Never Out of Date: How Hannah Arendt Helps Us Understand Our World
SOURCE:Spiegel International
Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever.
It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called "The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt,” combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF.
Titelbild: [M] DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2), privat
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
Five actresses, then. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her childhood in Königsberg, her student years in Marburg and the affair with Heidegger. Life in Berlin in the early 1930s and her flight from Germany when the Nazis came to power. Exile in Paris and arrival in New York, where she then became known as a political theorist in the early 1950s.
Hannah Arendt in New York in 1944.
Foto: Fred Stein / picture alliance
It is clever, sometimes also funny, and when the five actresses stand on stage at the end and receive the audience’s applause while standing next to a small table piled with Arendt’s books, the whole thing is a bit reminiscent of "I'm Not There," that film in which five actors (and one Cate Blanchett) play Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan though? Is that the category we’re speaking about when we talk about Hannah Arendt?
She passed away 50 years ago. She suffered a heart attack on December 4, 1975. As a result, she was unable to complete her last book, which was supposed to be called "The Life of the Mind." She was well-known at the time, but far from famous.
Half a century later, she is everywhere. The Thalia Theater in Hamburg just premiered a play in which Corinna Harfouch plays the philosopher; and an Arendt play is also running in Stuttgart. Two new biographies have just been published, even though one came out just two years ago. There are now at least a dozen of them. A film about Arendt also hit the silver screen in late summer. Every politician who has ever held a book in their hand has dropped a few sentences about Arendt in an interview. Angela Merkel, Robert Habeck, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The governor of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, has even written a book about her, published a few weeks ago.
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Everyone wants a piece of her. The liberals, because freedom was the concept around which her thinking revolved. The leftists, because she always stood up to power. The conservatives, because she could find nothing appealing in socialism. The feminists, because she was a self-confident woman who refused to be intimidated in the male-dominated world of great thinkers. The conspiracy theorists, because Arendt believed that politics must not allow science to take away the primacy of decision-making. The critics of Israel, who believe they can align themselves with her criticism of the state of Israel. The friends of Israel, who recall her Zionist activism.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt at a PEN meeting in New York in 1966.
Foto: Inge Morath / Magnum Photos / Ostkreuz
And the influencers, because she was cool and not only wrote thick books but also left behind sentences that look good on any Instagram post. Some really are direct quotes – while others are only almost verbatim. "No one has the right to obey." "The meaning of politics is freedom." "Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers." "The problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did." "Thinking is dangerous." The list goes on and on. And we still haven’t mentioned the "banality of evil," the kind of signature sentence reserved only for the likes of Theodor Adorno ("There is no right life in the wrong one") or René Descartes ("I think, therefore I am").
Is that, though, all people want from Arendt? A good saying, a bit of confirmation and a pat on the back? Is Hannah Arendt helpful in dark times because she makes one feel good?
Present-day upheavals would undoubtedly have felt familiar to Arendt. Authoritarian rulers, anti-Semitism, post-factual politics, mass migration, conspiracy theories, democracy on a shaky foundation. She experienced all of this herself. Fascism, communism, liberalism. World War I, Weimar, World War II, Cold War. She defended herself against the challenges of her era in ever new ways – by trying to understand them. One must "be completely present," Arendt believed. That is an extremely compelling attitude in a confusing world like today's.
A photo from the Hannah Arendt stage production in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
Foto: Jasmin Schuller
The philosopher Eva von Redecker once reduced Hannah Arendt's popularity to a simple formula: It is rooted in two things, she said, an economy of scarcity and an economy of abundance.
The scarcity part is immediately obvious. Germany did not produce too many heroic figures in the 20th century. How could it have. There is the Mann family, something like the royal family of Germany’s educated middle class, with its undisputed king, the unhappy brother, the even more unhappy children and a story that leads in all possible political directions – but always away from the Nazis. Willy Brandt, the exile who became chancellor because he trusted the Germans to dare more democracy. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the man who survived the civilizational rupture of the Nazis as a Polish Jew and then told the Germans about the value of their cultural traditions.
