to 22. Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers: "McCarthy is finished. The historians will no doubt busy themselves someday writing about what has happened here and how much extremely valuable china got smashed in the process... What I see in it is totalitarian elements springing from the womb of society, of mass society itself, without any movement or clear ideology." (158)

Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition in 1958. Peter Baehr argues that the book contains within it two distinct, if overlapping, narrative levels. "On one level, we are introduced to a quasi-historical sketch of how three fundamental activities - labor, work, and action - have been envisaged, ordered, and reordered from ancient to modern times. These activities, which in sum compose the vita activa, were themselves traditionally seen as inferior to the vita contemplativa - the life of contemplation - until the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the emergence of capitalism began the process that reversed this order of estimation." (159)

Arendt begins the book with the launching of the Sputnik the previous year: "In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circulated the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies - the sun, the moon, and the stars. The event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it." (160)

Arendt suggested that people seemed to think that "human existence was a free gift from nowhere" and wanted to exchange it for something new and man-made. "The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice." (161) Daniel Maier-Katkin has argued that "Arendt's judgment that it makes more sense to love and care for the Earth than to abandon it anticipated the environmental and ecological movements of the next half-century." (162)

Arendt criticised Karl Marx reluctantly because of her recent experience of McCarthyism and her sense of loyalty towards her husband, Heinrich Blücher, who still believed in the possibility of communist revolution: "Karl Marx will be criticised. This is unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional anti-Marxists." (163)

Hannah Arendt pointed out that the Bolshevik Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union suggested that Marx had made a serious mistake about the "withering away" of the state: "The difference between the Christian and socialist viewpoints in this respect, the one viewing government as a necessary evil because of man's sinfulness and the other hoping to abolish it eventually, is not a difference in estimate of the public sphere itself, but on human nature." (164)

Arendt argues that labour (which sustains life) is different from work (which is the expression of man's creativity). If automation were to allow us to free ourselves from labour, freedom would be meaningless to us without the contrast with futile necessity that labour provides. Meanwhile, advances in production and the transformation of work into labor means that many things that were once to be lasting works are now mere disposable objects of consumption, "The solution...consists in treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food." (165)

In the book, Arendt also deals with her conflict with Martin Heidegger, although she never mentions his name. She writes about the possibility of reconciliation, an action that can produce new beginnings. Reconciliation cannot be achieved merely through an averted glance; the pain is too great to be denied and can only be overcome through forgiving. Forgiving, like love, derives from being with others - no one, Arendt thought, can forgive himself. Christian belief recognized that men must forgive each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God. "The freedom contained in Jesus' teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end." (166)

Revenge, which is the natural, expected, automatic reaction to transgression, never puts an end to the consequences of a misdeed, but instead keeps everyone bound to a chain reaction with no place for freedom or spontaneity. Forgiving, which can never be predicted, "is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly... thus freeing both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven." (167)

Arendt points out that Christianity associates forgiveness with love. She goes on to argue that love is regard for another person from the distance that the world puts between us, love as awareness of shared humanity rather than as admiration or esteem. Arendt adds: "The whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good." (168)

Soon after the publication of The Human Condition the poet, W. H. Auden, introduced himself to Arendt with a telephone call. The book, he said, left him with the impression that it had been written especially for him, to answer precisely those questions he had been putting to himself. However, he disagreed with her use of the phrase, "we forgive what was done for the sake of who did it". Auden approached the problem of forgiveness as a turn-the-other-cheek variety of Christian, believing one must practice charity and forgiveness for the sake of Jesus, for the sake of the good. (169)

On May 24th, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem by agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. In July 1942, Eichmann joined Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Muller and Roland Friesler attended the Wannsee Conference where they discussed the issue of the large number of inmates in Germany's concentration camps. At the meeting it was decided to make the extermination of the Jews a systematically organized operation. Eichmann was placed in charge of what became known as the Final Solution. After this date extermination camps were established in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000). In August 1944 Eichmann reported to Himmler that, although the death camps kept no exact statistics, 4 million Jews had died in them and that 2 million more had been shot or killed by mobile units. (170)

