Men in Dark Times

"Yes, it’s men and women in dark times, but Arendt always used “man.” The title for this book is taken from Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, ‘ An die Nachgeborenen’ , which is translated as ‘To Posterity’ or ‘To Those who Come After’ which begins, ‘Wirklich, ich lebe in finisteren Zeiten!’ (‘Really, I’m living in dark times’). This is a collection of essays about people she was close to, and also some people she wasn’t so close to, but who had a significant impact upon her intellectual development, such as Rosa Luxemburg, whom she actually went to see once with her mother at a rally. I know. Do you ever wonder if people will look back on our time and think about the public intellectuals we have today and their milieus in the same way that we look back upon those of Paris in the 1930s? When you asked me to pick the five best books, I thought about the word ‘best’ and it felt like a sacrifice not to include Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil on the list. But thinking about the people that might go to this website and look for a set of books to introduce them to a thinker, I asked myself what the books were that made me fall in love with Hannah Arendt as a thinker and which included her most beautiful writing. And I really think that some of her most beautiful writing is in Men in Dark Times . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Her essay on “Humanity and Our Times”, which she delivered as the Lessing address when she received the Lessing Prize, is a timeless meditation on what it means to retain one’s humanity in dark times. I also find myself continually going back to her ‘ Laudatio’ for Karl Jaspers, which is a brilliant piece of writing about the importance of listening and conversation and allowing for silence and world-building and common humanity. These essays are so intimate that I think they make themselves available to any reader, and offer portraits of some of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. It was first published in 1955 and then it went through a few pressings. It’s also worth mentioning that there are essays here on Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, and the poet Randall Jarrell. What you also get in this book is a sense of Arendt’s poetics and her engagement with poets. There is her essay on Bertolt Brecht and the Brecht controversy and how we hold poets accountable, her essay on Walter Benjamin and how he wasn’t a poet but rather a poetic thinker. Well, Hannah Arendt wouldn’t call herself a philosopher. She rejected that label probably most famously in her televised interview in 1964 with Günter Gaus, where she says that she’s a political theorist. She turns away from philosophy after the burning of the Reichstag, and then, when she returns to philosophy in The Life of the Mind , her final work, she engages in what she calls ‘the dismantling of metaphysics’. I think she’s turning away from any kind of transcendent philosophy to think about materiality and to think about how we might orient ourselves in the present. She rejects anything like a Platonic idea of truth in that sense. I think we see in there a real critique of Heidegger. If we think about her grappling with these fundamental problems of metaphysics, like ‘what is the nature of being?’, ‘what is meaning?’, ‘how do we create meaning?’, ‘what is the purpose of life?’, ‘what is the good life?’, she’s certainly engaging in all of these questions and she was schooled in the tradition of German philosophy, the western tradition of political philosophy, but she didn’t understand herself to be doing the work of philosophy. She doesn’t easily fit into any box. Sometimes it seems as if she’s doing the work of phenomenology. Sometimes it seems she’s doing the work of metaphysics. Sometimes she is a biographer. Yes. Arendt did not have much respect for Simone de Beauvoir. She didn’t think she was that smart. She did interact with her, and with Sartre and Camus. She thought Nausea was a brilliant book. She said that was Sartre’s best book. She wrote to Karl Jaspers ‘Camus is probably not as talented as Sartre but much more important, because he is much more serious and honest’ In an early letter to Mary McCarthy she says something like, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s not really worth engaging with. One should just flirt with her instead.’ Arendt was not a feminist…"