American Masters

[ Siren wailing ] [ Lighter clicks ] -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.

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

[ Typewriter keys clacking ] -Antisemitism had been a feature of her life.

-Hannah Arendt saw this.

She was there.

She was living there.

-She escapes Nazi Germany and she boards a boat bound for the United States, and that's where she writes "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

-No one could ignore it.

It's too important.

At the same time, she becomes an American citizen.

-Never have been a member of the Communist Party.

-McCarthyism takes hold.

It's very familiar.

[ Fireworks exploding ] -In the 1960s, she became a voice of American politics.

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

[ Gunshot ] -I had a member of my family killed.

[ Gunshot ] -She sounds off a warning.

She says, "You can actually destroy the republic from within.

-...in the Watergate bugging case... -Crisis 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?

[ Children shouting ] -Hannah Arendt was born in 1906, in Hanover, Germany, and pretty soon, the family moved to Koenigsberg.

She was born into a secular Jewish family.

Her mother was a musician.

Her father was educated, erudite, loving.

Her parents were creatures of the Enlightenment.

They were creative.

They were deeply, deeply loving.

-Her great-grandparents had fled the pogroms.

It was a historical understanding of her identity.

It was part of her family story in that way.

-My father had died young.

My grandfather was the president of the liberal Jewish community and the civil official of Koenigsberg.

I never heard the word "Jew" at home when I was a small child.

I first encountered it through antisemitic remarks from children on the street.

After that, I was, so to speak, enlightened.

All Jewish children encountered antisemitism, and it poisoned the souls of many children.

The difference was that my mother was always convinced that you must not let it get to you.

She would say, "You have to defend yourself."

[ Explosion ] [ Indistinct radio chatter, gunfire ] It's almost impossible to describe what happened in Europe on August 4, 1914.

The days before and the days after the First World War are separated, like the day before and the day after an explosion.

The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop.

-Hannah Arendt's life was disrupted by World War I. Koenigsberg was not a safe place for people to be at the time.

Arendt and her mother were forced to flee to Berlin.

[ Train whistle blows ] Things were moving very, very quickly.

She'd seen the soldiers coming back without limbs, the marches, the fear, the anger.

She'd seen all those.

There was violence on the streets.

And it's really important to realize just how profoundly shaking that was, because it wasn't just, "Oh, these are bad things happening," but that sense of your experience of the world being profoundly altered in ways you do not understand was Hannah Arendt's starting point, as it was for many of her generation, too.

[ Bell tolling ] -You studied at the University of Marburg with a major in philosophy and minors in theology and Greek.

How did you come to choose these subjects?

-You know, I thought about it often.

I always knew I would study philosophy ever since I was 14 years old, I read Kant.

I had this need to understand.

The desire to understand was there very early on.

You see, all the books were in the library at home.

One simply took them from the shelves.

-Kant, she said, teaches us that we're thinking beings, and it's thinking that gives us a place in this new world, that how we think has consequences for other human beings.

That's the thing that Kant taught her, and she never forgot it.

As soon as the young Hannah Arendt gets off the train at Marburg, what's happening in the rest of Germany?

Adolf Hitler steps on the stage.

So the very time that she's studying, she's reading Kant, of course she's reading Hegel, she's reading Plato, Hitler publishes "Mein Kampf."

So the beginnings of her anti-totalitarian thinking run in direct parallel to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

-Students from across Germany were flocking to Marburg to take courses with Martin Heidegger.

-[ Speaking German ] -Thinking has come to life again.

-[ Speaking German ] -There exists a teacher.

One can perhaps learn to think.

-Martin Heidegger was at the beginning of what became known as Existentialism, which is to say there is nothing to ground us except what we make of our own being.

For a generation of young thinkers, it was exhilarating.

You could exist, you could be fearlessly on your own terms.

[ Bell tolling ] -We're so accustomed to reason versus passion... spirit versus life... that the idea of a passionate thinking in which thinking and aliveness become one takes us somewhat aback, but it is more than questionable that we would ever have discovered this without the existence of Heidegger's thinking.

-She was thoughtful.

She was restless.

She wanted to fall in love.

She wanted to be.

She wanted to exist.

She wanted to experience life.

She was serious and she was very, very beautiful.

-My most momentous encounter in Marburg was with Hannah Arendt, whom I met in 1924.

At the time, she was 18.

I noticed her at once.

Who wouldn't have?

The beauty was mainly in her eyes, the way she looked into the world or the way she looked away.

We were the only Jews in a seminar on the New Testament.

Our position as outsiders immediately created a bond between us, which lasted for the rest of our lives.

Among the philosophy students, the Heidegger cult was hard to take.

It was more like a sect, almost a new religion, which I found profoundly repellent.

What was developing in Marburg in those days wasn't healthy.

-He's a 35-year-old married man with two sons.

He nonetheless writes a note to her and says, "Why don't you come to my office, and let's talk."

-Hannah confided the following to me.