When the news was announced, Arendt approached William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, suggesting that she be sent to report on the trial. He accepted her offer. She told friends that attending the trial in Jerusalem was an obligation that she felt she owed to her past. She told Karl Jaspers: "You will understand, I think, why I should cover this trial; I missed the Nuremberg Trials, I never saw these people in the flesh, and this is probably my only chance." (171)

Jaspers replied that he felt unsettled by the trial and questioned the legitimacy of Israel's claim to the right to try Eichmann for crimes committed before the existence of the state. Jaspers would have preferred for the international community, perhaps through the United Nations, to create a permanent international criminal court to hear cases involving crimes against humanity. He believed that Eichmann deserved to be executed, but since "what was done to the Jews was done not only to the Jews" but to all humankind, the sentence would best be imposed outside of Israel and in the name of all humanity." (172)

Arendt arrived in Israel on 9th April, 1961. She wrote to Heinrich Blücher about her first impressions of the trial. Eichmann in his glass cage like "a materialization at a séance", the prosecutor, a Galician Jew, immeasurably boring and taking "a blue streak, constantly repeating and contradicting himself like an eager schoolboy who wants to show how much he knows". The defence attorney, "oily, adroit and corrupt," but concise and to the point, "much more clever than the public prosecutor". Only the three judges, all German Jews, "the best of German Jewry," towering high above the proceeding, impressed her favorably, especially the presiding judge, Moshe Landau, who she found "really and truly marvelous - ironic and sarcastic in his forbearing friendliness." (173)

The five-part series in the The New Yorker began on 16th February, 1963. "There is no doubt from the very beginning that it is Judge Landau who sets the tone, and that he is doing his best - his very best - to prevent this trial from becoming a 'show' trial under the direction of the prosecutor, whose love of showmanship is unmistakable. Among the reasons he cannot always succeed is the simple fact that the proceedings happen on a stage before an audience, with the usher’s marvellous shout at the beginning of each session producing the effect of a rising curtain. Clearly, this courtroom is well suited to the show trial that David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped in Argentina and brought to the District Court of Jerusalem to answer the charge that he had played a principal role in 'the Final Solution of the Jewish question,' as the Nazis called their plan to exterminate the Jews. And Ben-Gurion, who has rightly been given the title of 'architect of the state,' is the invisible stage manager of the proceedings." (174)

Arendt objected to the message of the trial: "The lesson that the government of Israel derived from the Holocaust... was that the world hates Jews, that security requires Jews to separate themselves from the peoples of the world and become strong so that generations of virile young Israelis would never succumb to a ghetto mentality the way the Jews of the Diaspora... had, debased and walking quietly to their deaths." Arendt believed the Holocaust "owed more to the short-lived triumph of racist totalitarian ideology and the imperfect judgment of Jewish leaders than to any inherent weakness derived from Jewish involvement in the European Enlightenment." (175)

Arendt criticized the motives of the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion for holding the trial in Jerusalem. In a Ben-Gurion's pre-trial pronouncements, he made it clear that the trial was meant to be a demonstration to the world of both how much the Jews had suffered in history, and how determined Israel was to let the world know that they would not let it happen again. He declared that he hoped that the trial would teach young Jews "the most tragic in our history, the most tragic facts in world history", and that "the Jews are not sheep to be slaughtered but a people who can hit back." Hannah disliked the "rhetoric of self-pity and aggressiveness" as being "undignified and inappropriate attitudes for Jews". (176)

In several speeches Ben-Gurion’s attacked Arab countries for protecting Nazi criminals: "That Arab nationalists have been in sympathy with Nazism is notorious, and neither Ben-Gurion nor this trial was needed 'to ferret them out;' they were never in hiding. The trial revealed only that all rumors about Eichmann’s connection with Haj Amin el Husseini, the wartime Mufti of Jerusalem, were unfounded.... Documents produced by the prosecution showed that the Mufti had been in close contact with the German Foreign Office and with Himmler, but this was nothing new. But... his failure to mention present-day West Germany in this context was surprising. Of course, it was reassuring to hear that Israel 'does not hold Adenauer responsible for Hitler,' and that 'for us a decent German, although he belongs to the same nation that twenty years ago helped to murder millions of Jews, is a decent human being.' (There was no mention of decent Arabs.) While the German Federal Republic has not yet recognized the State of Israel - presumably out of fear that the Arab countries might thereupon recognize Ulbricht’s Germany - it has paid seven hundred and thirty-seven million dollars in reparation to Israel during the last ten years; the reparation payments will soon come to an end, and Israel is now trying to arrange with West Germany for a long-term loan." (177)

