Correspondence 1926-1969 [Hardcover]

Hannah Arendt (Author), Karl Jaspers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 1992

The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jaspers's "inner emigration, " and it is resumed immediately after World War II. The initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship, in which Jasper's wife, Gertrud, is soon included and then Arendt's husband, Heinrich Blucher. These letters show not only the way both philosophers lived, thought, and worked but also how they experienced the postwar years. Since neither ever dreamed that this correspondence would be published, and each had absolute trust in the other, they reveal themselves here - for the first time - in a personal and spontaneous way. Brilliant, vulnerable, forthright, Arendt speaks about America, her adopted country. About American universities, American politics from McCarthyism to Kennedy, American urban decay. She speaks about Germany, the country she left: its anti-Semitism, its guilt for the Holocaust, its politics. And about Israel, which she always supported as a Jew but also criticized, especially in her controversial book about the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In his dialogue with Arendt, the thoughtful, generous, concerned Jaspers considers the question of the German essence, and of the Jewish character. He speaks about philosophers past and present - Spinoza, Heidegger. About old age and retirement. Corrupt journalism. Suicide. Man's future on this planet. Here is a fascinating dialogue between a woman and a man, a Jew and a German, a questioner and a visionary, both uncompromising in their examination of our troubledcentury.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The voluminous correspondence between political philosopher Arendt and German existentialist Jaspers, who taught her philosophy in Heidelberg, is a study in contrasts. Jaspers mistrusts his "stale fame" and postwar respectability after years of official neglect. Arendt, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, feels alone and stateless in New York, yet is determined to live "on the fringes of society." Jaspers idealizes the United States as a model for a united Europe. Arendt is acutely critical of McCarthy-era abuses, the disintegration of America's cities and schools and the authoritarian drift of mass society. Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish, engages Arendt in opinionated, heartfelt dialogues on the Holocaust, German resistance to Hitler, the Eichmann trial, Marx, Spinoza, Israeli politics, JFK, the atomic bomb and the Vietnam war, among other topics. In a clash of titans, the two close friends spar and confide in each other in this rich, kinetic correspondence spanning the middle decades of the century. Kohler, a retired professor of German, is literary executor of Arendt's estate; Saner, a Swiss philosophy professor, is executor of Jaspers's.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This treasure trove of letters dates from 1926, when Arendt was Jaspers's student, to Jaspers's death in 1969. The correspondents, both academics, both philosophers, both German-born, hashed out world affairs and differences of perception: She was a Jew and emigree to the United States, while he remained optimistic about the "German character" into the war years, although he eventually moved to Switzerland. This is a book for all students of 20th-century history, politics, and Western philosophy. The notes amplify a text that is already essentially colored by necessary details. A volume that many readers will want, as well as need, for years to come.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 848 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First U.S. Edition edition (September 11, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151078874
• ISBN-13: 978-0151078875
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,017,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( A ) > Arendt, Hannah

More About the Author

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) taught political science and philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Chicago. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant and original thinker, her works include Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Human Condition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Than a Correspondence - A Dialogue, December 10, 2000

By 

Edward Garea "Edward Garea" (Branchville, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Correspondence 1926-1969 (Paperback)

In 1926 Hannah Arendt was a student of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University. What began as the questions of a student to her teacher in 1926 blossomed into a friendly correspondence that ended with Arendt's forced emigration from Nazi Germany to the United States, with a stopover in France in the 30s, and then resumed in the Postwar years completely transformed into a rich, detailed dialogue between colleagues and friends, taking on a father-daughter feeling in many of the letters.

It was during the years after 1945 that the two examined everything about their world and themselves. Of particular importance were the dual issues of German guilt for the war and, for Jaspers, what it meant to be a Jew, for not only was Arendt and her husband Jewish, but also Jaspers's wife. This issue becomes intertwined in their conversations about the future of West Germany, the Suez War of 1956, and Arendt's trip to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. When they shift the political into the personal, Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Jaspers and a teacher of Arendt, is there for taking. The passages concerning Heidegger are quite gossipy at times and lend the reader a voyeuristic look into the private worlds of Arendt and Jaspers. It's almost as if when things get dull and weighty, a little dirt about Heidegger adds just the spice to make the letter memorable.

The other strong point of this book is the portrait Arendt paints of politics in 1950s America, succinctly analyzing the Eisenhower (and later Kennedy) Administrations, describing the collapse of the cities in the 60s, and the "pointless" war in Vietnam. It's almost as if a mirror were held up to history, as insights about those turbelent times pour forth from every letter dispatched.

