“‘Footprints and Sensible Things'”: Rebecca Brenner Graham on Samantha Rose Hill’s *Hannah Arendt*

“The way Hannah Arendt lived her life will always be more instructive than the ideas she deduced from it,” argues Christopher Bray in The Critic. That piece is subtitled “How the facts of Hannah Arendt’s life read like fiction.” Hannah Arendt had escaped death repeatedly. She was born Jewish in Germany in 1906. I don’t have a statistic of how many of the Jewish Germans born in 1906 survived past 1945, but we can assume too few. In the aftermath of her 1962 severe taxi accident, Arendt recalled: “For a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or die. And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it” (165). Arendt remained constantly aware of death. In a deeply existentialist way, she constantly chose to live, maintaining an awareness that each person’s life ends eventually.

Born into a secular Jewish family in Germany in 1906, she was arrested after Germany appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. Having escaped to Paris in 1933, she was transported to an internment camp in Gurs in 1940. From 1925 to 1927, Arendt had an affair with future-Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she reconnected in 1950. She enjoyed a happy marriage with Henrich Blucher from 1940 to 1970, and she published a series of important publications from 1951 through her death in 1975. Hill writes: “Arendt’s ashes were buried next to Heinrich Blucher’s in the Bard College cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. And after everything, amidst the praise and consolations offered in this realm of human affairs, Hannah Arendt had achieved that rare heroic feat she described so elegantly in The Human Condition: immortality” (206). Based on how well Hill knows Arendt despite their lives never intersecting on the planet, Arendt does seem immortal. So, why don’t we have as many biographies of Hannah Arendt as Abraham Lincoln?

The newest Arendt biography, Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill, is part of the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books in the United Kingdom, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the United States. Critical Lives provides “a major series of short critical biographies that present the work of important cultural figures in the context of their lives” according to its website. Equipped with a Political Science PhD from UMass Amherst, four years of experience as Assistant Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, an encyclopedic knowledge of Arendt that she generously shares on social media, Hill and her work appear in LA Review of Books, Lit Hub, other publications including her Substack, her forthcoming translated book of Arendt’s poetry, and various podcast appearances.

Hannah Arendt offers an extraordinarily readable 210 pages, combining sharp analysis with concise and precise summary of Arendt’s life and works. Twelve of the twenty chapters are named for individual article or book publications by Arendt, and the other eight are: Inner Awakening, Turn Towards Politics, Internment, State of Emergency, Transition, Friendship, Reconciliation, and Storytelling.

Hill wields such a thorough knowledge of available details, quotations, and sources regarding Arendt that she chooses the most engaging, thought-provoking ones and integrates them into her prose. For example, in Shadows – the chapter about the Heidegger affair – Hill explains that Arendt “lived in an attic apartment near the university with a pet mouse. The mouse was already in residence when Arendt arrived, but she befriended the lonely creature and entertained her friends when they came to visit by luring him out of his hole with cheese. Arendt’s childlike playfulness was one of the many traits that attracted Heidegger to her” (35). Although the mouse comes across as a more sympathetic character than Heidegger here, this chapter also offers that “love is not the affection one might feel for a particular object, it is not a form of sentimentality, but rather the ‘footprints’ and ‘sensible things’ that leave an impression on the mind” (42). This statement is emblematic of Hill’s subtle integration of Arendt’s words into her own writing.

While Arendt’s background was philosophy, and Hill’s is political science, neither scholar fits squarely into either discipline. Hill writes: “After the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, Arendt left the world of academic philosophy to do the work of political thinking” (9). Indeed, German philosophy before World War II was phenomenological, interrogating the essence of being itself, whereas following the rise of Nazism, Arendt needed to philosophize about political events in the world that shaped her life. Arendt rejected labels because she opposed ideology itself. Hill writes: “Hannah Arendt rejected all forms of ideological thinking. She did not subscribe to a particular school of thought or philosophical doctrine” (12). ‘Ism’s’ represented red flags to her. Hill continues: “Arendt was demanding, unapologetic and opinionated. Her husband was a Marxist, and she read Marx, yet she never labeled herself. She was not a feminist, a Marxist, a liberal, a conservative, Democrat or Republican. She loved the world and accepted what she understood to be the fundamental elements of the human condition: we do not exist alone, we are all different from one another, we appear, and we will disappear” (13). Today neither liberals nor conservatives, Democrats nor Republicans can rightfully claim Arendt because she’d reject ideological labels. She’d likely philosophize about why they’re trying to claim her.

