Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt did not know she was precocious growing up. “I thought everyone was like me,” she says. She was born near Hanover, in 1906, but her parents shortly moved to Konigsberg to live with her grandparents. Her father died when she was seven. In school, in Konigsberg, she learned what it meant to be Jewish in Germany.

At first she went to the university at Marburg, and became involved with her professor, the charismatic and eloquent Heidegger.  “Being is hazardous,” said Heidegger. “The ground is trembling, but this lack of meaning is what makes life so vital and real.” She moved on to the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on St. Augustine, under Karl Jaspers in 1929. Both of these teachers led Arendt to what she called “passionate thinking.” 

In 1929 she married Gunther Stern, like her headed toward an academic career. But by this time, it was almost impossible for them to find work. As more repression began, things became very difficult for Jews in Germany. Stern moved to Paris in 1931, but Arendt used their apartment in Berlin as a way-station for people trying to leave. She was arrested in 1933 for work documenting anti-Jewish propaganda. When she was freed after eight days, she walked out of Germany and into exile in Czechoslovakia.

Arendt looked for practical work in Paris. She had watched her university friends accommodate themselves to Hitler and she vowed not to get further involved with academia. She decided that if she was attacked as a Jew, she must fight as a Jew. She worked with Jewish organizations, including Youth Aliyah, doing fund-raising and helping young people move to Palestine. Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Her mother had joined her in Paris, but her marriage was only a formality. She and Stern divorced.

Arendt met Heinrich Blucher, a working-class, self-taught philosopher, poet and activist, in Paris, “a political street fighter.” She found she could keep faith both with herself and with him. They married in 1940. “Where you are, there is my home,” she wrote to him.

Hannah was made to report for internment as France capitulated to Germany. She was sent to a camp in Gurs, in southern France with about 7,000 other women. The chaos was so great, however, that she managed to escape to Montauban, where she met her husband, and also her mother. With help from the American Varian Fry, they were able to get papers to get to Lisbon and then a ship to New York in 1941.

In New York, Arendt and Blucher participated in the vibrant life around them, gathering a tribe of fellow refugees and making many friends. Arendt excelled at loyalty, friendship and honesty. She said later that she wasn’t surprised by the persecution of Jews, but when they learned about Auschwitz in 1943, “that was the real shock. We could not believe it.”

Though she worked for Jewish organizations, Arendt was never a Zionist. She thought the creation of a state for Jews only would make hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. She had accepted being a “pariah” and found there was a certain warmth among her fellow Jews. But when the Israeli state was created, the warmth disappeared.

Arendt saw herself as a political theorist, not a philosopher. She began work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book, published in 1951. In it she says that the true existential crisis at the root of totalitarianism is loneliness. Loneliness had become the everyday experience of the masses, crushing them. In the modern world, labor and consumption alone throw us back on ourselves and make us lonely. Consumption takes the place of all truly relating activities.

Arendt was also teaching at many institutions, though she would not accept tenure-track positions, preferring to be independent. In her classes she said, “I don’t want you to empathize. I want you to understand.” We can’t change human suffering, but we can make it articulate. The table we sit around, she told her seminars, is the world. She was trying to remake the common world. She was not interested in people’s existential relationship to themselves as much as to each other. This was the true experience of freedom and true politics.

When Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arndt offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Reading his many pages of defense, Arendt laughed aloud. She thought he was a clown. Her ironic treatment of the trial was misunderstood by many and Arendt got a lot of backlash. The trial was a public event which brought the Holocaust to world-wide notice, and made Arendt well-known.

Traveling back to Germany to help reclaim treasures stolen by the Nazis, Arendt re-connected with Heidegger. She did not wish to return to Germany, but she did enjoy speaking German, and hearing it on the street. In 1950 she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She continued to write and teach. Her husband Blucher died in 1970, and her own ill-health began in 1974. She died the following year, of a heart attack.

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents much of Arendt’s thought, as embodied in her life in We Are Free to Change the World [published 2024]. She points out Arendt’s stubborn insistence on reality, her fearlessness. The life of the mind doesn’t harden as it matures, but is responsive, always ready to look again. 

There are many biographies of Hannah Arendt, and I especially enjoyed an interview she gave in 1964, which you can watch here. Her thought seems to me to be particularly relevant today because of her insistence that we live in the world with others. She felt that violence is always a failure of politics. Freedom cannot be forced. It can only be experienced in the world and alongside others.