At some point, Hannah had to see Heidegger during office hours.

It was late in the day, and in his office, it was growing dim.

Hannah got up to leave.

Heidegger saw her to the door.

-Suddenly, he went down on his knees before me.

He reached his arms up towards me and I took his head in my hands and he kissed me and I kissed him.

-This moment marked the beginning of something from which both parties never freed themselves.

[ Squawking ] -He has an odd way of signaling when he wants to make her appear before him.

"There will be a lamp lit in the room, and that will tell you that I am not available."

Or "I will be taking the train to such-and-such a place.

Why don't you come on at the next station and sit in the car behind me."

-She always knew that to be in love was to be totally immersed, and she kind of wanted that.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -I no longer know how love feels.

I no longer know the feels aglow.

And everything wants to drift away simply to give me peace.

-The affair went on for two years.

He was married and staying married, and when it became apparent, Hannah was the one who cut it off.

-So, on one hand, this is a story about a professor who has an affair with a female student, but the other side of that story is about a younger thinker and an older thinker and the older thinker opening up a passageway for the younger thinker to move into.

And I think that's why Heidegger was so important to her.

[ Train whistle blows ] -What I want to tell you now is nothing but a very frank assessment of the situation.

The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought.

Do not forget me and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life.

This knowledge cannot be shaken.

[ Train screeching, hissing ] [ Man singing in German ] -Hannah Arendt goes to Berlin to become a journalist.

She starts writing book reviews for the major newspapers.

She bobbed her hair.

She started smoking long cigarettes, going to parties.

[ Singing continues ] -After the untidy end of her relationship with Heidegger, she begins work on her dissertation on Saint Augustine and the theme of love.

-She found, in Augustine, the idea of neighborly love.

[ Whistle blows ] No one exists alone, and we have an ethical responsibility to one another in the world, which gave her a way of thinking about how one should be in the world.

So, the passage from Augustine that Hannah Arendt always goes back to is that "man was born, a beginning was made," which means as long as new people are born into the world, then we can always act to change the world that we inhabit.

[ Singing continues ] -It's a beautiful thesis.

As she's writing, the culture of death is taking hold all around it.

[ Singing continues ] -At the time, she was invited to a Marxist ball, and at the ball, she met Guenther Stern.

[ Woman laughs ] Stern came from a good family.

He was Jewish.

He had also studied at the University of Marburg with Martin Heidegger.

So they had a common base, and six months later, they're married.

At the time, Hannah Arendt encountered a still very lively city, but a city where you could sense the tensions.

[ Indistinct conversation in German ] -There's a sense of resentment that many people feel between a deeply unhappy, depressed, working-class, often-unemployed group of people and a more artistic, sexually free, libertine culture.

At the same time, you have Roma, Jews, Slovaks, Poles moving in between borders, because, suddenly, after World War I, there was a lot of homelessness, a lot of rootlessness.

The world was in flux.

-When you've got a profound fear of the future and then you bring the figure of the migrant Jew, it's very easy, at that point, for Hitler to step in and say, "Look, these migrants are destitute.

They come with nothing.

They're menacing.

And they're on your borders."

You've got the perfect recipe for Hitler-style fascism.

-I think a lot of people had to sense that something was going to happen.

It's like the moment before the summer storm starts.

Hannah, bored with philosophy, gets interested in German Romanticism, but she's also becoming increasingly aware and troubled and disturbed by antisemitism.

Where do these two histories come together for her?

They come together in the figure of a woman called Rahel Varnhagen.

-Arendt is working on a book on Rahel Varnhagen, who's a 19th century woman who was born Jewish, ran one of these very famous salons at the time, and hid her Judaism in order to fit in with and assimilate into Berlin society.

-Naturally, one was not going to cling to Judaism.

Why should one?

Excluded for centuries from the culture and history of the lands they lived in, Jews were only tolerated, but usually oppressed and persecuted.

Rahel's life was bound by this inferiority, by her infamous birth from youth on up.

It remained a nasty, present reality as a prejudice in the minds of others.

-When Hannah Arendt started to work on Rahel, I think she saw the danger of assimilation.

You have to forget that you are a Jew and you have to become a German and you have to leave behind who you are.

-Rahel's struggle above all against the fact of having been born a Jew very rapidly became a struggle against herself.

-It's pretty obvious that assimilation was a big failure, because she was sitting there in Berlin, and you just could sense every single day that antisemitism was growing, growing, growing, growing.

And I think, pretty early on, she knew that something would happen, that the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany would come to an end.

[ Bell dinging ] -Suddenly, we have hyperinflation.

The unemployment, which is already a problem, turns into a crisis.

The world is not only wobbling, it's shaking violently.

-The deutsche mark loses all of its value, and people are angry.

They feel like they have been lied to and they're looking for someone to blame.

[ Cheers and applause ] -The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy.

The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself.

By 1931, I was firmly convinced that the Nazis would take the helm.

-There were federal and regional elections at the time.

