The modern reader will scarcely fail to observe at once that Rahel was neither beautiful nor attractive; that all the men with whom she had any kind of love relationship were younger than she herself; that she possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality; and finally, that she was a typically “romantic” personality, and that the Woman Problem, that is the discrepancy between what men expected of women “in general” and what women could give or wanted in their turn, was already established by the conditions of the era and represented a gap that virtually could not be closed.
The statements are wondrous, in the history of Hannah Arendt’s relationship with feminism. Arendt had no interest in the movement or its rhetoric. Her professional alliances were mostly with men. She never worried much about whether she belonged among her mostly male intellectual peers. She did not feel that patriarchy was a serious problem. In fact, asked about women’s emancipation late in her life, she said the “Woman Problem” was never much of a problem for her. “I have always thought that there are certain occupations that are improper for women, that do not become them,” she told an interviewer.
It just doesn’t look good when a woman gives orders. She should try not to get into such a situation if she wants to remain feminine. Whether I am right about this or not I do not know … The problem itself played no role for me personally. To put it very simply, I have always done what I liked to do.
This sort of self-contradictory answer gave little room to retroactively anoint Arendt as a quiet crusader for women or even an advocate for equality of the sexes, per se.
And yet she thought one should do what one wants to do. Instead of writing a biography of, for example, Kierkegaard, she began her public career with an obsession about another woman. One who was “neither beautiful nor attractive,” but who was nonetheless possessed of “extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality.” And one whose outsider status was not a difficulty to be overcome but something to be dug into, mined for strength. It’s possible, as some scholars have speculated, that the reason any kind of discrimination against women seemed invisible to her is that in her lifetime her Jewishness had simply been a far more explicit target. Hostility to women was far more diffuse than the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews.
Arendt was still working on the book on Varnhagen when, in 1933, the Reichstag—the seat of the German parliament—burned down. It was arson, a crime whose perpetrator is still in some dispute, though a young Communist was arrested and tried as the immediate culprit and the German left was blamed for the resulting chaos.
Hitler had been sworn in as chancellor only a month or so before the fire. The tumult gave him the excuse to assume emergency powers. Gunther Stern, Arendt’s husband, who had deep roots with anti-Nazi dissidents, left for Paris immediately. Arendt stayed.
It was not that the danger of the regime was lost on her. In fact, she said the fire was an “immediate shock,” one that no longer left her with the impression she could remain a “bystander.” The fact that former friends and allies were gradually falling under Nazi influence must have been clear to her before then, though. The fall before, after hearing rumors, she had written to Heidegger asking about his new politics. Specifically her concerns were about the rumor that he had become anti-Semitic, news she gathered from her husband and his friends. His reply was, to say the least, petulant. It listed all the Jewish students he had recently helped, then added:
Whoever wants to call this “raging anti-Semitism” is welcome to do so. Beyond that, I am now just as much an anti-Semite in University issues as I was ten years ago in Marburg … To say absolutely nothing about my personal relationships with many Jews.
And above all it cannot touch my relationship to you.
But it had touched the relationship. This is the last letter that passed between them for over a decade.
Some months after the Reichstag fire, Arendt agreed to help surreptitiously collect anti-Semitic statements from pamphlets held by the library that also housed Varnhagen’s papers. The statements were then going to be used by friends in Zionist organizing abroad. But within days Arendt was discovered and reported to authorities. She was arrested, along with her mother, and spent a few nights in a holding cell. Her arresting officer liked her, even flirted with her: “What am I supposed to do with you?” Eventually, he let her go. She was very lucky. In the interrogation she just lied. She had not revealed who she’d been working with.
But after that incident it became clear she couldn’t stay in Germany. At first, Arendt and her mother went to Prague. Martha Arendt went from there to Königsberg, and Arendt went to Paris. She brought the manuscript on Varnhagen with her. But a cloud came with her. The depth of the Nazi catastrophe was becoming apparent to her. In Berlin, the intellectuals she’d known were starting to cooperate with the Nazi regime. Heidegger had taken up his work as a university rector, wore a swastika pin, and even briefly tried to meet Hitler. She knew all about it.
So Arendt left thinking to herself, “I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business.” Her plan to estrange herself from intellectualism did not, as we know, pan out. But the betrayal left a permanent mark. No longer could she see a traditional life of the mind as salvation. Even great minds were susceptible to poor judgment. They could abandon common sense very quickly.