Then there is Arendt, the thinker with an abundance of good ideas. And she really was extremely productive. There are not just her books. There is her "Denktagebuch" (thinking diary), in which she recorded the ideas that were currently occupying her. She gave lectures and wrote a huge number of essays and articles. Not to mention the hundreds of letters. She wrote enough that everyone can find something in Arendt.
Many people have written a lot, though. The special thing about Arendt is that she seems like a contemporary.
Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Linden, a town near Hanover. Her parents belonged to the Jewish bourgeoisie. When Hannah was still a child, the family moved back to Königsberg, present-day Kaliningrad, where her parents' families came from. And despite all the blows that fate dealt Hannah Arendt over the years, she nevertheless experienced a great deal of luck in her life. Her mother seems to have given her daughter plenty of self-confidence. The obviously highly gifted child also had the benefit of the many books in her parents’ library. It was a good start. At 14, Hannah began reading the writings of Immanuel Kant.
She also had the right instinct for the place where she wanted to study philosophy: Marburg. It was home to a young professor who had already developed a reputation for teaching his students to think: Martin Heidegger. She was not the only one attracted to Heidegger’s mind: Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer and many others also became Heidegger students. Marcuse would later become the intellectual forerunner of the global left, Strauss of American neoconservatism, Gadamer developed philosophical hermeneutics, an extremely influential school of understanding. One can imagine the spirited conversations of these young idealists. What was that if not luck?
Hannah Arendt as a university student in 1930.
Foto: ARCHIVIO / A3 / CONTRASTO / laif
Arendt began an affair with Heidegger that would accompany and occupy her throughout her life – an affair with one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, but also a man who embraced the Nazis after 1933 and never really regretted it.
Her politicization did not come from the right or from the left, it developed through Zionism. Arendt studied the history of Judaism, came into the orbit of Zionist activists in Berlin and was arrested after the Nazi seizure of power because she helped compile dossiers on the government's anti-Jewish campaigns. Luck again: After eight days in custody, she was released – likely the result of her having charmed a policeman, as Arendt would later relate. She fled to Paris via Prague.
There, she herself became a Zionist activist, helping Jewish youth emigrate to Palestine and also traveling there once herself. She also met Heinrich Blücher, her second husband and the love of her life. Blücher, who was also fleeing the Nazis, was a former communist. They were interned when the Germans attacked France, but were ultimately released and, like so many stateless Germans, they wandered through unoccupied southern France and ended up in Marseille, where they found luck once more: They received a visa for the United States. In 1951, Arendt became a U.S. citizen after 14 years of statelessness.
Hannah Arendt together with her husband Heinrich Blücher in 1960.
Foto: Fred Stein / ullstein bild / dpa
Luck, though, is not a category in Hannah Arendt's thinking, that is not how she sees human beings. The arbitrariness to which she was exposed, however, the loss of her rights, the grotesque significance that papers could have for survival, the collapse of everything that constitutes being human: That forms the foundation of her work.
She became famous overnight in 1951 with "The Origins of Totalitarianism.” It is a book in which she sought to get to the bottom of this novel political system from which she had escaped. She called it "totalitarian." She tried to comprehend how the abyss of the Holocaust could open up in the middle of Europe.
"Eichmann in Jerusalem," published in 1963, offered her the opportunity to examine the evil that had occupied her so intensively – sitting in the glass booth of an Israeli courtroom. And to her own surprise, Arendt discovered that while the man who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews might be one of the greatest criminals of all time, he was also a buffoon. Beneath the mask of the bureaucrat was not a monster, but a bureaucrat.
She became a university professor, first in Chicago, then in New York. She traveled extensively, including to Germany (and also to Heidegger). American intellectuals, newly minted German-Jewish Americans and visitors from West Germany all met in her living room.
There is an interesting story that Arendt told of herself in March 1962. It was the time when she was working on the Eichmann book, but a truck had rammed the taxi she was sitting in, and she was now in the hospital with a few lost teeth and a couple of broken ribs. When she woke from unconsciousness, she would later write to her friend Mary McCarthy, she performed a bit of a self-test – first to see if she could still move, and then her memory. "Very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers." Finally, she reached a conclusion: "Everything all right."
