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, the port city on a hill that blossomed into Lisbon.” In the past few years, Portugal, unlike other European countries, has shown itself eager to take in more immigrants and refugees. And yet, for some reason, remains somehow immune to the cosmopolitan ethos of other European capitals.

Hannah Arendt, the German émigré and great theorizer of statelessness, was sheltered in Lisbon for three months in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied France and awaiting passage to New York. This was an exit point common to Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Arthur Koestler, Otto von Hapsburg, and many others. The city’s prominence in this drama of escape was in large measure a result of the fact that Portugal’s official nationalism was never rooted in notions of biology or race. Salazar himself wrote a book, How to Raise a State, in which he rejected the ideology behind the Nuremberg Laws as pagan and antihuman, leading the Argentine historian Avraham Milgram to reflect that modern anti-Semitism failed “to establish even a toehold in Portugal.”

Leaving Portugal was another story, and the Kafkaesque obstacles European Jews encountered attempting to gain entry to the West prefigured the difficulties African and Syrian refugees face today. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt called statelessness “the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history.” With extraordinary prescience, she added, “Every political event since the end of the First World War inevitably added a new category of those who lived outside the pale of the law.” The consequences could not be graver. For Arendt, “only the loss of a polity itself expels [man] from humanity.” This is what is so horrific about the plight of those men—they are almost always men—caught in limbo and limping into traffic to plead against rolled-up windows on the outskirts of Paris, and to a lesser degree throughout the city. Portugal is not the world. It is a small country long ago humbled. But it is also an exciting new laboratory of migration, providing insight into what is possible when a society doesn’t take ideas of national purity too seriously. Walking around the Praca Martim Moniz, I was reminded of another immigrant community I’d visited recently—Prato, in Italy, which had left an enduring impression.