And if you look at Hitler's speeches during the campaigns, he would say things like, "We are a majority."

He was never a majority.

And he would come up with some argument that they won.

He was giving them a coherent narrative.

"We are winning.

We are going to change Germany.

We are going to change the world.

And the movement is growing and it's stronger because of you and your undying loyalty to me."

-The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality.

The ideal subject was not the convinced Nazi, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed.

A most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader, who, like a talisman, assures that ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

-Arendt saw this.

She was there.

She was living there.

And so many of her friends said, "Oh, well, he's just crazy.

He's just making things up.

And don't worry about him.

He can't win.

He's just creating fantasies."

But fantasies are sometimes what we want and especially at times of economic, cultural, social, and political despair.

People -- they were lonely.

They were needy of meaning and belonging, and that's what Hitler was giving people.

-The Nazi movement recruited their members from this mass of indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention.

The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene.

-I think she came up with these ideas when she was looking at what this mass society would provide people.

It would provide them with the impression that they're not alone anymore, and there is a party giving them an idea that they are part of something really big.

[ Crowd chanting ] -All the major German conservative politicians are on record over and over again saying, "We cannot let Adolf Hitler become chancellor."

And, yet, because they wanted to recruit followers of Hitler to their side, they didn't just exclude Hitler when they could, they tried to control him, and he was able to then play them all against each other until they had to make him chancellor.

[ Fireworks whistling, exploding ] -Is there a definite event in your memory that dates your turn to the political?

-I would say February 27, 1933, the burning of the Reichstag and the illegal arrest that followed the same night.

What happened next was atrocious.

-Right after the Reichstag fire, the Nazis blame the communists and declare martial law.

-Police start arresting communists, and her husband, Guenther Stern, is forced to flee.

I think she knew that the life she had was over and I think from that point on, it became a question of how to fight.

-People were taken to Gestapo cellars or to concentration camps.

This was an immediate shock for me.

And from that moment on, I felt responsible.

I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.

-It's at this point that Hannah Arendt decides to turn her apartment into a safe space for communists who have to flee Germany and find safety and refuge outside.

-Hitler becomes dictator of what is now called the Third Reich.

I mean, it's a profound power grab and it happens in the blink of an eye.

Literally, you go to bed one morning and you have one set of laws, you wake up in the morning, and your friends are being put into camps.

You don't know whether you are going to be the next one.

You don't know who's going to be shot down on the street.

Suddenly, it's the takeover.

[ Crowd cheering ] [ Laughter, bell tolling ] [ Man speaking German ] -Professor Martin Heidegger declares that his university must now sign up to Nazi ideologies and become a university of the Reich.

He signed the memos that drove out Jewish students, that drove out Jewish faculty.

He was an active ideological Nazi.

-When Arendt finds out that Martin Heidegger has joined the Nazi party, she cuts off all contact with him.

[ Man speaks German ] -The problem, the personal problem, was not really what our enemies did, but what our friends did.

At least not yet under the pressure of terror, cooperation among intellectuals was the rule.

And I never forgot that.

-Arendt starts working for an old friend of hers.

Kurt Blumenfeld, the head of the World Zionist Organization in Germany.

-Blumenfeld said, "We want to put together a collection of all antisemitic statements made in everyday circumstances."

For example, in teacher associations, professional journals, It's the sort of thing that wasn't known abroad.

No member of the Zionist organization could do this, because if he were found out, the whole organization would be exposed.

"Will you do it?"

I said, "Of course."

I was happy.

It gave me the feeling that something could be done after all.

-One day, a librarian reported her to the Gestapo for reading too many newspapers.

What use does an academic have with so many newspapers?

And walking out of the library, she is arrested and imprisoned at Alexanderplatz, the Gestapo headquarters.

She sat in a prison cell while the Gestapo searched her apartment.

The only thing they could find was a collection of notebooks which had funny writing in them, and when they questioned Arendt about them, she said, "Those are my Greek notebooks.

It's Greek."

[ Laughs ] -I had to lie to the official who arrested me.

I couldn't let the Zionist organization be exposed.

I told him tall tales, and he said, "I got you in.

I shall get you out again."

I was very lucky.

-It was clear to her that she couldn't stay longer in Germany.

I think her passport had been confiscated.

So, overnight, she crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia on foot, walking.

She reached the other side.

-When Hannah Arendt arrives in France, there are massive waves of refugees arriving from Germany daily, and this generated mass anti-immigrant attitudes in France.

-France, too, was in depression.

France, too, had to find its scapegoats.

So the very fascism that she escaped from was also there in her refuge.

-When you left Germany in 1933, you went to Paris where you worked in an organization that tried to provide for Jewish youngsters in Palestine.

Can you tell me something about that?

-That was Youth Aliyah.

This organization brought Jewish youngsters from Germany to Palestine.

Most of the children were not yet damaged, but they were in despair.

But why did I take this on?

I expressed it then time and again.

