Hannah Arendt (1907-1975) was a German-born American political
scientist and philosopher. She was forced to leave Germany in 1933,
after which she lived in Paris for eight years working for Jewish
refugee organizations before immigrating to the United States in
1941. Her most famous philosophical works are The Origins of
Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.
Clara Winston(1921-1983) andRichard Winston (1917-1979) were
celebrated American translators of German literature.
Barbara Hahn is a professor emerita of German studies at Vanderbilt
University. She has written and edited a number of books in German,
collecting and commenting on Hannah Arendt's work and the life and
correspondence of Rahel Varnhagen.
"Arendt probes so deeply into her subject's inner life, and writes
so vividly about her frustrations and sorrows, that the biography
often reads like a novel. . . . an imaginative mix of
biography and social commentary that still feels, as the scholar
Barbara Hahn writes in her introduction, thoroughly 'ahead of its
time.'" —Lily Meyer, NPR
"In recounting Varnhagen’s life, Arendt documents the paradoxes of
German Jews’ emancipation between the breakdown of the Jewish
ghetto in the eighteenth century and the emergence of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois Christian nation-state. . . . What
interested her was the evolution of Varnhagen’s psychology and,
especially, her Jewish identity." —Seyla Benhabib, New York Review
of Books
“Reading Rahel Varnhagen today, I am startled to see that it is
neither Jewishness nor womanness that holds my attention. What is
striking now are the extraordinary similarities between Rahel’s
period and our own. . . . Seen against the disturbed and disturbing
climate of a time, then as now, in which profound questions of self
and world are being asked, Rahel’s double portion of outsiderness
cannot help but sound a deep note in the responsive reader.”
—Vivian Gornick, The Nation
“Arendt’s insight into the psychology and the situation of pariah
and parvenu is essential.” —Kirkus Reviews
“If you know about Rahel Varnhagen, it’s probably because of Hannah
Arendt.” —Talya Zax, Forward
“A veritable laboratory of Arendt’s political thought.” —Julia
Kristeva, Hannah Arendt
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