Articles

What We Are Reading:
The Plague And the Literary Cure

Roger Berkowitz
Jill Lepore writes about the literature of epidemics, looking back at great works about plagues by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Stephen King, Albert Camus, and Jose Saramago. What all plague literature shares is, first, the knowledge that the plague threatens the human world, that is “cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal.”

Corona Loneliness

By Samantha Hill
Before the Corona pandemic we were already facing a loneliness epidemic. And now, with mandatory self-isolation, many are worried about what kind of impact this enforced aloneness will have for individuals. Hannah Arendt draws an important distinction between solitude and loneliness.

Dialogue with One’s Self

Roger Berkowitz
Kate Bracht turns to Hannah Arendt to find a silver lining to our need to be by ourselves during the Corona Virus pandemic. We are all increasingly spending more time by ourselves. One answer is to reach out for companionship through on-line dinner parties and courses.

Grimm Lecture 2020: Thinking Itself is Dangerous

Acting Assistant Director and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies Samantha Rose Hill gave the annual Grimm Lecture, the premiere event of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, a research institute at the University of Waterloo. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Dr. Hill livestreamed her lecture, entitled “Thinking Itself is Dangerous. Reading Hannah Arendt Now.”

What We Are Reading:
Impotent Bigness

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt McManus writes about a dimension of Hannah Arendt’s work that he believes is given short shrift: Arendt’s critique of bigness and of “political leaders who embody the traits of “impotent bigness,” as she framed it.” Bigness in politics for Arendt is a danger to freedom. It goes together with the rise of bureaucracy and centralized government. 

What We Are Reading:
Los Angeles

By Samantha Hill

Alex Ross writes about “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile.” Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, found refuge in Los Angeles during the war years, and turned the city into “the capital of German literature in exile.”  

Lisbon

By Samantha Hill
Hannah Arendt Center NEH fellow Thomas Chatterton Williams write about his travels in Lisbon, Portugal, reflecting on Hannah Arendt’s own time there for three months in 1941, as she fled Nazi-occupied France. Williams observes that “According to legend, it was Odysseus himself who, during his meandering trip around the Mediterranean and past the Pillars of Hercules—guided by a thunderbolt from Zeus—founded Olisipo...

What We Are Reading:
Longyearbyen

By Roger Berkowitz
We are all learning about the year 1918 when the last influenza pandemic swept across the world leaving millions dead in its wake. Most of all we have learned the difference in the impact of the flu in Philadelphia, where rallies and crowds were allowed, and in St. Louis, where public health officials banned such gatherings. But there are other lessons to learn from the last great viral pandemic.

From Our Members:
A Necessary Element in the Solution of Our Existential Problems.

By Howard Goldson
I would like to share an ancient wisdom story still told by the indigenous peoples of North America as it has been for over a thousand years. It so happened that on a particular day, a day like most other days, the hunters returned to the village without a single deer for food. Not only were they unable to kill a deer, in fact they had not seen a single deer during the entire day.