Arendt’s own exploration of a Jewish woman in European history demonstrated how seeing oneself in a particular historical figure can enhance not detract from analysis. Did Arendt project herself onto Rahel Varnhagen? Hill describes Arendt’s ‘habilitation’ work, Rahel Varnhagen: Life Story of a Jewess in the Romantic Era, a project in which Arendt “found her ‘closest friend’ and ‘a woman with a truly passionate nature.’ She also found a biographical example of the dangers of romantic individualism, Jewish assimilation and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe” (51). Although Arendt believed the personal and political realms to be separate at least in her later work, her exploration of Varnhagen’s life seemed at least partially personal. Hill observes: “Arendt wanted to tell Rahel’s story as she might have told it herself, abandoning chronology and historicism. There is little material detail in the work. Instead, one meets Rahel’s voice and Arendt’s judgement” (52). Hill likewise incorporates her subject’s own words in a way that feels intentional, precise, and authentic.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill is the book’s consistent integration of Arendt’s own phrasing owing to Hill’s encyclopedic knowledge of the archives and relevant sources. Arendt, for example, called her husband Heinrich Blucher her “four walls” and “portable home” (80). Hill explains that in Blucher, Arendt “found another sense of durability that gave her the freedom to pursue her work” (81). Two pages later, Hill recounts that Blucher sent Arendt a list of items that he might need in an internment camp: ski boots, winter jacket, trousers, winter socks, kitchen knife, mess tin, small pipe, and tobacco pouch (83). These details help slow down readers and to illuminate nuances that previous accounts or conventional wisdom have insufficiently captured. Arendt not only escaped Nazism to secure refuge in the U.S., but she also endured exile in France from 1933 to 1941. Exile included moments of joy – their friendship with Walter Benjamin and philosophizing alongside thinkers like Sartre and de Beauvoir – yet their refugee status necessitated constant fear for nearly a decade.

I only have two minor grievances with the whole book. The first is when Hill notes that Arendt’s stepsister Clara “committed” suicide (116), while mental health advocates prefer the phrase “died by suicide.” The second is more complicated. In the “Transition” chapter in which Arendt settled in the U.S., Hill analyzes that what made the U.S. “unique in Arendt’s view was the fact that America had never been a nation-state, and so it was not ‘affected by the vices of nationalism and chauvinism.’ In America, she came to understand, citizenship was founded upon adherence to the constitution, not ethnicity or race. She praised American federalism, the separation of powers and the lack of a centralized government” (99). I think it worth noting that Arendt’s ideas here are ahistorical at best. Arendt’s assumption here comes across as aggressively white. From the perspective of a person of color in the U.S., ethnicity and race each shape how an American experiences citizenship and the Constitution from the founding through today. This is an important point not for the sake of judging Arendt’s error, but rather for analyzing race and whiteness in the U.S. and for understanding the escalation of antisemitism in Europe. As Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman and Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson leave no room for doubt, Nazis’ treatment of Jewish Germans drew inspiration for the treatment of Black people in America. Arendt’s journey from being Jewish under Nazi rule to white passing in the U.S., as well as her assumption of colorblind American citizenship, could be a productive case study.