First the memories. Then the poems. And, finally, the telephone numbers. It likely reflected her thinking. First rooted in life, then in education and then in her dialogue with a large and tightly woven network of friends.
The designation of intellectual is one she rejected for herself. She had simply seen too many people who "had something to say about Hitler," as she later said. Heidegger first and foremost, of course. From her engagement with Judaism, she extracted a pair of concepts that she found useful: that of the parvenu and the pariah. The former is the assimilated Jew who can achieve prosperity in the majority society but will never really become part of it. The latter, the pariah, is the one who lives and thinks on his own terms.
Like Arendt.
Her perhaps most important essay was hardly read when it first appeared in 1943.The Menorah Journal, a small Jewish magazine from New York, was simply too obscure. The author, who had stepped off the ship that had brought her to the U.S. just two years before, was simply too unknown. And the first words of the essay, called "We Refugees,” were dripping with laconism. "In the first place,” she wrote, "we don’t like to be called 'refugees.’”
The stateless person, from whom everything has been taken and whom no one wants, stands at the center of Arendt's thinking. The migrant, as one might say today, but Arendt may not like that term either. It reduces people to a technical process and an administrative act. For Arendt, the refugee is more. "We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings," she wrote. "Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are." And: "That means the rupture of our private lives.”
These few words encapsulate much of Arendt's thinking. For the expulsion of people by states is not simply unjust. By doing so, the state takes from them elements of what it means to be human. In a certain sense, however, modern nation-states cannot help it. The danger that the nation’s duty to protect its citizens might lead to it excluding some of those citizens always exists. It is inherent in a nation’s structure.
Hannah Arendt as a refugee in 1944.
Foto: Fred Stein / ullstein bild
Of course, she developed this thought on the strength of her own experiences as a refugee from the Nazis. In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she explains over the course of hundreds of pages how anti-Semitism, the decay of nation-states and the modern refugee problem are connected, how they made the Nazi catastrophe possible. But for Arendt, the refugee is more than that: He is a central figure of modernity.
"We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation," she wrote.
Arendt's formulation of the "right to have rights" is perhaps one of the most significant sentences of 20th-century political theory. There is a right that precedes all others: the right to be part of the community. Where that is called into question, the path to ruin begins.
She was not the only one who sought to think about politics in completely new ways after the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Many others did as well – thought which produced modern international law, complete with the United Nations and its network of institutions. The European Union is a consequence as well – as is, if you will, the Dublin Regulation, which is supposed to regulate EU member states' responsibility for asylum procedures. Though, as is well known, it functions poorly.
Arendt was skeptical of these solutions, but she was also short on ideas for how to do it better. She tried on one occasion, when the question arose around the founding of the Israeli state regarding how to deal with the Palestinians. She advocated a kind of federation, but her concept generated very little response. Arendt was not a policy advisor. She did, though, have a radar. And this radar told her: Where there is a refugee problem, there is a problem that is bigger than the refugees. Where the rights of one are in danger, the rights of all are in danger.
Could anything be more current than that?
From the masked ICE squads in Trump's America that kick down doors at dawn and take people into custody. To the failed European migration policy that has allowed tens of thousands of people to drown in the Mediterranean. To the civil wars that are driving people to flight everywhere in the world. And the people who, if they are lucky enough to escape the ethnic cleansing and massacres of their homeland, end up in refugee camps without prospects. People who are treated as if they were superfluous. In that regard, little has changed since the 1930s.
A refugee camp in Palestine.
Foto: Saleh Salem / REUTERS
One does not, of course, need Hannah Arendt to see the injustices of this world. For that, it is enough to watch the news. But her thinking helps one understand the logic according to which the injustices function.
It is not a moral argument that Arendt makes, but a philosophical and political one. The modern state – as it has emerged since the 17th century, as it has transformed into the nation-state and spread across the entire world – may offer protection to people. But at the same time, it repeatedly produces the catastrophes itself.
Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" was a scandal from the very beginning. She was accused of trivializing the man who was responsible for the death of millions of people because she considered him ridiculous. She was also attacked for her criticism of the so-called Jewish Councils, which were compulsory bodies established during Nazi rule in German-occupied territories in Jewish communities and ghettos. Arendt held them co-responsible for the Holocaust. And then there was her tone. She was accused of lacking "love for the Jewish people," old friends broke off contact, the book did not appear in Israel until 2000.
War criminal Adolph Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
Adolf Eichmann, who during World War II headed a central department of the Reich Security Main Office, was one of those responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. After the war, he managed to flee to South America, where he was tracked down in the late 1950s, not least through the work of Frankfurt's chief prosecutor Fritz Bauer. A Mossad commando captured Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Israel, where he was put on trial and sentenced to death after 121 days in court.
Arendt desperately wanted to lay eyes on this man. She had written about the enormity of totalitarianism, now she was eager to examine an individual perpetrator. In fact, however, she was not a very good court reporter. She missed most of the trial days and her reconstruction of the case was based largely on reading the files. She did not feel particularly comfortable in Israel, she also had to finish another book, her husband grew ill in the middle of it all, and then she had her car accident. Nothing was going right.
Moreover, the criticism of her book was not misplaced. The vehemence with which she held the Jewish Councils co-responsible for the Holocaust proved unsustainable. And even if she did not absolve Eichmann from responsibility, the picture she painted of him was misleading. He was not a simple bureaucrat who only did what he was ordered to do. Research today has produced an entirely different image: Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semite who was acting in accordance with his beliefs.
But none of that detracts from the fact that while she may not have accurately depicted Eichmann, she succeeded in two other things: the sharp portrait of one of the archetypes of modernity, the Schreibtischtäter, or "desk perpetrator.” And the updating of one of humanity's oldest categories: evil.
It remains scandalous to this day, to be sure, to separate evil so radically from the evildoer, as Arendt does. To demythologize evil. If someone like Eichmann does monstrous things, must he not be a monster? Eichmann had "to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing," Arendt wrote in a famous passage of her book. "It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period."
Thoughtlessness, to be sure, is something without which no bureaucracy in the world can function. The modern state, this strange behemoth that now organizes the lives of a large part of humanity, can only function if there are people who act thoughtlessly. Without them, there are no taxes, no road construction and no penal system. And the more important algorithms and artificial intelligence become, the more central becomes the question of responsibility that arises when what one does and what one imagines no longer coincide.
Arendt was on the scent of the great questions of modernity when she wrote about Eichmann. No wonder her answers are uncomfortable.
There is a small book that appeared in German a few weeks ago, "Hannah Arendt in Syria.” The author Yassin al-Haj Saleh seeks to apply Arendt's ideas to his homeland. He spent 16 years in Syrian prisons before he managed to emigrate, and after spending some time in Berlin, he began reading Arendt's books. Her thinking strikes a powerful chord in him. Much of what he knows from Syria he recognizes in Arendt's description of totalitarian rule. Again and again, Saleh speaks of the "Eichmanns" he encountered during his years in prison – before ultimately proposing an addition to the "radical evil" that Arendt sketched in her totalitarianism book and the "banal evil" that she described in the Eichmann book: the "intimate evil” that he encountered – the evil of systematic rape and torture that requires bodily contact.
Arendt would surely have liked the approach.
All those wishing to understand Hannah Arendt, however, must also acknowledge that there are wide swaths of the modern world that cannot be understood with her thinking. Realities that she could not or would not see, or for which the conceptual toolkit she deployed simply does not work. Climate change, for example. According to everything we know today, it is the biggest problem facing humanity in the 21st century. And it is distantly separated from the concepts that Arendt offers.
