Wie ich einmal ohne Dich leben soll, mag ich mir nicht vorstellen: Briefwechsel mit den Freundinnen Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, Hilde Fränkel, Anne ... und Helen Wolff
Freundschaft, so Arendt in ihrem Denktagebuch,gehört zu den »tätigen Modi des Lebendigseins«, und Briefe sind deren herausragende Zeugnisse. Dieser Band versammelt weitgehend unveröffentlichte Briefwechsel der politischen Philosophin mit ihren langjährigen Freundinnen Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil-Mendelsohn und Helen Wolff. Neben den gemeinsamen Projekten prägte die Freundschaften auch, dass alle Frauen die Wirklichkeiten von Emigration und Immigration kannten. Die Briefwechsel führen mitten hinein in Arendts Gedanken- und Arbeitswelt, sie erzählen Privates und Alltägliches aus fünf sehr unterschiedlichen, intensiv gelebten Freundschaften.
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).