Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later: A German Jewess in the Age of Totalitarianism

Abstract

Strange Dialectics: Arendt on Caritas and Jewishness How many Hannah Arendts are there? Is she the German Jewish pariah who nonetheless loved the world? Is she the twentieth-century literary modernist who, in writing Origins of Totalitarianism, recapitulated Augustine's City of God? Is she the unrelenting critic of conformism in bourgeois liberal culture who celebrated American political liberalism? Is she the German-Jewish refugee who accused Adolph Eichmann of philistine banality? Is she the Heideggerian fifth-columnist intent on destroying the Western philosophic tradition who wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine's social philosophy? Recently published and still emerging evidence of her earliest writing, together with her already published books, journal articles, reviews and correspondence clearly demonstrate that from the start of her public career in 1929 Arendt presented all of these masks to the public world, often simultaneously. Beginning with her dissertation on St. Augustine's