This has nothing to do with the era in which she lived. During the clearance of Lützerath in winter 2023, the village in North Rhine-Westphalia that had to be forcibly evacuated to make way for an expanding open-pit lignite mine, young people protested by occupying houses and refusing to come down from trees. And Luisa Neubauer held up a book called "The Imperative of Responsibility” by Hans Jonas. Jonas was one of Arendt's closest friends; they knew each other from their studies. Though they had a falling out over her Eichmann book, he nevertheless delivered the eulogy at her grave. Modern technology endangers the "integrity" of the world, according to Jonas, opening up a need for a new ethics. Arendt was even married to the ecology pioneer Günther Anders, who wrote "The Obsolescence of the Human" in the 1950s. Such thoughts are not far from her own.
Yet nature is a void in her work. At the center of her thinking stands the human being. When she reflected on the beginning age of space travel in the introduction to "The Human Condition," she wrote that the danger of journeys into space lay in the fact that humans, should they detach themselves from Earth, might possibly no longer understand themselves. That exactly the opposite occurred, and it was precisely the photos of Earth from space that launched a new branch of holistic thinking because it suddenly became clear just how vulnerable the blue planet is: That was something she could not imagine.
Arendt was also not a feminist, though many feminists revere her today. The power imbalance between men and women and the results of that imbalance for politics, identity and thinking was not particularly interesting to Arendt. She had simply always done what she wanted, she answered when Günter Gaus asked her in their famous television conversation whether she saw her life as the only philosopher among countless men as an emancipation story.
The limits of Arendt's thinking, though, were starkest when it came to the third great theme of our time: racism. Nowhere does this become clearer than in her essay "Reflections on Little Rock." The occasion was a photo that went around the world showing 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, a Black girl who, on September 4, 1957, at the beginning of the new school year, tried to enter her school and was prevented from doing so by a white mob. Three years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that segregation in schools must be abolished. The governor of Arkansas, though, had refused to comply, prompting President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send armed forces. The conflict dragged on for a number of days, and ultimately, it was soldiers from an airborne division who escorted Eckford and eight other students into the school.
Students in Little Rock in 1957.
Foto: Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Hannah Arendt thought that was wrong. The schools, according to her argument, were not part of the political sphere and should not be transformed into one. If white parents wanted to send their children to school only with other white children, the government had no right to prevent them from doing so.
The text was a scandal even then. And it has remained a scandal. Was Hannah Arendt a racist?
She never endorsed or justified racial segregation in the U.S., which at that time still dominated large parts of the South. Nor did she do so in this essay either. She merely voiced doubts as to whether it "was wise to begin the enforcement of civil rights in a domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake." That such an argument accepted that the rights of the white parents outweighed those of Black parents was something she ignored.
In fact, the problem of the essay lies not least in the fine print: "If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews," she wrote, "I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so." It made it sound as though the centuries-long history of racism in the U.S. was akin to the question of finding the right hotel. The controversy the essay triggered seems to have had its effect on Arendt. When an interview with the Black writer Ralph Ellison appeared a few years later, in which he criticized Arendt and accused her of clearly knowing little about the history of Black America, she wrote him a letter in reply, essentially admitted as much. But she never publicly revised her position.
The dispute over "Little Rock" continues to this day. The question of how a thinker who was one of the first to point to the roots of Nazi ideology in European colonialism could understand so little about racism in the United States remains open. Did she love the U.S. too much? Did Arendt's understanding of anti-Semitism blind her to other forms of discrimination?
Perhaps it is simpler to just say: Those seeking to understand racism can do better than turning to Hannah Arendt.
Arendt's political thinking is based on the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, she was always clearly rooted in the present, in the difficulties of the day. Not an easy gap to span.
In most political theories, and also in common sense, power and violence belong together. Not with Arendt. For her, power belongs to the sphere of public action. It establishes republican, liberal institutions. Power is communicative action. Violence is the opposite of that. It is mute, uncommunicative. It makes power disappear.
Hannah Arendt in a classroom at Wesleyan University in 1961.