If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew, not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the rights of man, but very specifically, "What can I do?"

I wanted to go into practical work, exclusively and only Jewish work.

In pursuit of this work, I spent three months in Palestine.

-Arendt saw the existence of being Jewish as a starting point.

This is what her book on Rahel had taught her.

This is what national socialism was teaching her.

You cannot escape Jewishness.

So the only way is to be Jewish.

It's not safe to be Jewish in Europe.

The Jews need a homeland.

Palestine offered one such homeland, and what she had in mind was a binational federated state where Jews and Arabs would, together, make Palestine a homeland.

So that journey itself was very significant to her.

-When Hannah returns to Paris, there's some sense in the German refugee community that there's a way of continuing to have a kind of social life.

She's separated from her husband, Guenther Stern, and has made the acquaintance of Heinrich Bluecher.

-He was this dashing, charismatic man, who, unlike Stern, had no formal education, came from a poor family, and was not Jewish.

-Heinrich was a Marxist, an activist.

He had been a street-fighting man in the revolution.

He was a cabaret performer.

He was a talker.

He had very, very sparkling eyes.

He was captivating.

But what she really loved was the way he saw her, and that never stopped.

-You see, dearest, I always knew, even as a kid, that I can only ever truly exist in love, and that is why I was so frightened that I might simply get lost.

And so I made myself independent.

And about the love of others who might have branded me as cold-hearted, I always thought, "If only you knew how dangerous love would be."

And when I first met you, suddenly, I was no longer afraid.

It seems incredible that I managed to get both things -- the love of my life and the oneness with myself -- and, yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other.

But finally, I know what happiness is.

-In March 1938, Germany invades and annexes Austria.

This triggers a flood of Jewish refugees desperate to escape.

But most countries, including the United States, refuse to take them in.

Hannah becomes a person without a country, a person without a home.

-Suddenly, there was no place on Earth where migrants could go without the severest restrictions, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory where they could find a new community of their own.

The calamity of the rightless is that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.

[ Air-raid siren blaring ] -Adolf Hitler's all-out attack on Poland makes the long-dreaded European war a certainty.

[ Sirens continue ] -Alarms sound over Paris.

Nazi bombers attack in earnest.

-So, in January 1940, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bluecher marry, and a couple of months later, Germany invades France.

-Soon after, France requires all Germans to register as enemy aliens and to be sent to a detention camp.

-Heinrich and Hannah are separated, and she's sent down to Gurs camp in Southwest France.

-What Gurs was known for was the terrible soil.

[ Thunder rumbles ] You would sink in deeper and deeper and deeper.

As time went on, the rations got smaller and smaller.

People all had dysentery and people died like flies.

-Every day, they would throw one loaf of bread into the barrack.

-When we became hungrier and hungrier, things became worse and worse.

These women who had been ladies turned into animals just to have a little bit more bread.

-Arendt later said, "It was the one time in my life when I thought about committing suicide."

-Thinking about despair, I posed the question to myself in earnest and I answered, somewhat jokingly, "If only world history were not so awful, it would be a joy to live."

-June 1940 happens.

France falls.

It's chaos.

No one knows quite what's going to happen.

Arendt and a few others make the decision to leave the camp.

-When the German front approached, the order inside the camp fell apart, and the women forged exit papers.

-Camp discipline seemed to fall apart.

The sentries were confused and distraught.

And we started to distribute certificates to escape from the camp.

Someone said, "Don't forget Hannah Arendt in the next block.

She wants to get out with us, but wants to go on her own."

[ Train whistle blows ] -None of us could describe what lay in store for those who remained behind.

All we could do was to tell them what we expected would happen, that the camp would be handed over to the victorious Germans.

-3,000 women were left inside the camp after Hannah Arendt escaped, and a couple of months later, Adolf Eichmann sent all of the prisoners to Auschwitz.

-After walking for weeks, she gets word that refugees who have escaped are gathering in Montauban.

-The place was flooded with Jewish refugees.

[ Baby crying ] One day, she's walking around Montauban and she thinks, "I recognize that gait.

I recognize the swagger."

She looks again, and it's Heinrich.

-He had managed to be released from the camp that he was in, and I can't imagine the sense of joy at having found each other again.

The situation in France is getting more and more difficult.

There are very few exit visas that are going to be issued.

And the word is that people who want to get out of France need to get to Marseille and get one of these visas.

-Arendt goes to petition, to hustle, to queue, and fortunately, she scrapes in.

She's not that well-known, Hannah, but she has friends.

She scrapes in and gets a permit.

[ Horn blows ] -We're saved.

We are here and living at 317 West 95th Street.

[ Typewriter keys clacking ] -In the first place, we don't like to be called refugees.

We ourselves call each other "newcomers" or "immigrants."

And as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life.

We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world.

We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.

We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends in concentration camps.

I don't know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams.

Sometimes, I imagine that at least nightly, we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.

