https://derspiegel.substack.com/p/how-hannah-arendt-helps-us-understand
Dec 06, 2025
By Tobias Rapp
It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher’s life, called “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt,” combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF.
Five actresses, then. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her childhood in Königsberg, her student years in Marburg and the affair with Heidegger. Life in Berlin in the early 1930s and her flight from Germany when the Nazis came to power. Exile in Paris and arrival in New York, where she then became known as a political theorist in the early 1950s.
It is clever, sometimes also funny, and when the five actresses stand on stage at the end and receive the audience’s applause while standing next to a small table piled with Arendt’s books, the whole thing is a bit reminiscent of “I’m Not There,” that film in which five actors (and one Cate Blanchett) play Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan though? Is that the category we’re speaking about when we talk about Hannah Arendt?
She passed away 50 years ago. She suffered a heart attack on December 4, 1975. As a result, she was unable to complete her last book, which was supposed to be called “The Life of the Mind.” She was well-known at the time, but far from famous.
Half a century later, she is everywhere. The Thalia Theater in Hamburg just premiered a play in which Corinna Harfouch plays the philosopher; and an Arendt play is also running in Stuttgart. Two new biographies have just been published, even though one came out just two years ago. There are now at least a dozen of them. A film about Arendt also hit the silver screen in late summer. Every politician who has ever held a book in their hand has dropped a few sentences about Arendt in an interview. Angela Merkel, Robert Habeck, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The governor of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, has even written a book about her, published a few weeks ago.
Everyone wants a piece of her. The liberals, because freedom was the concept around which her thinking revolved. The leftists, because she always stood up to power. The conservatives, because she could find nothing appealing in socialism. The feminists, because she was a self-confident woman who refused to be intimidated in the male-dominated world of great thinkers. The conspiracy theorists, because Arendt believed that politics must not allow science to take away the primacy of decision-making. The critics of Israel, who believe they can align themselves with her criticism of the state of Israel. The friends of Israel, who recall her Zionist activism.
And the influencers, because she was cool and not only wrote thick books but also left behind sentences that look good on any Instagram post. Some really are direct quotes – while others are only almost verbatim. “No one has the right to obey.” “The meaning of politics is freedom.” “Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.” “The problem was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did.” “Thinking is dangerous.” The list goes on and on. And we still haven’t mentioned the “banality of evil,” the kind of signature sentence reserved only for the likes of Theodor Adorno (”There is no right life in the wrong one”) or René Descartes (”I think, therefore I am”).
Is that, though, all people want from Arendt? A good saying, a bit of confirmation and a pat on the back? Is Hannah Arendt helpful in dark times because she makes one feel good?
Present-day upheavals would undoubtedly have felt familiar to Arendt. Authoritarian rulers, anti-Semitism, post-factual politics, mass migration, conspiracy theories, democracy on a shaky foundation. She experienced all of this herself. Fascism, communism, liberalism. World War I, Weimar, World War II, Cold War. She defended herself against the challenges of her era in ever new ways – by trying to understand them. One must “be completely present,” Arendt believed. That is an extremely compelling attitude in a confusing world like today’s.
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How Hannah Arendt Helps Us Understand Our World
3 days ago · 20 likes · DER SPIEGEL
Martin Heidegger at Eighty
Hannah Arendt, translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter
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