The impression of Eichmann provided by Hannah Arendt upset a lot of her Jewish readers: "Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man (Eichmann) was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise this trial, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. (178)

Arendt was incensed by the hypocrisy of Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, who denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans, even though he knew, as she pointed out, that Israel prohibited the intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews. The better-informed journalists were well aware of this irony but did not mention it in their reports. (179) "This, they figured, was not the time to tell the Jews what was wrong with the laws and institutions of their own country." (180)

Arendt complained about the behaviour of Jewish leaders during the Holocaust. For example, Philip von Freudiger, a leader of the Hungarian Jewish community and Rudolf Kastner, the vice president of the Zionist organization in Budapest, were involved in the negotiations with Eichmann in arranged for the transport of Hungarian Jews to the concentration camps, where 99% of them died. She claimed that Freudiger and Kastner had saved 1,684 prominent community leaders by throwing overboard 476,000 innocent victims. However, both Freudiger and Kastner survived and went to live in Palestine and later became prominent figures in Israel. (181)

Arendt wrote that the "role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people" was documented Raul Hilberg, in his book, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) in all its "pathetic and sordid detail and is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story." (182) Arendt claimed that Krasner "had sold his soul to the devil". (183) He was later shot dead as he arrived at his Tel Aviv home. The attack was carried out by a three-man squad from a group of veterans from the pre-state right-wing Jewish underground group. (184)

Arendt explained how the Nazi plan to physically exterminate the Jews of Europe was known as the Final Solution. In January 1942, the Wannsee Conference was called to coordinate all efforts to implement the program. "Eichmann was present and was so impressed with the fact that a group of high Nazi officials laid down the program, that he followed orders blindly from then on. The darkest chapter of the story of Jewish extermination was that certain Jewish leaders cooperated with the Nazis.... The Nazis considered some Jews 'first-rate' and granted them the status of Germans, or half-Jews and thousands were exempted from restrictions. This may explain why a number of Jews or half-Jews were Nazi officials: Heydrich, Hans Frank, General Erhard Milch. Long account of the handling of the Final Solution in Hungary. It did not suit the Nazi timetable to exterminate these Jews until 1944, when in less than 2 months, 434,351 were sent to their deaths. When the war went badly for the Germans, the Nazis decided to pursue a more moderate policy in regard to the Jews. Eichmann, however, continued along previously designated lines and went on record to the effect that he did not approve of the new line." (185)

Eichmann pleaded "not guilty in the sense of the indictment," and maintained that "with the killing of the Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter - I never killed any human being, I never gave an order to kill; I just did not do it." He did not deny that he had aided and abetted the annihilation of the Jews, and even called this "one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity", but argued he was only following orders. (186) Arendt did not absolve Eichmann of guilt, nor oppose his execution, "But thought the prosecution case against him was misleading insofar as it portrayed him as a monster, and exaggerated in its assessment of his individual responsibility for the totality of harm done to the Jewish people." (187)

Adolf Eichmann was found guilty on 31st May, 1962, and pleaded that he should be allowed to live. "I have heard the Court's severe verdict of guilty. I see myself disappointed in my hopes for justice. I cannot recognize the verdict of guilty. I understand the demand for atonement for the crimes which were perpetrated against the Jews. The witnesses' statements here in the Court made my limbs go numb once again, just as they went numb when once, acting on orders, I had to look at the atrocities. It was my misfortune to become entangled in these atrocities. But these misdeeds did not happen according to my wishes. It was not my wish to slay people. The guilt for the mass murder is solely that of the political leaders... Once again I would stress that I am guilty of having been obedient, having subordinated myself to my official duties and the obligations of war service and my oath of allegiance and my oath of office, and in addition, once the war started, there was also martial law." (188)