[ Thunder rumbles ] -Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bluecher go about trying to build a new life.

Her first impressions of America are really of awe.

-She reads Alexis de Tocqueville.

She reads the Founding Fathers.

She comes to believe the American creed of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and that this is a country that's not a Christian country, not a male country, not a white country.

What a country for everyone.

-You can't imagine how foreign and strange this social life is for us here.

With all that, we are doing well.

Monsieur works as a sort of expert on all possible book and research projects.

I'm writing my things on antisemitism and publishing them piecemeal in Jewish publications.

On the side, I'm a rather regular contributor to Aufbau.

[ Typewriter keys clacking ] -Aufbau was a German paper that was established for immigrants so that they could keep up with news, culture, politics.

She's trying to raise awareness in the United States about what is happening in Europe.

-It's Saturday, December 13, 1942.

Here is the latest news.

-Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.

The phrase "concentration camp" is obsolete.

It is now possible to speak only of extermination camps.

-What was decisive was the day we learned of Auschwitz.

And at first, we didn't believe it.

My husband said, "Don't be gullible.

Don't take these stories at face value.

They cannot go that far."

And then, half a year later, we believed it, after all, because we had the proof.

That was the real shock.

Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves.

None of us ever can.

What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses?

-She said, "This is why we broke at this point, because we could not find the words or imagination to conceive what was happening."

Hannah first left Germany in 1933.

She lived the experience of totalitarianism and she's trying to understand it.

Finally, we get to '43, and she starts to see a pattern.

She starts to see a book.

[ Typewriter dings ] -Propaganda provided the foundation for building totalitarian power.

The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality.

Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself.

[ Whistle blows ] -The line she uses -- and she actually repeats it many times in her "Origins of Totalitarianism" -- is, "To comprehend what's going on."

And she says, "Comprehension is the unpremeditated and attentive facing up to and resisting of reality, whatever it may be.

Unpremeditated, you can't come at it with your theories.

You can't come at it thinking you know it.

You have to face up to reality if you're going to resist it.

While it may not happen again in the same way that it happened in Germany, it's likely that totalitarianism is going to come back, and it may come back in different forms, but we have to be prepared for it.

We have to understand it."

-At the end of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she brings us back to Augustine and gives us that passage that "Man be born, a beginning was made," which means that even though totalitarianism has come into existence, even though this horrifying political reality shapes the world that we live in, it doesn't have to be this way.

We have the ability to act to make the world anew.

[ Crowd cheering ] -The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.

The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.

[ Cheering continues ] [ Foghorn blows ] -After the war, Hannah Arendt starts working for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization and she goes back to Germany to find the lost archives of the Jewish communities.

-She was going back to reclaim stolen goods, to find the books, to find the manuscripts, to find the Torahs, and getting the things back.

-It appears that the German synagogue's silver was carefully preserved for the purpose of establishing an anti-Jewish museum.

The people who worked under the Gestapo told me that they had seen silver from all over Germany and many items from abroad.

For instance, a Torah scroll from Thessaloniki, which was 500 years old.

This is a pretty sad report.

-But what she also discovers in post-Nazi Germany is a sense of unreality.

It's like walking through a vandalized museum, and there's a sense that people did not understand the crime that had been committed.

-The sight of Germany's destroyed cities and the knowledge of German extermination camps have covered Europe with a cloud of melancholy.

But nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself.

And it is difficult to say whether this signifies a half-conscious refusal to yield to grief or a genuine inability to feel.

And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead.

Dear Heinrich, do you know how right you were never to want to come back here again?

-At the end of her trip, she ends up in Freiburg, near where Martin Heidegger is living.

And she calls her friend, the American writer Mary McCarthy, who's in Paris, and she says, "I don't know.

Should I write to him?

Should I not?

Should I see him?

Should I not?"

And Mary McCarthy says, "The very fact that you're going crazy, you're still in love with him like a schoolgirl, you've got to see him."

So she writes him and says, "I'm at this hotel."

-There was a knock on her hotel-room door, and there stood Heidegger saying, "I have come to turn myself in."

Both of them, as she told me freely, were overwhelmed by their feelings.

-Dear Heinrich, I went to Freiburg, and Heidegger soon appeared at the hotel.

The two of us had a real talk.

I think for the first time in our lives.

He, who always at every opportunity has been such a notorious liar, evidently never, in all those 25 years, refuted that I had been the passion of his life.

For God's sakes, Heinrich, I wish you were here.

Hannah.

-Her good Heinrich had no choice but to accept the situation, more so since he himself took ample advantage of the modern notion of an open marriage.

Hannah basically didn't approve of Bluecher's libertine ways, for she was a faithful soul.

Heidegger being the only exception.

-Heidegger, by that point, is a diminished man.

He was put through denazification committees, found guilty, temporarily stopped from teaching.

He was poor.

They became friends again, and she helped his work be translated into English.

-Martin Heidegger is, to this day, widely regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

And he became an ardent Nazi, worse than people thought.

