Short thread

I started using Twitter in the fall of 2016. I had always been reticent to try social media, but I had just finished putting together a full draft of Hannah Arendt's poems, and was working on an introduction as I prepared to pitch the book to publishers. And then... One afternoon I was looking through Arendt's papers in the archive and I stumbled across a letter from Elizabeth Bishop. It was so charming, I thought: Why not share it? So, I did. And that's how I began here. Now nearly 15 years after I discovered Arendt's poems...

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The cancellation of @mashagessen's @BoellStiftung Hannah-Arendt-Prize is an affront to Hannah Arendt's memory.

By their own logic, the @BoellStiftung needs to cancel the Hannah-Arendt-Prize altogether. What Hannah Arendt said about the nation-state of Israel was far more damning than anything Gessen wrote.

1) Arendt from Jerusalem in 1955:

"On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel."

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I finished teaching Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism last night. I shared the handout for week three on imperialism. Here are the handouts for weeks one and two on antisemitism, racism and power politics. As we finished class I kept thinking about two things.



Citizenship will always be an instrument of imperialist nation-state politics, which create superfluous masses of people who are systematically stripped of their humanity. Arendt called this radical evil. She understood it as a three-step process.

Thread for those who asked for my syllabus on The Problem of Evil.

The course is designed to explore the concepts of evil, radical evil, and the banality of evil.

Why does evil exist?
Who does evil?
Does God allow evil to exist?

Here's the syllabus.

We read books 5 and 7 of Saint Augustine's Confessions.

You can find the reading here:

And book 12 of City of God:

Here's a guided reading handout with questions and key passages: newadvent.org/fathers/110105…
newadvent.org/fathers/120112…

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I finished teaching a course on evil last Thursday. The last reading we discussed was Hannah Arendt’s “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In the essay Arendt asks how politics can become so divorced from reality as to destroy our sense of moral judgment. What Arendt's work has helped me think about is what it means to be a person in this world. Her greatest teaching was love of the world, Amor Mundi. We all appeared here, we all have a right to exist here. A crime against humanity is a crime that denies a people a right to exist.

Hannah Arendt and her mother Martha Sara Cohn.

Martha was born in Königsberg on May 28, 1874. Her father Jacob Cohn had fled Russia in 1852 to escape Tsar Nikolaus. She was trained in classical music and French, and was a committed social democrat. Martha Cohn married Paul Arendt in April 1902. She knew he had contracted syphilis in his youth, and it was in remission when they decided to have Hannah Arendt in 1906. But by the time Arendt was born, he was in steady decline. He died on October 10, 1913.

Since Donald Trump has decided to decree that a statue to Hannah Arendt be erected in the National Garden of American Heroes, I thought I would take a few moments and share some of Arendt's thoughts on monuments. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a… First let me say that the irony of this order is beyond laughable. After Hannah Arendt escaped Nazi Europe, she emigrated to New York in 1941. She was a housekeeper, a journalist, & an adjunct professor before she wrote her first major work The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951.

"Johanna Arendt was born in Linden, Hannover, Germany on 14 October 1906 at a quarter past nine on a Sunday evening."

— Martha Cohn

#HappyBirthdayHannahArendt
📸Martha's Kinderbuch "Her independence and idiosyncrasy were actually based in a true passion she had conceived for anything odd. Thus, she was used to seeing something noteworthy even in what was apparently the most natural and banal."

— Hannah Arendt, 1925

📸Shadows (A self-portrait)

1) I'm receiving emails asking for reading recommendations. This is what I'm sharing: I've been rereading Benjamin's essay On Violence, Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, & Baldwin's Letter from a Region in My Mind. I've also been reading Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Brecht, & Auden 2) If you want to read Hannah Arendt on protest, rebellion, and solidarity, I'd recommend: On Violence, Civil Disobedience, the end of On Revolution, the essays on Jaspers and Lessing in Men in Dark Times, and this essay on the Freedom to be Free: lithub.com/never-before-p…, But....

Hannah Arendt's final exam for On Revolution, taught at Northwestern in 1961: Hannah Arendt's bibliography in lieu of syllabus. Taught while she was writing On Revolution.

Since we can't leave our houses, I thought I'd make a short thread on some of the houses Hannah Arendt lived in.

Hannah Arendt was born in Linden, Hannover Germany on October 14, 1906. This was her first home, Lindener Marktplatz 2. At the age of 3, Hannah Arendt's family moved to Königsberg so her father’s syphilis could be treated, and they could be near family. She spent most of her youth here, at Tiergartenstrasse 6.

People often ask me where they should start with Hannah Arendt's work. These are my most common suggestions.

For those who want a taste before committing to the longer works:

Politics: Crises
Theory: Between Past & Future
A sense of Arendt: Men in Dark Times
Overview: Thinking For people who want to dive into Hannah Arendt's work headfirst:

Origins was her 1st major work, about the constellation of elements that crystallized into Totalitarianism. 1951

The Human Condition was her 2nd major work, about spaces of freedom and the life of action. 1958