An invaluable book, not only for those interested in the scholarly events of the times, but for anyone interested in the history of the times.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartwarming and Intellectually Engaging, August 31, 2001

By 

Andrew G. Rothschild (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Correspondence 1926-1969 (Hardcover)

Jaspers and Arendt cover everything and everyone: Sartre, Heidegger, Marx, Goethe, Camus; post-WWII Germany, "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," the Cold War, the "senile" Eisenhower administration, Eichmann, totalitarianism, the atom bomb, local democracy--it's all there. So too is a life-long, extremely close friendship between people who weathered a war from different sides of the globe, who faced cold war terror in radically different ways, who loved their spouses intensely but felt somehow separated by differences in world-view tracable to ethnicity(Gertrude was ethnically Jewish and Heinrich was ethnically Christian). Her admiration of him, her intellectual debt to him, her love for him; his seeming amazement at her vivacity, his admiration of her intellect, his cold, German form of love--and the walls cracking, and his sentiment sometimes pouring through.

It's a warm book up until the very last entry, Arendt's address at Jaspers' funeral. That's enough to send a shiver up your spine--but only if you read it in the context of everything else.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice considerations of when these people should sound off, January 25, 2006

By 

Leah Osad (Second Peter, Chapter 2, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Correspondence 1926-1969 (Paperback)

I have found CORRESPONDENCE 1926 - 1969 of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers to be enormously entertaining, easy to read, and surprisingly foreboding about problems in the book trade caused by foreign indebtedness. Politically, each date brings chilling summaries. For Hannah Arendt in America, on June 3, 1949, "At the moment, the general political atmosphere is dismal here, particularly at the universities and colleges (with the exception of the very eminent ones)." (pp. 136-137). This letter 90 has several notes on pages 714-715 which give details that are sure to be humorous now for anyone who has ever heard of Aspen, where the leaves all turn at the same time because the roots are interconnected, as perjury suspect Libby Scooter informed New York Times reporter Judy Miller in a letter urging her to end her days in prison and testify in 2005 so an investigation of White House activities relating to the identity of CIA WMD analyst Plame could be resolved quickly. According to this book, Hutchins, the president of Chicago University, was the nominal organizer of a two-week conference and Goethe celebration in July 1949 in Aspen, Colorado, attended by José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Schweitzer, Ernst Simon, Stephen Spender, and Thornton Wilder. Letter 90 was a response to articles that had been written by the "Bonn Romanticist Ernst Robert Curtius, 1886-1956," (p. 714) who would also be at the conference:

"The real power behind it is a German-American, a real-estate dealer, who recently bought up a ghost town and then had the commercially brilliant idea of tying Goethe into his business. His sole motive is to exploit Goethe to make this town world famous, so he can then make a bundle of money from tourists. The whole thing is really quite marvelous. The second backer, however, is a less amusing figure: Do you remember Bergstrasser from Heidelberg? After he had successfully accommodated himself to the regime, it was shown that he had a whole string of Jewish ancestors. He is the real moving force behind this program." (p. 136).

Curtius had published a polemic in Germany on April 2, 1949 which accused Jaspers of making "our collective guilt so plain to us that we can continue to live only with a guilty conscience. A Wilhelm von Humboldt of our time, he laid out guidelines for German universities, until he turned his back on them. ... He is crowning these national pedagogical efforts with a `campaign in Switzerland' that is directed against Goethe. Habemus Papam!" (pp. 714-715). In response to the comments of some Heidelberg professors, Curtius replied on May 17, 1949, and finally on July 2, 1949, with a title, "Goethe, Jaspers, Curtius." (p. 715). `Die Zeit' might be to blame for that title, which reeks of arrogance.

In any event, books in those days were considered significant enough that the move by Jaspers to Switzerland, as advised by Hannah Arendt on June 30, 1947, (when Jaspers was giving guest lectures in Basel), "we would do best not to settle down too permanently anywhere, not really to depend on any nation, for it can change overnight into a mob and a blind instrument of ruin" (p. 91), which made publication of books by Jaspers much easier, was resented by Germans who had already spent the money those books would earn. America was a great place for books by Jaspers to make money, and Hannah Arendt did her part to make sure that the translators selected by the publishers were able to express what Jaspers was saying in some form of English that readers could understand. Sounding like an American, Jaspers wrote on July 20, 1947:

"We are living in paradise here. My wife is already cutting back at table for fear of putting on weight." (p. 93)