And people say, "Well, how is it possible that she defended him and maintained a relationship with him?"

And the answer is so simple that it is amazing that it doesn't stick.

Martin Heidegger was the love of Hannah Arendt's life.

In that sense, friendship and that intimacy triumphed over politics.

-"The Origins of Totalitarianism" was published in 1951.

-It's well-read and -reviewed.

No one could ignore it.

It's too important.

So she begins to get a place in intellectual life.

At the same time, she becomes an American citizen.

It's something she takes really seriously.

-There's much I could say about America.

There really is such a thing as freedom here.

The republic is not a vapid illusion, and the fact that there's no national state and no truly national tradition creates an atmosphere of freedom or at least one not pervaded by fanaticism.

This country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin.

The natives were the Indians.

Everyone else is a citizen.

And these citizens are united only by one thing, by simple consent to the Constitution.

-Over time, the Riverside Drive apartment becomes a kind of New World salon, the kind of friendship circle that discussed ideas and politics and the events of the day.

[ Jazz music playing ] -Every year on New Year's Eve, she gave one big party at which the Germans, arriving promptly at 9:30, would congregate in one room with the marzipan and the liqueurs, while the Americans, piling in around midnight, would gather in another with the bourbon and the scotch.

-Hannah Arendt loved fun.

She had a good sense of humor.

She had a wonderful smile that would just light up every now and then.

And she might get up and sing or do something like that.

The woman was intensely alive.

And you can't be intensely alive and not have fun.

-Hannah's husband was quite eccentric and absolutely adorable, a very peppery little Prussian.

And when people came, he'd sit down in the center of the room and listen to the conversation.

And if somebody said something that he disapproved of, he'd explode like a little artillery piece.

-Heinrich was the one who brought her down to earth.

He was the Marxist who taught her about real politics.

A lot of their thinking was a two-in-one dialogue.

Hannah wrote the bonds and threads of friendship that, as it were, keep us in a place, keep us together.

So if you've been a stateless refugee, if everything else has failed, what you have is what she'll call the hazards of friendships and the incalculable grace of love.

And you get a sense, for Arendt, that the first lines of defense against totalitarianism were love and friendship.

-Asked me if I knew him and various other people.

I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party.

-No sooner has a Arendt found a place in the world, no sooner has she unleashed her understanding of totalitarianism on the world, McCarthyism takes hold in the United States.

It's very familiar, what is going on.

-One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

[ Crowd cheering ] -Arendt was actually teaching at Berkeley, and she talks about how the academic environment on campus was chilled, how people were afraid to laugh in public or to make jokes or just to speak freely.

[ Siren wails ] -And you see how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred, and up to now, hardly any resistance.

The whole entertainment industry and, to a lesser extent, the universities, have been dragged into it.

It all functions without any force, without any terror.

They're introducing police methods, they name names, and, in this way, the informant system is being integrated into the society.

-One element that she sees unfolding is the threat to denaturalize naturalized citizens.

Heinrich Bluecher, who had been a communist in Germany, was quite worried, as well.

-It seems that one can now deprive someone of citizenship with a simple denunciation, and in my case, absolutely nothing could stop it.

-I think they're correct.

-American citizenship could, it seems to me, become the most worthless in the world at a stroke.

-Whether they're American or alien-born.

-What's always in common is the conviction that you are right and there are enemies and the enemies must be found and the enemies must be destroyed and they must be relinquished.

If you allow this, then you are actually going to undermine the foundations of America.

-If you try to make America more American, you only destroy it.

Your methods are the justified methods of the police and only of the police.

-Have you no sense of decency, sir?

At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

-McCarthy is finished.

The historians will no doubt busy themselves someday writing about what has happened here.

What I see in it is totalitarian elements springing from the womb of society without a movement or clear ideology.

-The McCarthy years were more frightening to German Jewish refugees than a native American could imagine.

For Hannah and many of her friends, the original trust she had had in the protection of this country for her right of free thought vanished on the spot and was never fully restored.

-In Jerusalem, the trial of Adolf Eichmann begins.

-The building in this compound was originally designed as a theater.

It has been rushed to completion in order to serve as the temporary courthouse in which the state of Israel will bring Adolph Eichmann to trial.

-Dearest Mary, I decided that I wanted to attend the Eichmann trial and wrote to The New Yorker.

-Your passport, please.

-William Shawn called me and seemed to agree to let me go for them, with the understanding that he does not have to print whatever I may produce.

-Adolf Eichmann had been Hitler's chief logician.

He took part in the Final Solution and was in charge of liquidating the internment camp where Arendt herself had been held captive.

[ Door opens ] -So, the horror of the Holocaust, 15 years later, walks into this courtroom.

It's beamed across the world.

It's on American TV every night.

-Here with me at this moment stands 6 million prosecutors.

But, alas, they cannot rise to level the finger of accusation in the direction of the glass dock and cry out "J'accuse" against the man who sits there.

