Edna Brocke, Hannah Arendt's Niece, Visits the Center

Edna Brocke, Hannah Arendt's niece and heir, visited the Arendt Center at Bard with her sister Hannah Pinto (named after Arendt) yesterday and delivered a talk that combined personal reflections of her time with Arendt, specifically during the Eichmann trial, with her professional assessment of the current debate over Eichmann in Jerusalem as the 50th anniversary of the book approaches.

Brocke, whose parents left Germany for Israel in 1934,  met Hannah Arendt for the first time in 1955 when she was 12 years old and quickly became her favorite among the children in the family. When Arendt returned to cover the Eichmann trial in 1961, she acquired a guest pass for her niece, who, then 17, accompanied her to many of the sessions.

In addition to fascinating reflections about the Eichmann Trial,  Brocke also devoted part of her talk to describing resistance to Arendt's analysis of both Eichmann and of totalitarianism in contemporary Germany and to what she sees as its continuing political motivations.

Brocke also related the personal side of her relationship with her aunt, noting that she last saw Arendt in 1975, just months before her death. Arendt was on her way to the train station to visit Heidegger when Brocke, venturing into a subject of tense disagreement in their family, asked if she really had to go. Arendt replied by whispering in her ear: "There are things that are stronger than man." ("Es gibt Dinge, die stärker sind, als der Mensch.")

View the video footage of her illuminating visit here.