Eichmann was hanged a few minutes past midnight on 1st June 1962. The execution was attended by a small group of officials and journalists. After making a formal declaration that as a non-Christian Nazi he did not believe in the after-life. His last words were reported to be: "Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God." (189)

Some critics accused her of showing no sympathy towards them in the dreadful moral dilemmas they often had to resolve or the agonizing decisions they had to take. This is not true as she addressed this in the first chapter of the book and one of the first articles that she wrote for The New Yorker, when she quoted a question frequently asked in court, "Why did you not revolt?". Arendt commented: "The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941 dared to attack a German security police department. (190)

The articles upset the Israeli government and attempts were made to stop the publication of her book on the trial. Siegfried Moses, wrote a letter on behalf of the Council of Israeli Jews from Germany where he warned that if the book was published it would be a "declaration of war". (191) Moses flew to Switzerland to meet with Arendt where she refused and warned him that "her Jewish critics were going to make the book into a cause célèbre and thus embarrass the Jewish community far beyond anything that she had said or could possibly do." (192)

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was eventually published it caused a storm of protest: "She challenged the legitimacy, morality, and effectiveness of the Jewish leadership past and present. She was not hostile to Israel but was firmly in the loyal opposition, wanting Israel to adopt secular, multicultural values in support of a state based on the equality of all citizens; failing that, she would have liked a government with a less belligerent attitude, committed to working for peace by promoting projects of cooperation between Arabs and Jews." (193)

The book received some good reviews. Hans Morgenthau wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Arendt's work was "superb," "concise," "incisive," and "powerful". (194) The poet Robert Lowell described the book as a masterpiece and called Arendt as a person with a "heroic desire for truth". Dwight Macdonald called it "a masterpiece of historical journalism". Norman Podhoretz admired Arendt's scrupulous account of the almost total unwillingness of the Federal Republic of Germany "to prosecute and mete out adequate punishment to Nazi war criminals still at large and in many cases flourishing." (195) Bruno Bettelheim agreed with Arendt that the Jewish leadership needed to be condemned for co-operating with the Nazis. (196)

The Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish non-governmental organization established to fight anti-Semitism, distributed a memorandum informing its members of "Arendt's defamatory conception of Jewish participation in the Nazi Holocaust". Leo Mindlin wrote that Arendt was a self-hating Jew who had turned her back on her faith and she was "digging future Jewish graves to the applause of the world's unconverted anti-Semites." (197) A Jewish magazine, Commentary, claimed that "in place of the monstrous Nazi, she (Arendt) had given us the banal Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr... the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence... the collaboration of criminal and victim." (198)

Gershom Scholem, a German Jew, who worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote to Arendt explaining that in the Jewish tradition there is a concept known as "Ahabath Israel: Love of the Jewish people and that in you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this." She replied: "I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective - neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love only my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons." (199)

Arendt continued to publish controversial books. A collection of essays, On Revolution (1963) upset many on the left as she criticised the outcome of both the French Revolution (1789) and the Russian Revolution (1917). This view was attacked by the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that Arendt's approach was selective, both in terms of cases and the evidence drawn from them. For example, he claimed that Arendt unjustifiably excludes revolutions that did not occur in the West, such as Chinese Revolution (1911) and finds the link between Arendtian revolutions and history to be "as incidental as that of medieval theologians and astronomers". (200)

The anthology of essays, Men in Dark Times (1968) presents intellectual biographies of some creative and moral figures of the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Bertolt Brecht and Isak Dinesen. In her article on Rosa Luxemburg, she argues that her execution severely damaged the chances of socialism in Germany: "Rosa Luxemburg's death became the watershed between two eras in Germany; and it became the point of no return for the German Left. All those who had drifted to the Communists out of bitter disappointment with the Socialist Party were even more disappointed with the swift moral decline and political disintegration of the Communist Party, and yet they felt that to return to the ranks of the Socialists would mean to condone the murder of Rosa." (201)

