American Masters

(tense music) - [Narrator] Never has our future been more unpredictable.

Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense.

Forces that look like sheer insanity if judged by the standards of other centuries.

- [Narrator] Hannah Arendt was a fearless thinker, and becomes one of the most prolific political writers of our time.

- [Narrator] Antisemitism had been that feature of her life.

- [Narrator] Hannah Arendt saw this.

She was there, she was living there.

(glass shattering) - [Narrator] She escapes Nazi Germany, and she boards a boat bound for the United States, and that's where she writes "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

- [Narrator] No one could ignore it.

It is too important.

At the same time, she becomes an American citizen.

McCarthyism takes hold.

It's very familiar.

- [Narrator] In the 1960s, she became the voice of American politics.

- [Narrator] Arendt sees this rise in violence that can threaten the norms and the institutions that preserve freedom in the United States.

- I had a member of my family killed.

- [Narrator] She sounds off a warning.

She says, you can actually destroy the republic from within.

- [Narrator] Crises of our time has brought forth an ever present danger that is only too likely to stay with us from now on.

The questions that my generation has been forced to live with.

What happened?

Why did it happen?

How did this happen?