What Remains

The German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt is internationally renowned for her work on totalitarianism, the human condition, and the banality of evil. While Arendt often acknowledged that the language of poetry—especially that of Dickinson, Goethe, and Lowell—informed her writing on these subjects, relatively few people know that she also wrote poems. In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in a virtual autobiography, marking moments of joy, love, loss, and remembrance. Now, for the first time in English, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill present these intensely personal poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York’s Upper West Side. A gift to all readers of Arendt, this stunning, en face edition provides an unparalleled view into the inner sanctum of one of our most private thinkers.