Anna Bont Frith

Geraldine Brooks

Anna Frith is 20 when plague comes to the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, England, in 1665. She is the main witness to what becomes of her village, as recounted in Geraldine Brooks’ historical novel Year of Wonders [published 2001]. Though many of the characters are based on research, this is a fictionalized account.

As a child Anna lost her mother early and her father treated her badly. She is married at 15 to Sam, a miner for lead, the chief work of the village. They are happy and have two sons. Anna is also in service to the Bradfords, the landed gentry, and to the new rector, Michael Mompellion. Mompellion’s wife Elinor teaches Anna to read, as Anna loves language, and also about the herbs in her garden.

When her husband is killed in a mining accident, Anna takes in a boarder, Mr. Viccars, a tailor. Viccars orders a bolt of cloth from London, opens it and soon is dead from plague. He tells Anna to burn his belongings, but villagers come to take some of the clothing he has made. Thus plague spreads throughout the village.

Horrified, the Bradfords leave, but Mompellion convinces his church flock to quarantine themselves. He sets up a system of exchange at a boundary stone, where local gentry will supply them, if they do not leave. Everyone agrees.

Anna’s two sons die, one after the other. She is lost, wondering why she is still alive. Spending time in the churchyard, she sees people torturing the local herbalist/midwife and her niece, whom they call “witches.” They have consorted with the devil and brought the plague. They hang the younger woman and her aunt dies of consumption and exposure. Mompellion tries to stop them. “Do we not have suffering enough here.”

Because there are no longer midwives in the village, Elinor asks Anna to assist at a birth. She is reluctant, but successfully helps a boy to be born. Death is all around, however. Anna goes to ask her father for help, but he belittles her. Why does God take good people and leave evil ones like her father, she wonders.

Anna and Elinor become nurses to villagers while Mompellion ministers to their spirits. They go to the physic garden kept by the “witches,” trying to learn what they can. Anna experiments with poppies, lulling herself with lovely dreams, but then realizes she must be awake to help people. Working with Elinor gives her serenity. Elinor tells Anna her own story, of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Mompellion saved her.

With Elinor’s determination and Anna’s knowledge, the two of them manage to save the mine of nine-year-old Merry, the last of her family, by extracting enough lead to fill a “king’s dish.” The miners’ barmote court also sentences Anna’s father for stealing, however, and he is left to die. The villagers all succumb to fear. Some take to flagellating themselves. Anna’s step-mother Aphra sells charms as the ghost of one of the “witches.”

The villagers begin meeting for church outdoors at a distance from each other. Mompellion realizes they should burn their possessions, which they do in July 1666, about a year after the plague began. After a few weeks they realize no one else has died. Anna envies the love between Mompellion and Elinor and rues her own lonely state.

Aphra has gone mad, however, after a harsh punishment and losing her last child. She arrives for the service of thanksgiving wielding a knife. Mompellion and Elinor try to soothe her, but she fatally cuts Elinor’s neck. 

Mompellion is prostrate, all his strength gone. He throws down his Bible.  Anna tries to take care of him, but after many weeks gives up. She goes out to his spirited horse and takes it for a ride. When she returns, Mompellion kisses her. He apologizes for his excessive grief. They sleep together, but when Mompellion tells Anna that he had held himself away from Elinor because of her sin and the need for atonement, Anna is horrified by his coldness.

Anna goes to the church, where she finds Miss Bradford. She begs Anna to go to her mother who is having a difficult birth. Anna succeeds in midwifing a little girl. But the daughter tries to drown the baby, a bastard. Anna says she will take the baby away and never come back. The Bradfords give her jewels, and Mompellion lets her take his horse, as she will be in danger. Anna spurns protection and takes the first ship, which is bound for Venice. After a difficult voyage, they end up on the north coast of Africa, at Oran.

It seems to Anna that she should continue to learn healing. She has also had a daughter of her own, by Mompellion. She is taken into the household of a compassionate doctor and helps him in healing women as she raises her two daughters. It is difficult for her to get used to the sun and light, but she insists she will never go back to England.

Geraldine Brooks was a foreign correspondent in recent places of terrible conflict, Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa. She wanted to write about the question of who people become under the worst circumstances. In making Anna a witness to what happens in her village which, even today, plays up its status as a plague village, Brooks is able to explore many dark places. The book is not easy to read, but it does delve into the question.