“I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything,” she told an interviewer a couple of years before she died. She was saying that she thought it was a bad thing. “Today I would say they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened.” Intellectuals—like Heidegger—weren’t actively making a strategic choice when they joined the Nazi Party. They weren’t doing it just to survive. They rationalized it, aligning themselves with the ideas of the party because it was anathema for them to be associated with a cause in which they did not fervently believe. And in so doing, they became Nazis themselves.
When she arrived in Paris in 1933, Arendt broke not just with her home country but with her professional career in philosophy. She barely published a word during the eight years she spent in France, completing the Varnhagen manuscript only because friends urged her to. Instead she worked. She took a post as an administrator for various charitable efforts aimed at helping the increasing numbers of emigrant Jews gathering in Paris. Something about the relatively bureaucratic procedures of pencil pushing was comforting, achievable, and lacked potential for the same disappointments her “life of the mind” had previously held.
Arendt briefly reunited with Gunther Stern in Paris, but he had gotten himself lost in the writing of an enormously complicated novel (one he would never quite manage to publish), and the marriage soon crumbled. By 1936, she’d met another man—Heinrich Blücher, a gregarious German Communist whose roots in the movement were deep enough that in Paris he lived under a fake name.
It’s tempting to romanticize Blücher’s evidently staggering projection of masculinity, and many an Arendt biographer has succumbed. Blücher was a larger man than Stern or Heidegger. He also had a loud voice and a ready laugh, and he was a man of the world because of his long involvement with politics. But he could also joust intellectually with Arendt, something she demanded in a partner. He expounded strong views on philosophy and history in his letters as well as ordinary dinner conversation. In one memorable letter to Arendt, he begins with consolations and observations about the death of her mother and then ratchets himself up to a full-scale polemic against the allegiances philosophers have to abstract truth:
Marx simply wanted to spread out the heaven of being over the whole earth, as did all those lesser ideologues too. And thus we are all on the verge of choking to death in clouds of blood and smoke … Kierkegaard used the fallen blocks to build a narrow cave in which he locked his moral self together with a God of a monstrous nature. To that one can only say: Well, good luck, and thanks a lot.
As his br
ash prose style suggests, Blücher was not an academic like Heidegger or Stern. He had done a lot of reading but he was entirely self-taught. Though he had literary ambitions, he never wrote a book himself. He complained of lifelong writer’s block, which apparently didn’t apply to his letter writing. He lived his life as a rejection of the gentility of academic intellectual life, and this seemed to appeal to Arendt. In a letter she’d write to Karl Jaspers ten years after meeting Blücher, she credited her husband (the pair married in 1940, in part so that Blücher could get papers to leave Europe) with having brought her to “see politically and think historically.” She liked that he lived and worked in the concrete world, a place that Heidegger, certainly, had little interest in.
A friend, the poet Randall Jarrell, called them a “dual monarchy.” The point was less their imperiousness—though they could be imperious—than the fact that the Blücher-Arendts drew considerable strength in their relationship from their discussions. Neither seemed to be the master or mistress of the other, although Arendt was frequently the breadwinner in their years in America. The marriage operated on a kind of natural equality, a balance generally untroubled by Blücher’s occasional infidelities.
Being in Paris around other writers and thinkers turned out to be good for her. It was easier to think in concert, Arendt came to find. She had befriended fellow German refugee Walter Benjamin, then a rather unsuccessful critic who was having trouble getting published. Editors quarreled with him, and he only reluctantly gave in to their demands. Benjamin was a classically romantic figure, having come from a prosperous family that found any overt displays of professional ambition quite vulgar. Though his father largely refused to support him, he insisted on a career that naturally led him to penury. As Arendt put it, reflecting on Benjamin’s choice to be an homme de lettres:
Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: Not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line.
Benjamin was among the friends who insisted that Arendt finish her Varnhagen manuscript. “The book made a great impression on me,” he wrote to their friend Gershom Scholem, recommending the manuscript in 1939. “It swims with powerful strokes against the current of edifying and apologetic Judaic studies.” She, too, was interested in helping him do his own work. To Scholem, she wrote, “I am very worried about Benji. I tried to procure something for him here and failed miserably. Yet I am more than ever convinced of the importance of securing him a living for his further work.”
