Arendt as an Epistolary Friend

Madeleine Thien reads Hannah Arendt’s correspondence and finds that they add to her depth as a thinker. Thien writes: 

In the voluminous letters available to an English language reader, Arendt is very much a live wire. The voice that unifies The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Men in Dark Times, and Eichmann in Jerusalem is here in all its complexity, passion, impatience, patience, irreverence, undeniable brilliance, erudition, tenderness, and a sardonic tone that often serves to hide her mourning.

Perhaps because I am a novelist, the scope of the person beneath the books—what they leave unsaid—has always interested me. Sometimes the writer beneath is surprisingly thin, as if all thoughts and deeds are ultimately directed outwards, to self-aggrandisement. This is not the case with Arendt. I keep returning to her books and letters not to agree with her, or to imbibe her thoughts, but because her company impels me to question the meaning of my own thinking — to stop and think. In a June 27, 1946 letter, Jaspers writes an incisive critique of one of Arendt’s essays (possibly The Seeds of a Fascist International but biographers are not certain):
There are many brilliant, persuasive formulations and observations in your essay—quite apart from the passion, which is central to it. I don’t know what to suggest to you. Would it be possible to articulate the connections more cautiously and therefore more powerfully—that is, to present them in a historically more correct and less visionary way?
In this and throughout the four hundred and thirty-three letters of the Jaspers-Arendt correspondence, they are continuously critiquing, grappling with, and facing the depth of the other’s thinking. Responding to Jaspers’ critique, Arendt’s letter begins, in fact, with response to Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage:
Your definition of Nazi policy as a crime (“criminal guilt”) strikes me as questionable. The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate.
Later in the letter, turning to her own essay, she says, “You’re absolutely right: as it stands now, you cannot and should not print it.”

The letter concludes with a startling, joyful, expression of gratitude that is very Arendtian: “But now, when you debate me like this … it seems as if I had solid ground under my feet, as if I were back in the world again.”