Hannah Arendt continued to have contact with Martin Heidegger and in the last nine years of her life the couple exchanged seventy-five letters. Hannah also visited him and Karl Jaspers in Europe in September 1968. She wrote to Heinrich Blücher that Jaspers could barely walk even with a walker and that he should be in a wheelchair. Hannah returned in February, 1969, to attend Jaspers's funeral in Basel. She also took this opportunity to visit Heidegger in Freiburg. (202)

At the memorial service held by Jaspers, Arendt reminded the mourners that he was not only among the leading thinkers of his age, but had also been the conscience of Germany during the Nazi period and remained loyal to his Jewish wife. "We don't know what happens when a human being dies. All we know is that he has left us. We cling to the works... which are what someone who dies leaves behind in the world... What is at once the most fleeting and at the same time the greatest thing about him - the spoken word and the gesture unique to him - those things die with him, and they put a demand on us to remember him. That remembering takes place in communication with the dead person, and from that arises talk about him, which then resounds in the world again." (203)

In October 1971, Arednt published an article on Heidegger in the New York Review of Books. She pointed out the almost unparalleled influence in the twentieth century among abstract thinkers and philosophers. Even before the publication of Being and Time (1927), "Heidegger had achieved fame as a teacher because he, before anyone else, recognized that philosophy had become formalized, tradition-bound, and boring precisely because it no longer bore any relationship to independence of thought... With Heidegger, students did not simply absorb lessons formulated by philosophers of earlier generations, but learned to interrogate and challenge the great thinkers of the past." (204)

As Heidegger's student, she acknowledged the influence he had before the publication of the book: "For Heidegger’s 'fame' predates by about eight years the publication of Being and Time in 1927; indeed it is open to question whether the unusual success of this book - not just the immediate impact it had inside and outside the academic world but also its extraordinarily lasting influence, with which few of the century’s publications can compare - would have been possible if it had not been preceded by the teacher’s reputation among the students, in whose opinion, at any rate, the book’s success merely confirmed what they had known for many years. There was something strange about this early fame, stranger perhaps than the fame of Kafka in the early Twenties or of Braque and Picasso in the preceding decade, who were also unknown to what is commonly understood as the public and nevertheless exerted an extraordinary influence." He was, according to Arendt, the "secret king in the empire of thinking". (205)

Hannah Arendt addressed the problem of old age and dying. "The end of life is death, but man lives not for the sake of death, but because he is a living being; and he thinks not for the sake of some result or other, but because he is a thinking, sensing being." The product of thought is less important than the fact of thinking. "The thinking self is ageless, and it is the curse and blessing of thinkers... that they get old without aging." She quotes something that Karl Jaspers said to her just before he died: "And now, just when one finally wants to get properly started, one is supposed to leave!" (206)

Arendt discussed Heidegger's collaboration with the Nazi government. Heidegger had succumbed to the temptation of intervening in the world of human affairs. She pointed out that his "escapade" involved "avoiding the reality of the Gestapo's secret rooms and the torture cells of the concentration camps" Arendt acknowledged that "both Plato and Heidegger resorted to tyrants and Führers" when they became involved in human affairs. This she concluded, "must be attributed not simply to the conditions of their times, and even less to innate character, but rather to a déformation professionnelle (occupational hazard)", which seems to drive many great thinkers to tyrannical tendencies. (207)

Arendt sent a copy of her article to Heidegger with a note explaining that his 80th birthday was the occasion for his contemporaries to honour "the master, the teacher, and - for some surely - the friend," by acknowledging that the "passionate fulfillment" of his life and work had been to demonstrate what it is to think and to have the courage to venture into unexplored territory: "May those who come after us, when they recall our century and its people and try to keep faith with them, not forget the devastating sandstorms that swept us up, each in his own way, and in which something like this man and his work were still possible." (208)

