Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (Icons) by Anne C. Heller

Author:Anne C. Heller [Heller, Anne C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Published: 2015-08-18T04:30:00+00:00

5

Security and Fame

The Origins of Totalitarianism and the New York Circle, 1941–1961

Everything was possible and nothing was true.

— HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 19511

HANNAH ARENDT AND Heinrich Blücher arrived at the docks on New York City’s bustling West Side in May 1941.2 They had twenty-five dollars, clothing, photographs, and an unpublished collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays, entrusted to Arendt by Benjamin before he left France for Spain. With a seventy-five-dollar monthly stipend guaranteed by a Zionist organization until they could find work, the pair rented two furnished rooms in a shabby redbrick rooming house on West Ninety-Fifth Street and waited for Martha, who arrived in June, thin, frightened, and exhausted.

For Arendt and her small family, the next three years were hard ones. Sharing two rooms and preparing meals in a communal kitchen, they lived meagerly and sought out friends of friends from Germany: Julie Vogelstein-Braun, the sister of a Königsberg rabbi who was relatively prosperous and knew her way around New York; Albert Salomon, a professor of sociology at the New School who had emigrated in 1935 and gave Blücher paid research assignments; the Columbia University historian Salo Baron, who encouraged Arendt to write for German-language publications, even before she could communicate in English; Bertolt Brecht, who turned up in New York from time to time; and the political theorist Theodor Adorno. As she struggled to get her bearings, what impressed her most was that America, with its many varieties of immigrant peoples, was not a nation-state like the European nations — not unified by “blood and soil” and thousands of years of tribal history. It was a republic of citizens equally bound by a sworn allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, a document she, like many other new arrivals, revered.

Even before the war ended and the United States expanded its immigration quotas, she must have been surprised by the cosmopolitan character of New York City intellectual life. In the early and mid-1940s, the city was, as it had been at other times, “the beacon, the world city of freedom, openness, hope,” according to Alfred Kazin. The Upper West Side, “the cheaper side of town” where Arendt lived, was, he added, “ethnic territory, foreign,” and was filled with the sights and sounds of Europe.3 In spite of hardships, the city welcomed Arendt.

She began to piece together a living, primarily by writing. The politics of antitotalitarianism became her subject. In a biweekly column for a Jewish German-language newspaper called Aufbau, she advocated for unified Jewish action in the battle against Hitler. Stateless, in a new country, with reason to worry that she or Blücher might be unfavorably noticed or even expelled, she took a public stance in favor of the unpopular movement to raise a Jewish army, comprising volunteers from all nations of the world to fight Hitler “as Jews, in Jewish battle formations under a Jewish flag.”4 “[Y]ou can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as,” she wrote in Aufbau, pointing out that to expect a benefit

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