-This is the opportunity to try and understand this new crime, a crime against humanity itself.

-Eichmann tried a number of times to explain that, during the Third Reich, the Fuehrer's words had the force of law.

He did his duty, as he told the court over and over again.

He not only obeyed orders, but he also obeyed the law.

He was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an "innerer schweinehund," a dirty bastard, in the depths of his heart.

And as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do -- to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.

He left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.

-Banality was a phenomenon that really couldn't be overlooked.

The more one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.

There's nothing deep about it, nothing demonic.

There's simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.

That is the banality of evil.

-So, Hannah came up with this idea that what really happened was that something that was radically evil had become normalized through the use of law and the bureaucratic organization of work killing Jews became like herding cattle or, you know, boxing cereal, that the utter horror of it was not the work of a bunch of devils, but ordinary people like you and me.

It was your neighbor who had a nice family and mowed the lawn, and that person was part of an elaborate, huge mechanism, nearly industrial, of killing people.

-Crimes against humanity involve a lot of people.

That's why they're atrocious and major.

And what she wants to say about Nazi totalitarianism is it corrupted everybody.

-Her example was of Jewish leaders in Jewish communities who collaborated with the Nazis, -Eichmann's modus operandi is that he would come to a city, find the Jews who wanted to work with him, and make them the Jewish leaders, the Judenraete, and then they would do what he asked in return for favors.

They would organize the Jews.

They would make people wear the yellow star.

They would then decide who gets deported and they would decide who gets saved.

-We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder, like captains whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo, like saviors who, with 100 victims, save 1,000 people, with 1,000, 10,000 victims.

To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.

-When her "Report on the Banality of Evil" was published in 1963, she was told that what she had seen was wrong.

-There were highly personal attacks, highly emotional response.

A lot of pain and fury and confusion was being poured on her.

-What she didn't see was the effect of the testimony of Holocaust survivors from that trial on everybody else.

So some people, especially in America and Europe, were hearing this stuff for the first time.

And so the world was not ready to hear about banality of evil, and she totally misjudged that.

[ Telephone rings ] -I immediately phoned Hannah to talk to her about the article.

I was shocked by the manner in which she gave Jews responsibility for the Shoah.

Instead of describing the tragic, terrible state of affairs as forced cooperation by the Jews in their own destruction, Hannah made herself judge over the behavior of people caught in this terrible situation.

I could forgive her even less when she advocated the thesis of the banality of evil, as if Eichmann was, strictly speaking, an innocent, who simply and faithfully fulfilled what he was instructed to do.

Hannah painted a terribly distorted image of both the Jewish and the Nazi side.

I had to break off our relationship, because the foundation of our friendship had been destroyed by her Eichmann book.

[ Cawing ] -When I wrote "Eichmann in Jerusalem," one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil... to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers, like Richard III.

-[ Shouting in German ] -I found, in Bertolt Brecht, the following remark.

"The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter.

They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different."

-Above all, people were offended by the question you raised of the extent to which Jews are to blame for their passive acceptance of the German mass murders or to what extent the collaboration of certain Jewish councils almost constitutes a kind of guilt of their own.

-First of all, I must, in all friendliness, state that you yourself have become a victim of this campaign.

Nowhere in my book did I reproach the Jewish people with non-resistance.

-I've read the book.

I know that.

But some of the criticisms made of you are based on the tone in which many passages are written.

-That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true.

Look, there are people who take it amiss, and I can understand that, in a sense.

When people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malignant lie and propaganda and nothing else.

The tone of voice, however, is an objection against me personally, and I cannot do anything about that.

-I mean, she'd never backtrack.

She knows something's gone wrong, and I think it broke her.

She stopped writing poetry after "Eichmann."

-In New York, the whole apartment was literally filled with unopened mail.

Almost all of it about the Eichmann business.

People are resorting to any means to destroy my reputation.

If I had known this would happen, I probably would've done precisely what I did do.

-Hannah Arendt returns to America from the Eichmann trial and then begins a pretty awful time in her life.

She has a course to teach -- on Machiavelli, of all things.

Halfway through teaching the course, her beloved Heinrich falls ill. She rushes back.

She's in a car in Central Park.

A truck comes, smashes into the taxi.

Hannah Arendt is pulverized.

Face is smashed to bits.

She's broken nine ribs.

She's practically lost an eye socket.

She is an absolute mess.

-I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened.

I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both eyes, then tried out my memory very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers -- everything alright.

The point was that, for a fleeting moment, I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or die.

And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I'd rather take it.

[ Monitor beeping ] [ Birds chirping ] [ Lighter clicks ] Dear Mary, we acquired a television set and use it very infrequently for news and presidential announcements.

The more I see of Johnson, the less do I like him.

I'm worried and have no confidence in LBJ.

-Against United States ships... seas and the Gulf.

-What troubles me more than anything else is the sort of lying we have begun to practice.