Soon after publishing her article on Heidegger, Heinrich Blücher was taken ill. He was having lunch with Hannah when he experienced chest pains. He made his way to the couch, and there suffered a major heart attack. Hannah called for an ambulance and held his hand. "That's it," he said. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital a few hours later on 30th October, 1970. He was buried on 4th November. She asked her friend, Mary McCarthy, "How am I to live now?" She immediately returned to teaching: "I function all right, but know that the slightest mishap could throw me off balance. I don't think I told you that for ten long years I had been constantly afraid that just a sudden death would happen. This fear frequently bordered on real panic. Where the fear was and the panic there is now sheer emptiness." (209)

A few weeks after Blücher's death, W. H. Auden arrived at her home. He was a heavy drinker, and it showed in his deeply lined and puffy face, which he himself described as looking like a wedding cake left out in the rain. Auden told her that he loved her and thought they should live together, take care of each other and even marry. Hannah explained to McCarthy that he was in great need of someone to help take care of him, but "I know that I can't do it, in other words I have to turn him down. I have a hunch that this has happened to him once too often... and I am almost beside myself when I think of the whole matter. But I can't change that, it would simply be suicide - worse than suicide as a matter of fact... When he left he was completely drunk, staggering into the elevator. I did not go with him. I am afraid of pity, always have been, and I think I never knew anybody who aroused my pity to this extent." (210)

Over the next couple of days Arendt worked on The Life of the Mind. She told her friend, Hans Jonas, "I have done my bit in politics, no more of that; from now on, and for what is left, I will deal with trans-political things." She was to "get down to philosophy". She planned a work that would do for the life of contemplation what The Human Condition had done for man's active life in the world. "Hannah approached this topic in her own idiosyncratic way. She took no account of the modern English and American philosophers who had considered, with stringent logical analysis of their propositions, the 'philosophy of mind'. On the other side of the coin, she showed no interest in Freud and his picture of human nature. But she ransacked medieval theologians and the great figures of German philosophy for illustrations congenial to her way of thinking." (211)

In January 1975, she received a letter from the rector of the University of Copenhagen informing her that the government of Denmark had selected her to receive the Sonning Prize and an award of $35,000 in recognition of her meritorious contribution to European civilization. She was the first woman and the first United States citizen to receive this honour. Earlier recipients had included Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Niels Bohr, Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer and Karl Popper. (212)

In her acceptance speech she praised the behaviour of the Danish people during the Second World War. "I have always been fascinated by the particular way the Danish people and their government handled and solved the highly explosive problems posed by the Nazi conquest of Europe. I have often thought that this extraordinary story, of which you, of course, know more than I do, should be required reading in all political science courses which deal with the relations between power and violence, whose frequent equation belongs among the elementary fallacies not only of political theory but of actual political practice. This episode of your history offers a highly instructive example of the great power potential inherent in nonviolent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. And since the most spectacular victory in this battle concerns the defeat of the 'Final Solution' and the salvation of nearly all the Jews on Danish territory, regardless of their origin, whether they were Danish citizens or stateless refugees from Germany, it seems indeed only natural that Jews who are survivors of the catastrophe should feel themselves related to this country in a very special way." (213)

Arendt was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War and abandoned her work on The Life of the Mind to write an article in the New York Review of Books, on the deterioration of the nation's institutions of liberty, had begun with Joseph McCarthy. The greatest threat to democracy, she argued, came from the emergence of lying as a way of life in politics. She pointed out that President Lyndon Baines Johnson had declared war on North Vietnam based on a lie that the United States Navy had been attacked at the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson had been succeeded by Richard Nixon and that Watergate was an attempt to organize a Secret Service that worked just for the president and not for the governme3nt. "In other words, it is as though a bunch of con men, rather untalented Mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves the government of the mightiest power on earth." (214)

On 4th December, 1975, Hannah Arednt held a small dinner party at her home. After dinner they retired to the living room for coffee and conversation in comfortable chairs. Then, after a sudden brief spell of coughing, Hannah fell into unconsciousness; her doctor was summoned and came immediately, but Hannah, who was sixty-nine years old, died of a heart attack without regaining consciousness. (215)

The Middle Ages

The Normans

The Tudors

The English Civil War

Industrial Revolution

First World War

Russian Revolution

Nazi Germany

United States: 1920-1945

(1) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 14

(2) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 21

(3) Hannah Arendt, interviewed by Günter Gaus (28th October, 1964)

