![]() ![]() And in the immediate postwar years Hannah impressed me every time I saw her by her stalwart Jewishness, her independent commitment to a Jewish homeland, her directorship of an organization devoted to restoring to devastated Jewish communities the religious and cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis. Hannah and Heinrich were not only close but enclosed, it sometimes seemed to me, by what Churchill had called “the worst episode in human history.” The reverberations of the Nazi experience would never cease. Nothing had so unhinged me from my old “progressive” beliefs as the destruction of the Jews. He was given to fantasy and exaggeration, noble lies about his military knowledge (he had been a teenage recruit in the Kaiser’s army) and his relationship to the family of Marshal Bluecher.Īs a Protestant and independent German radical married to a Jew, he impressed me most by his concern and even identification with Jews. He made up for this by shouting philosophy at you in the sweetest kind of way. In the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the book’s thesis was credited entirely to the unpublished philosophy of Bluecher.īluecher, an extraordinarily mental creature, an insatiable orator in his living room on the great thinkers even when he transferred his vehement verbal powers to the New School and Bard College, was incapable of writing for publication, whether in German or English. The “Holocaust” (no one yet called it that) as the ultimate horror of the Nazi regime’s twelve years so dominated every conversation with them that I was not surprised to learn that Hannah was writing a book on totalitarianism. ![]() No less than the Bluechers, I felt that Hitler’s war had not ended. She was a handsome, vivacious forty-year-old woman who was to charm me and others, by no means unerotically, because her interest in her new country, and for literature in English, became as much a part of her as her accent and her passion for discussing Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, even Duns Scotus, as if they all lived with her and her strenuous husband Heinrich Bluecher in the shabby rooming house on West 95th Street. I met Hannah Arendt in 1946, at a dinner party given for Rabbi Leo Baeck by Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary.
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