-On the orders I gave after... -In the 1960s, she reinvented herself as a voice of American politics, and what she witnessed in the Vietnam War was the success of the resistance to the government, the exposure of its lies, and to the protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

-I've just come from a student protest meeting against our policy in Vietnam.

The whole thing was extremely reasonable and un-fanatical, so crowded that one could hardly get through.

-We will not have mass arrests.

-This generation seems characterized by sheer courage, an astounding will to action and by a no-less astounding confidence in the possibility of social change.

-She really loved the civil-disobedience movement.

At the same time, there was violence, the rise of political violence.

You start to see a real challenge not just to freedom, but to civil freedom.

[ Gunshots ] -There's no doubt that someone of her background and experience would see harbinger of a possible bad outcome of authoritarianism.

-Take your hands off of me unless you intend to arrest me.

Don't push me, please.

-This is the kind of thing that can threaten the norms and the institutions that she thinks ground and preserve freedom in the United States.

[ Typewriter keys clacking ] -I'm working on an essay on power and violence.

I am trying to understand the experiences of recent years here.

Power and violence are not the same.

[ Dogs barking ] The power of the laws or the constitution rests on the consent and support of the people.

-Martin Luther King dedicated his life... -Wherever this power is intact, violence is unnecessary.

[ Screaming ] -What she saw towards the end of the '60s, and the beginning of the '70s was the acceptance of violence as a way of doing politics.

That terrified her, because she thought it kind of meant that totalitarianism had won.

[ Thunder rumbles ] -Dear Mary, I'm now sitting in Heinrich's room and using his typewriter.

Gives me something to hold on to.

I don't think I told you that, for 10 long years, I had been constantly afraid that just a sudden death would happen.

This frequently bordered on real panic.

Where the fear was and the panic, there's now sheer emptiness.

-There were two things working at the same time.

One was despair, but the other was resilience.

Being alone with your thoughts, but being in the world at the same time.

-I sit here much worried.

Things are in an extremely dangerous state here, but I sometimes think this is the only country where a republic at least still has a chance.

I have no great desire to watch another republic go to the dogs.

-Daniel Ellsberg, ex-Pentagon employee, made history by leaking to The New York Times the Pentagon Papers.

-So, the Pentagon Papers breaks and reveals that the government have been lying about Vietnam War.

-As I felt that the concealment of this information for 25 years has now led to the death of 50,000 Americans and several hundred thousand Vietnamese in the last few years, a couple of million over 20 years of this involvement.

-They knew the war was being lost.

They knew that they were killing people at much higher rates than they were telling us.

They knew the costs were much worse.

The lie was told to serve a purpose, to help justify the war in Vietnam and pursue the anti-communist agenda.

-If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but, rather, that nobody believes anything any longer.

And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind.

It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge.

And with such a people, you can then do what you please.

-Two former White House aides with electronic receiving devices were in the room of the Watergate Hotel on the early morning of June 17th when five men with bugging gear were found in Democratic headquarters here in the Watergate building.

-Watergate has eaten rather deeply into my time and attention.

The overwhelming number of scandals that have come to light is, in a way, self-defeating.

-Oh, I think there was no question that the coverup began that Saturday when we realized there was a break-in.

-I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency.

-Mr. Nixon was asked about break-ins and burglaries and wiretapping.

He said a Supreme Court decision has indicated inherent power to the president to protect the country.

-Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

-Dearest Hannah, Nixon's appeal to national security expresses, I think, his true political aim of a police state.

I immediately thought of "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

-Dear Mary, everybody, so it must seem, did more or less what Nixon did, and where all are guilty, no one is.

Since Nixon actually behaved like a tyrant, his downfall would be a kind of revolution.

-Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

-It was obvious that, during Watergate, crimes had been committed, big crimes.

But what's amazing is how many people who knew better weren't willing to stand up and stop it.

So many people cared more about power than they did about the health of the republic and doing what was right.

-Watergate has revealed perhaps one of the deepest constitutional crises this country has ever known.

It's the whole fabric of government which is actually at stake.

The Founding Fathers never believed that tyranny could arise out of the Executive Office.

However, we know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is, of course, from the executive.

[ Applause ] -Suddenly, the very idea of the United States itself as a constitutional republic was called into question.

And this scared Arendt.

Not only is the republic itself in danger, but if fascism is going to emerge in America, it's going to come from the Executive Branch, from the liberties the Executive feels free to take.

The last major speech she gives in the United States is for the bicentennial anniversary of America.

-We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other.

At such moments in history, when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life, with its unchanging pressing demands.

One of the discoveries of totalitarian governments was the method of digging giant holes in which to bury unwelcome facts and events, for the past was condemned to be forgotten as though it never had been.

But I rather believe with Faulkner, who wrote, "The past is never dead.

It is not even past.

And this for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past."

When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome.

Let us try not to escape into utopias, images, theories, or sheer follies.

For it was the greatness of this republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in man and to the worst.

[ Light switch clicks ]