(4) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 18

(5) Peter Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt (2000) page viii

(6) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) pages 17-18

(7) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) pages 85-86

(8) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 23

(9) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 23

(10) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 27

(11) Hannah Arendt, New York Review of Books (21st October, 1971)

(12) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 29

(13) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 24

(14) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) page 50

(15) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 31

(16) Carol Brightman, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (1995) page xii

(17) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) page 128

(18) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 36

(19) Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse (2001) page 7

(20) Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1993) pages 137-138

(21) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) page 61

(22) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 40

(23) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 24

(24) Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1993) page 127

(25) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 68

(26) Martin Heidegger, letter to Hannah Arendt (10th January, 1926)

(27) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 68

(28) Anthony Grayling, Ideas that Matter (2009) pages 196-198

(29) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 45

(30) Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Heidegger (1978) page 34

(30a) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 299

(31) Anthony Grayling, The History of Philosophy (2019) page 480

(32) W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Martin Heidegger (2019)

(33) Michael Wheeler, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Martin Heidegger (2018)

(34) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) page 66

(35) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 46

(36) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 28

(37) Hannah Arendt, letter to Martin Heidegger (April, 1928)

(38) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 48

(39) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 29

(40) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 49-50

(41) Hannah Arendt, letter to Martin Heidegger (September, 1929)

(42) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) page 10

(43) Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: the Life of a Jewish Woman (1974) page 103

(44) Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2003) pages 1-34

(45) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 59-60

(46) Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: the Life of a Jewish Woman (1974) page 3

(47) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 85

(48) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 62

(49) Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (2001) page 22

(50) Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) page 218

(51) Hannah Arendt, interviewed by Günter Gaus (28th October, 1964)

(52) Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: the Life of a Jewish Woman (1974) page 256

(53) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 67

(54) Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (1998) page 154

(55) Hannah Arendt, interviewed by Günter Gaus (28th October, 1964)

(56) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 38

(57) Hannah Arendt, interviewed by Günter Gaus (28th October, 1964)

(58) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 83

(59) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) page 21

(60) Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1958)

(61) Stanley Hoffmann, New York Review of Books (8th December, 1983)

(62) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 87

(63) Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker (19th October, 1968)

(64) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1968) pages 253-264

(65) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 90-91

(66) Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1993) page 146

(67) Michael Inwood, Heidegger (2019) pages 6-7

(68) Anthony Grayling, The History of Philosophy (2019) page 477

(69) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 99

(70) Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1999) page 254

(71) Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (1989) pages 119-121

(72) Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1997) page 44

(73) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 100

(74) Konrad Heiden, Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) page 11

(75) Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (1991) page 41

(76) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 100-101

(77) Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (1998) page 362

(78) Alfred Rosenberg, Volkischer Beobachter (July, 1930)

(79) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 101-102

(80) Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1999) page 271

(81) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) pages 444-445

(82) Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (1993) pages 140-143

(83) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 40

(84) Amos Elon, New York Review of Books (5th July, 2001)

(85) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 106

(86) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 47

(87) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) pages 40-41

(88) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 107

(89) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) pages 122-130

(90) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) page 48

(91) Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978) pages 62-63

(92) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 112-113

(93) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) pages 82-83

(94) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 181-182

(95) Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (2008) page 10

(96) Bernard Lazare, The Dreyfus Affair - A Miscarriage of Justice (November, 1896)

(97) Bernard Lazare, Job's Dungheap: Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution (1948) page 97

(98) Hannah Arendt, From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today, Jewish Social Studies (July, 1942)

(99) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 138

(100) Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978) pages 67-90

(101) Hannah Arendt, interviewed by Günter Gaus (28th October, 1964)

(102) Adolf Hitler, quoted by Joseph Goebbels in The Goebbels Diaries (1948) page 148

(103) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 457

(104) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) pages 84-85

(105) Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers (17th August 1946)

(106) Hannah Arendt, Menorah Journal (October, 1944)

(107) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 141

(108) Hannah Arendt, Menorah Journal (October, 1944)

(109) Motti Golani, Palestine Between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947 (2013) page 130

