Poemes

The German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is world-renowned for her work on totalitarianism, the human condition, and the banality of evil. Not many people know that she also wrote poems—yet the language of poetry, especially that of Goethe and Schiller, was a banister for Arendt’s thinking throughout much of her adult life. Between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them acting as signposts in her biography, marking moments of great joy, love, loss, melancholia, and remembrance. Now, for the first time in English, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill present these intensely personal poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York, New York. A gift to all readers of Arendt, this stunning en face edition provides an unparalleled view into the private life of one of the most definitive thinkers of the twentieth century.