Foto: Wesleyan University Library / Special Collections & Archives
Arendt's image of society is also counterintuitive. For most sociological theories and in the common sense of most people, work stands at the center of how we see ourselves. Not with Arendt. Labor, production and action are the three categories with which she looks at coexistence – one could also say reproduction, self-realization and politics. But labor, in her hierarchy, is at the very bottom. The idea that spending time on one's phone and liking Instagram posts could have anything to do with politics would be completely foreign to Arendt. Politics – that which constitutes us as social beings – begins for her only beyond self-realization and consumption. It begins where the heavy weight of necessity no longer rests on our shoulders.
Her view of history, as well. The American Revolution, including the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 are normally considered two events that are linked. A pair of bourgeois revolutions that launch a new era because they produce a new kind of nation-state: a structure in which power must be democratically legitimized, where political and economic power passes into the hands of the bourgeoisie and where a constitution guarantees basic political rights.
Arendt takes a different view. For her, the two revolutions are polar opposites, and she only really accepts the American Revolution as a true revolution. She believed that the French Revolution failed at the moment when the poor became involved. An involvement which, in her view, necessarily led to terror. The American Revolution, on the other hand, succeeded precisely because it did not try to combat inequality – instead securing freedom through a complex constitution. Thus opening up a new space for politics.
That point of view, of course, is a declaration of love for the United States, the country that took her in when she was forced to flee Europe, penniless and stateless. But it is also a lucid anticipation of all the revolutions that have taken place in the world since the 1970s: in Greece, in South Africa, in Chile, everywhere in Eastern Europe, from the fall of the Wall in Germany to the Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in Kyiv. In mostly non-violent movements, ordinary citizens have managed to establish the "conditions of freedom," as Arendt calls it. This capacity for self-organization is, as Arendt sees it, among the basic human abilities. It crops up again and again – and makes people actors in political processes rather than its victims. Freedom is possible.
And then?
Hannah Arendt in 1970.
Foto: Hannah Arendt Literary Trust
Arendt has a complex view of democratic politics. Democracy derives its stability from its openness. Openness to both active and rebellious citizens, to responsible elites and to authorities. This only works when courage, judgment and civic sensibility come together – when differences come together to strengthen commonalities. Indeed, quite a lot must come together to enable democratic freedom.
She would almost certainly have viewed the thoroughly bureaucratized, cradle-to-the-grave democracy of today's Germany with skepticism. Freedom for Arendt means being prepared to set out into the unknown.
Hannah Arendt has very often been the thinker of winners in recent years. That is largely due to the course that the world has charted – to the illusion that there would, in the long term, be no alternative to liberal democracy. Arendt was a great source of quotes for that view.
With the new, rawer world that is now emerging, her standing is likely to change.
In 1972, three years before her death, there was a congress in honor of Arendt at the University of Toronto, to which she was also invited. It was an interesting event, particularly for the sharp criticism directed at Arendt – perhaps odd for such an event. But it was consistent with her nature: Nothing bored her as much as when everyone held the same opinion. There were quite a number of leftist and Marxist colleagues of Arendt's present who refused to accept that Arendt sought to exclude the "social question" from the political. "Where do you actually stand?" Arendt was asked several times. "I am nowhere," she answered. "I really do not swim in the stream of present or any other political thought. Not because I want to be particularly original, however – it simply turned out that I don't really fit in anywhere."
But one cannot think without having a foundation, she was told? "You speak of groundless thinking," she answered. "I have a metaphor that is not so cruel, which I have never published but kept to myself. I call it 'thinking without a banister.' When you go up or down stairs, you can always hold onto the banister so you don't fall. But the banister has been lost to us. That is how I come to terms with myself."
Thinking without a banister. Another Arendt sentence that could be printed on a T-shirt.
But one can also take it seriously. Here is a woman whose life closely coincides with the catastrophes of the 20th century. She did not choose this world, she was thrown into it. Fascism, communism, liberalism. World War II, Holocaust, Cold War. That is the age she traversed. And it tore away everyone's standards. The seduction of power that promises security is something almost nobody escaped. Arendt did. Most of the time, at least. Not many can say that.
Fifty years after Arendt's death, the ideologies are back. On a global scale, but also in the everyday life of each individual. The globe is being redistributed, a world after the West is emerging, and it is not entirely clear how it will turn out.
