Imaginary interview with Hannah Arendt
by Charactorium · Hannah Arendt (1906 — 1975) · Philosophy · Politics · 5 min read
It is in the book-lined study of the house in Basel, in the autumn of 1966, that Karl Jaspers receives his former student. The smoke from Hannah's cigarettes mingles with that of the old master's pipe, and through the windows one glimpses the gray Rhine. They have known each other for nearly forty years — since she came to defend a thesis on Augustine under his supervision — and their letters have never stopped crossing the Atlantic. Jaspers has placed on the table the pages she sent him; this time, he wants to hear her speak in person.
—Hannah, when the Gestapo arrested you in Berlin in 1933, you wrote to me very little. What were you looking for, rummaging through their libraries?
I was gathering evidence, Karl. A friend at the Prussian Library let me copy the crudest anti-Semitic propaganda, so that Zionist organizations could show it to the world. Eight days of interrogation, and a young policeman who didn't know what to do with me. When they released me, I understood that the neutrality of the intellectual had become cowardice. One could no longer just think about evil; one had to oppose it. I crossed the border on foot, through the mountains, without papers, until Prague and then Paris. You know I have never regretted that moment: that is when I stopped being a young woman who reads Kant and became someone who acts.
One could no longer just think about evil; one had to oppose it.
—Then came Gurs, in 1940, and those years without a homeland. You who wrote to me from Paris: what did being stateless make of you?
It taught me a terrible thing, Karl: that a man deprived of all political status is no longer protected by anything, not even by his mere humanity. At the Gurs camp, we were "enemy aliens," a word that meant nothing and yet decided our lives. I had that Nansen passport, that paper identity for those who have none, and a suitcase for a kingdom. When the chaos of defeat opened the gates, I escaped; many stayed and perished. That is where my dearest idea was born: the first of human rights is the right to have rights. Without a political community, the naked man is nothing.
The first of human rights is the right to have rights.
—Your great book of 1951 on totalitarianism kept me awake at night. You put Hitler and Stalin on the same level: why such audacity?
Because it is, under opposing flags, the same political invention, Karl — something that neither classical tyranny nor despotism had ever known. The tyrant wants submission; totalitarianism, however, wants a world where men become superfluous. It is not content to oppress: it wants to fabricate a being without spontaneity, reduced to conditioned reflexes, whose very death changes nothing. The camp is its laboratory — not to punish, but to demonstrate that everything is possible, that man can be made completely dominable. That is why Nazism and Bolshevism resemble each other in their essence: both deny that to be born is to begin something new.
Totalitarianism wants a world where men become superfluous.
—Let us go further back. When you arrived in Marburg as a young girl, with Heidegger, what did you find that held you so much?
I found that thought could be alive, Karl. It was said then that a king of philosophy was hidden in Marburg, and it was true: he taught how to think, not to recite. That dazzled me, and you know what that dazzle weighed in my life as a young woman. But the man and the thinker did not walk in step. What tore me apart, later, was to see that lofty intelligence capitulate to the worst, in 1933, believing for an instant that it would guide the movement. It took me years to separate in myself the intellectual debt from the wound. It was by coming to you, in Heidelberg, that I rediscovered a philosophy that did not cut itself off from the world of men.
He taught how to think, not to recite.
—You speak of me, so I will allow myself: do you remember your thesis defense, right here in 1929, on love in Augustine? What did I give you that Marburg did not?
Reason, Karl, and trust in reason that communicates itself. You were not looking for disciples; you wanted interlocutors, and that is the most beautiful gift a master can give. Augustine had led me to a question that never left me: how to love the world when one desires to flee it? You taught me that thinking only has meaning when shared, in that speech between two beings who recognize each other as equals. Our letters, for so many years, are the living proof of what you taught me: that a friendship can be a place of truth. I owe you my remaining faithful to reason when everything around us invited cynicism or despair.
Thinking only has meaning when shared, between two beings who recognize each other as equals.
—In The Human Condition, you separate labor, work, and action. Why does the latter matter so much to you?
Because action is the only activity that truly makes us appear to one another, Karl. Labor sustains the body, work fabricates durable things — but political action is the place where each one shows themselves as a unique being among equals. I think of the Greek agora, that public space where man revealed himself through his speech and deeds, not as a member of the species but as an irreplaceable individual. Our modern age threatens this space: it reduces us to producers and consumers, to a society of employment that no longer knows what acting means. Yet without this shared space, there is no more freedom — only the administration of things and men.
—I am told that Jerusalem, in 1961, shook you. You went to see this Eichmann for the New Yorker: what did you expect, and what did you see?
I expected a monster, Karl, and that is the whole ordeal: I did not find one. In his glass booth sat a nearly comical man, who spoke only in clichés, incapable of uttering a sentence that was his own. He did not have the genius of evil; he had the absence of thought. He had organized deportations as one schedules a train timetable, without ever imagining what he was doing. That is what struck me: the greatest evil of our century could be committed by men without depth, by pure inability to think from another's standpoint. I called this the banality of evil — not to excuse it, but to name a frightening thing that our words struggled to grasp.
He did not have the genius of evil; he had the absence of thought.
—That expression earned you a storm, even from your own Jewish friends. Scholem himself reproached you for lacking love for your people. Did that shake you?
Hurt me, yes; shaken in my thinking, no. People read a title instead of a book, Karl, and I was accused of judging the victims when I was judging a perpetrator. To Gershom, I replied frankly: I do not feel that "love of the Jewish people" that he reproached me for not having, because I have never loved a people, only persons. I know I am Jewish, it is a fact I have never wanted to flee, and no question touches me more. But loving a truth matters more to me than sparing my own. You, who paid the price for marrying a Jewish woman, know that true fidelity sometimes consists in saying what one's own do not want to hear.
I have never loved a people, only persons.
—Let us leave the storms. When you come home, to New York, how do you really work, far from podiums and polemics?
Badly in the morning, well at night, Karl! I get up late, read three newspapers in two languages with too-strong coffee, and the real day only begins at nightfall. I type each page myself on my Olivetti, cigarette in hand — Heinrich says the machine and the smoke are my two lungs. Our apartment on the Upper West Side overflows with books and manuscripts, and in the evening friends come, fellow émigrés, journalists, poets. We talk until impossible hours over a simple meal. Believe me, these nocturnal conversations nourish my thinking more surely than any library: it is there, among friends, that ideas truly come to life.
—You once told me about your notebooks, that Denktagebuch you keep in secret. What is the use of such a journal for someone who already publishes so much?
To think without an addressee, Karl. In my books, I address readers; in these notebooks, I answer only to myself, and that is quite different. I jot down a sentence from Kant, a verse, an objection I make to myself in a low voice, without concern for concluding. It is my silent dialogue of the "two-in-one," that company of oneself with oneself which is, I believe, the very heart of thinking. Eichmann was incapable of it, precisely: he had no one to talk to inside himself. These notebooks are my way of staying in good company with myself, so that the next day I can bear what I discover of the world. A philosopher without this inner forum would be merely a system-builder.
Thinking is that silent dialogue of the two-in-one, that company of oneself with oneself.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Hannah Arendt's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.