Despite the notorious controversy surrounding her publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem in The New Yorker, Arendt lamented that the public misunderstood her argument and points, while unbothered about the controversy itself according to Hill. Arendt felt “pronounced guilty for a book she had never written” (163). Here we can discern Arendt’s values: philosophizing the essence of real-world problems, and above all truth. She didn’t worry over what people thought of her, and she never aligned with a specific ideology. For example, she worked toward Zionist ideas, until after the founding of Israel in 1948, when she felt that Zionism and nationalism had gone too far. Hill parses out how Arendt’s opposition to ‘ism’s’ stemmed from her distinctions between private and public realms, and within public realms, between political and social problems. Hill likewise helps readers understand why Arendt criticized the Little Rock Nine following the Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools in the U.S. The way that her philosophy separated politics from social problems, Arendt thought that integrating schools signified a political solution to a social problem, which she perceived as a square peg in a circular hole. Further, Arendt thought that parents used their children as political pawns for a social problem. She soon apologized, explaining that she had misunderstood how racism became more than a social issue for African Americans. The misunderstanding stemmed from Arendt’s misguided assumption of that race didn’t affect citizenship in the U.S. While Arendt in America by historian Richard King explicates where Arendt’s thinking went wrong here, Hill centers Arendt’s apology: “The failure to understand caused me indeed to go into an entirely wrong direction… I simply did not understand the complexities of the situation,” Arendt wrote to Ralph Ellison. Both Arendt’s apology and her indifference toward controversy reflect her focus on discerning truth. Hill adds that for Arendt, the consequence of her misunderstanding was controversy, “to which she was not a stranger,” and then transitions into Eichmann in Jerusalem (152).

Many more books on Arendt herself exist now than when I entered graduate school in 2015. Earlier this year, in January 2021, Anne Heberlein published On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt, which is a good read but just not as crisp as Hill’s book. It could’ve been more engaging, and it also could’ve been more philosophical, while Hill provides both. But it’s still good – “Hannah could not write without smoking – or so she believed, anyway,” Heberlein quips. In mid-2015, Anne Heller published Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times, which captivated me sipping chai latte at the Willard Hotel bar after finishing finals in 2016. I remember the feeling of enjoying it, even if less sophisticated than Heberlein and Hill’s biographies. Finally, in early 2016, Arendt and America happened to be the book that inspired me to join the USIH board as secretary in 2017 because I couldn’t put it down and read it twice. King’s Arendt in America offers an ideal supplement to Hill’s book by bearing out some intellectual history regarding race and America that Hill didn’t have time to explore. Conveniently, Hill herself recommended “the best books on Hannah Arendt” for Five Books.

A key difference between most academic monographs and most popular biographies is that in the latter, our favorite characters usually die at the end. In Hill’s book, the death of readers’ favorite characters begins with the passing of Arendt’s doctoral advisor and mentor Karl Jaspers in the Men in Dark Times chapter. Hill includes a detail absent from recent Arendt biographies: “Arendt observed Jaspers’s passing with her own personal Shiva, wearing black for an extended period of morning, with brightly colored scarves. Jaspers’s disappearance from the world meant the physical disappearance of her mentor and friend” (182-183). Such a relatable description, including how Arendt adapted Jewish rituals. Upon the death of her husband in the following chapter, Crises of the Republic, Arendt confided in her best friend Mary McCarthy that she’d panicked over her husband’s impending death for nearly a decade, and after he died a profound sense of emptiness replaced the fear (190). In the five years between Blucher’s 1970 death and Arendt’s 1975 death, her daily life remained full of friendship, publishing, receiving awards, socializing, traveling, and writing.

Hill’s biography blends sophisticated philosophy, productive historical context, and ‘Easter eggs’ of human-interest story. My elementary school librarian would recall that I checked out the same biography of Allan Pinkerton repeatedly. In middle school and high school, I switched to devouring every biography of Harriet Tubman and several Presidents. My senior year of college, I was obsessed with Frances Perkins. Since then, my historical hero has been Hannah Arendt. My doctoral advisor and mentor Gautham Rao – who teaches a class on Arendt – reminds me not to have heroes. He’s right as usual. Yet, at its essence Hill’s Hannah Arendt fuses the gap between the wisdom not to have heroes and the human desire to focus on historical figures who provide inspiration both personally and professionally.