Benjamin was always more of a mystic than Arendt. His connections to the real world were extraordinarily tenuous. But in his aloofness, she later wrote, she found a kind of political principle worth sustaining. She distinguished his homme de lettres mode of living from that of the “intellectuals” she had come to disdain:
Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society.
In the Europe of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the state was a thing worth keeping one’s distance from. Anti-Semitic propaganda rose to a fever pitch in France, and the whole country, pressured by the Nazis to the east, began to fall apart. In late 1939 Blücher was sent to an internment camp in the south of France and only freed months later by an influential friend. In 1940, Arendt herself was sent to a camp in Gurs, near the French border with Spain, where she remained for a month before France surrendered to Germany and internment camps for Jews like Gurs were disbanded. The couple were eventually reunited and obtained a visa to the United States, arriving in New York in May 1941.
In the meantime, Walter Benjamin had also seen the writing on the wall. He arranged to travel to Lisbon to catch a ship to the United States in the fall of 1940. Benjamin had to go through Spain to get to Lisbon. But when he arrived at the Spanish border with a small group of other refugees who had been living in Marseille, they were informed that just that day the border had been closed to people like them who were “sans nationalité.” This meant they would likely end up in a camp. Overnight, Benjamin overdosed on morphine. Before losing consciousness, he gave his companions a note that said he saw no other way out.
Arendt was one of the first friends to hear of what followed, evidence of what she would later, in a long, elegiac essay, call his “bad luck”:
One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.
This was an intellectualized lament for Benjamin’s fate, a laying of ideas onto the tragedy, an attitude that might suggest a certain emotional distance. But Arendt was not distant from what had happened to Benjamin. On her way out of France, Arendt made a special point of stopping and trying to find her friend’s grave. She found only the cemetery, which, she wrote to Scholem:
faces a small bay directly overlooking the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life.
Just before Benjamin left Marseille he’d given her and Blücher a collection of his manuscripts, hoping that if he couldn’t make it to New York himself she could deliver them to his friends there. One of them, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the Arendt-Blüchers read aloud to each other on the ship to America. “Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us.” The piece continued:
The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.
But by the time they were on that boat to America, it was already clear that the war raging across Europe would leave very little chance at redemption. Most of what had formed them, including the Germany they had known, was simply gone.
In New York, things were difficult. The Arendt-Blüchers (and later Arendt’s mother) lived together in a couple of dilapidated rooms in a rooming house. They shared the kitchen with other residents. Blücher took a series of odd jobs, the first of which saw him take on a kind of factory work he had never performed before. Arendt went first to a home in Massachusetts to learn English, then began again to earn money by writing, primarily for a small German-language newspaper called Aufbau and other periodicals aimed at émigré Jews. She sent Benjamin’s papers to his friend Theodor Adorno, who was also in New York. But nothing immediately came of it. There seemed to be no plans to publish them.
The articles Arendt wrote in those years are halfway between academic treatises and modern newspaper editorials. Most of them betray a certain stiffness of pen and deadening repetition of theme. Reading them in order, one starts to feel harangued rather than moved. But one piece stands out, a 1943 item written for the Menorah Journal, titled “We Refugees.” It was originally published in English, which may explain the simple register in which it was written; at that point, Arendt had known the language only two years.
But the boiled, stripped-down tone her third language forced upon her suited her elegiac yet polemical purpose: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’” Arendt described a population so beaten down by their experience in Europe that they have suppressed it. The atmosphere, she writes, makes refugees wander around in a daze, unable to speak honestly about what troubled them because no one wants to hear about the “hell�
� they encountered:
Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
Never afraid to venture into the uncomfortable subject, Arendt was also critical of the prevalence of suicide among refugees—not so much of the people who chose it as the mode in which it was rendered. “Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing,” she wrote. “They seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems.” This, she felt, was inadequate because the logic of the suicide had been provided by the political catastrophe of the Nazis, and even by American anti-Semitism: “In Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are ‘enemy aliens.’”
This essay, written when Arendt was thirty-seven years old, was the first sign that she had any gift for outright polemic. It had taken her that long to convince herself of the uses of writing for the public. Her essay wraps up by calling on Jews to become “conscious pariahs”—Rahel Varnhagen is invoked, along with several other examples that Arendt would flesh out in later essays: Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka, “or even Charlie Chaplin”—because it is the only way out of the deadening, suicide-inducing denial of their situation.
Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of gentiles.
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