Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with Arendt is published in a standalone volume is Mary McCarthy.
But Arendt had other close women friends, including Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, and Lotte Kohler. These voices are crucial and yet too often left out of our understanding of Arendt’s political thinking. One reason Arendt’s letters with women are less available is simply that letters among women have long been devalued in philosophy.
It is also true, however, that Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care. The exception to this rule is McCarthy, whose published letters with Arendt are rich in intellectual inquiry. It is nevertheless the case that her friendships among women manifest a side of Arendt too often ignored: not the philosopher of worldliness but a woman capable of intimate, even erotic, bonds.
Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care. In her speech “On Humanity in Dark Times,” Arendt distinguished two kinds of friendships. There is, however, the other side of friendship—intimate and unguarded, embodied, nurtured in “face-to-face encounters.” In intimate friendships, Arendt wrote, we “speak about ourselves.” In political friendships, on the contrary, the focus is on the “common world.” Arendt rarely wrote about intimate friendships.
To the extent she spoke about love, as in The Human Condition, it was to exclude love from the public world. Love, she wrote, is different from friendship. While friendship is the bond that unites us with the common world, “love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.” Love erases the distinctions between two people, “destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.” Contained so fully in the cocoon that isolates two people, love is “not only apolitical but anti political.” Yet, in her private letters with women, this intimate dimension comes alive.
There are, of course, flashes of intimacy in her letters with Blücher and Jaspers. But the gravitational pull of those relationships is public. With women like Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelsohn Weil, Arendt’s friendships reached for a more private and intimate insistence on caring support.
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