A Special Donation

The Hannah Arendt Center recently received a special donation from Konstanze Bachman in honor of her mother, Maria Schmitt-Kuemmell. We accept this gift with our sincerest thanks.

The donation is Hannah Arendt's 1929 dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch Einer Philosophischen Interpretation, or "The Concept of Love in Augustine. Attempt a Philosophical Interpretation" (Berline, Springer Verlag, 1929).

Under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt first began her scholarly career in 1929 by writing a dissertation on Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love. Four years later, her life in Germany ended abruptly with Hitler's rise to power in 1933, events which forced Arendt into exile in France. She eventually moved to New York and took her dissertation with her.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arendt completed some of her most influential studies of political life. It was at this time that Arendt also reworked her dissertation using some of the arguments and observations she had used in her other works. In this sense, Arendt's dissertation became a bridge over which she traveled back and forth between her early years in Germany and her professional career in New York, two periods which, despite their separation in time and space, both found relevance in Augustine's questions about human freedom and the possibility of political life in a scientific and technological age.

This is the 9th booklet of the Philosophische Forschungen, which was published by Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg.

The Hannah Arendt Center intends to archive the book in the Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College's Stevenson Library.