(110) Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (1999) pages 48–52 (89)

(111) Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle for the Holy Land (1979) pages 323-340

(112) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 55

(113) Ahron Bregman, A History of Israel (2002) pages 40-41

(114) Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (2008) page 187

(115) Hannah Arendt, Commentary (May, 1948)

(116) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 379

(117) Hannah Arendt, What Is Existential Philosophy? (1946)

(118) Thomas E. Wartenberg, Existentialism (2008) page 102

(119) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) page 297

(120) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 168

(121) Hannah Arendt, Commentary (September, 1946)

(122) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) pages 239-240

(123) Hannah Arendt, letter to Hilde Frankel (January, 1950)

(124) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 154

(125) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 62

(126) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page xiii

(127) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 29

(128) Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild (1999), page 481-85

(129) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 30

(130) Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (1998) page 216

(131) Shumuel Ettinger, Jewish Emigration in the 19th Century (October 2019)

(132) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936) page 57

(133) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 158

(134) Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980) page 73

(135) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) pages 399-400

(136) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 407

(137) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 408

(138) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 415

(139) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) pages 418-419

(140) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) pages 427-428

(141) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (2017 edition) page 437

(142) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 61

(143) Mary McCarthy, letter to Hannah Arendt (April, 1951)

(144) Hannah Arendt, letter to Elfride Heidegger (February, 1950)

(145) Hannah Arendt, letter to Heinrich Blücher (February, 1950)

(146) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 185-188

(147) Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) pages 103-104

(148) Mary Jarrell (editor), Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection (1985) pages 392-393

(149) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 196

(150) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 78

(151) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 205

(152) Hannah Arendt, Commonweal Magazine (20th March, 1953)

(153) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 241

(154) Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers (June, 1953)

(155) Edward Murrow, See It Now (9th March, 1954)

(156) Harry S. Truman, New York Times (17th November, 1953)

(157) Walter Lippmann, The Washington Post (1st March, 1954)

(158) Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers (December, 1954)

(159) Peter Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt (2000) page xxviii

(160) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 1

(161) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 2

(162) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 230

(163) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 79

(164) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 60

(165) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 124

(166) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 241

(167) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 190

(168) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) page 75

(169) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) page 371

(170) Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (1998) page 81

(171) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) page 329

(172) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 248

(173) Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher (2000) pages 354-358

(174) Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker (16th February, 1963)

(175) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 253

(176) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) page 103

(177) Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker (16th February, 1963)

(178) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) page 55

(179) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 254

(180) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) page 7

(181) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 257

(182) Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers (20th April, 1964)

(183) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1968) page 30

(184) Ronald W. Zweig, The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary (2002) page 232

(185) Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker (2nd March, 1963)

(186) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1968) pages 22-25

(187) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 262-263

(188) Adolf Eichmann, plea to the court (31st May, 1962)

(189) David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (2004) page 321

(190) Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker (16th February, 1963)

(191) Siegfried Moses, letter to Hannah Arendt (7th March, 1963)

(192) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (2004) pages 348-349

(193) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 260

(194) Hans Morgenthau, Chicago Tribune (26th May, 1963)

(195) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 279-280

(196) Bruno Bettelheim, The New Republic (15th June, 1963)

(197) Leo Mindlin, Jewish Floridian (15th March, 1963)

(198) Commentary Magazine (September, 1963)

(199) Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978) pages 245-246

(200) Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (1973) pages 201–209

(201) Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1968) page 421

(202) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 299

(203) Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969 (1993) pages 684-686

(204) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 302-303

(205) Hannah Arendt, New York Review of Books (21st October, 1971)

(206) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 304

(207) Hannah Arendt, New York Review of Books (21st October, 1971)

(208) Hannah Arendt, letter to Martin Heidegger (October, 1971)

(209) Hannah Arendt, letter to Mary McCarthy (November, 1970)

(210) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 313-314

(211) Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (1986) pages 126-127

(212) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) pages 329

(213) Hannah Arendt, Sonning Prize speech (18th April, 1975)

(214) Hannah Arendt, New York Review of Books (26th June, 1975)

(215) Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010) page 336