Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew

Abstract

This chapter traces the origins of my affiliation with Arendt’s work that traces back to the early 1980s, when the Nietszchean/Heideggerian philosopher David Farrell Krell and I, having driven down to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest to visit the cabin where Heidegger did his late writing, informed me of Heidegger’s love affair with his young Jewish student Hannah Arendt. On returning to the United States, I plunged into her writing and that of the scholars who had represented Arendt as a political scientist engaged in the Habermasian question of the polis. In reading these accounts of Arendt’s thought, I found little reference to her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany nor to her abiding interest in the question of Palestine, which she had written a lot about. It was this scholarly suppression of Arendt’s fraught personal life that instigated my will to put back into play—contrapuntally—these suppressed aspects of her life and works.